Read the full article here – Massive Hybrid Manufacturing Machine Pushes Boundaries of 3D Printing

If you ever wanted to create threaded fasteners for screws, nuts, bolts and the like on the fly using good old Fusion 360, Autodesk has a simple method to easily implement them using the Thread command: Under the ‘Create’ menu, choose the ‘Thread’ command and select a cylindrical shape you want the thread to be…

After 10 years of designing sports products, industrial designer Eelco Siebring has opted for quite the career change. No longer designing sporting equipment, he now works as the lead designer and 2D layout artist for Undone, the upcoming, and quite unique, animated series on Amazon Prime centering around a girl named Alma as she interacts…

If you are in search of a workflow that will enable you to efficiently prepare 3D scanned data for use in Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) software environments, then you’ll want to know about R3DS Wrap 3 (Wp3). In short, Wp3 is a software application that non-rigidly fits a lightweight optimized basemesh to your imported scan…

For a guy who doesn’t use computers, Philippe Starck sure loves to test the tech. He recently teamed up Kartell and Autodesk to showcase “the world’s first production chair” designed with the help of… I’m sorry, through a conversation with, Artificial Intelligence. Making the announcement at the Salone del Mobile furniture fair, the process… apologies…

Another fiscal year, another chart showcasing a company’s earnings. The fiscal year 2018 proved to be another high-earning era for Autodesk, as the CAD company reported in its most recent yearly earnings report. The biggest highlights of the report include a Q4 2018 revenue of $737.3 million and 2018 fiscal year earnings worth $2.57 billion.…

Autodesk Fusion 360 is bringing in the new year with a User Interface (UI) facelift! Presently the UI is in “Preview” mode so as to ease the masses into the new UI workflow. Yet, as to be expected, many of the power users are taking the leap and donning new UI Diggs. While I’m calling…

It’s 3am. Visions of green and red shapes are swirling through your mind. Was it a bad batch of kombucha? No – it’s Autodesk Generative Design. Autodesk Generative Design provides a surprisingly addictive mix of novelty, somewhat mysterious results, and interesting shapes. If you can justify the cost – try it! Before I dive in,…

What happens when a business leader with the core of a true maker and engineer gets his hands on the resources to build whatever he wants? No, I’m not talking about Elon — I said, “true maker and engineer”. We’re talking about Carl Bass and his wood and metal shops. They’re stocked for projects requiring…

Autodesk is making very significant changes to their Fusion 360 product offerings. Fusion 360 is Autodesk’s flagship 3D design tool that is offered in a cloud-based subscription service. The system provides not only CAD, but also CAM, simulations and even generative components. It’s proven quite popular in certain circles. As of October 7th, they will no…

Autodesk’s SketchBook program, which serves as a jumping-off point for many artists, engineers, and CAD designers, is now totally free! I know what you’re thinking, but for now, there seem3 to be no strings attached to this deal. According to a blog post by Senior Product Manager Colin Smith, the aim of making SketchBook free…

Rejoice, creators of instructables.com! For if you ever wanted to learn how to use a table saw, manual lathe, CNC mill, or a certain crafting machine, Autodesk’s Pier 9 technology centers have heard your plea and made a slew of workshops to help you get your bearings without losing any important body parts. In total,…

Are you an aspiring CAD Designer or maybe a seasoned professional seeking new digs? Perhaps you are hesitant to start your search, not quite knowing which geographic locale will offer the best ratio of income to living-expense. Well, here’s a little tip “Go Midwest young man!” (and ladies too). I’m talking Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and…

Three weeks ago Autodesk posted a preview of Fusion 360 in the Browser. You remember Project Leopard correct? Well, that’s alive and well–not as a separate product from Fusion 360, but as Fusion Team, accessed directly in the browser from your Fusion 360 account. Fusion Team – Access Anywhere Even though we’re completely aware of…

Has Autodesk ever had a CEO with neck tattoos? Carol Bartz? Carl Bass? Who really knows, but it should be a qualification. Andrew Anagnost was at the top of the list to become the next CEO of Autodesk. Really, he was at the top, alphabetically his name was at the top of the list. The…

Sponsored by I’m not sure what you think when you hear the term ‘precision manufacturing’ but when I saw the 7+ axis micro-machining capabilities of Swissomation, I was completely floored. They take precision to the ultimate level. The company has over 70 years of experience working with some of the largest manufacturers in the U.S.…

There’s been plenty on 3D metal printing to talk about over the last few years, but 2017 may be THE year of more metal – more metal printers and more structures printed in metal. I’m ready for it too – ready for a metal suit, a metal house; bring on the metal. CES 2017 saw…

This is right out of the blue. As of today, Carl Bass is no longer CEO of Autodesk. His 10-year stint as the San Fransisco-based company’s leader ends after transitioning the company to the cloud and subscription based product offerings, launching an open hardware platform, overseeing 30+ acquisitions and building Pier 9 workshop to help…

On the ankle-veins of Autodesk announcing they are shuttering T-Splines, they’ve also announced that they’re bringing the family of 123D Apps to the end. Here’s what we know. The 123D apps are being consolidated into other Autodesk products and 123Dapp.com is being shutdown. Outside of specifying “early 2017” and “access and download your content from…

Was bound to happen sooner or later, right? We started worrying about this all the way back in 2011 when Autodesk acquired T-Splines. The small Utah-based company had a growing Rhino user base for its plugin that provide a unique take on organic modeling in a solid modeling environment, and they had just released a similar plugin for…

Presented by If you want to find out what Autodesk is up too, Autodesk University is the place to be each year. Last week that happened… yep, I just checked and we were in fact at AU last week. It was a bit of a blur, but I know two things for certain, nay THREE…

While plenty of exciting developments are happening in the product design space, few are as revolutionary as advancements in generative design. The result of artificial intelligence and the simulation of complex scenarios has enabled modern CAD software to play a participatory role in generating forms based on specific inputs provided by a user. The result…

When it comes to equipping tomorrow’s designers and engineers with the tools they need to create compelling projects today, few companies have been as generous in offering access to software, tools and even fabrication facilities as Autodesk has. While the company’s Fusion 360 design software has always been free to use for students and those…

You know when you cried into that bucket of bolts because you couldn’t find the matching hardware? Those were sad, rough times. It’s almost as bad as when you stared into that bucket of PDM space searching for that one thing, that one guy modeled, that one time, that would never be needed again, but…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a (very deep) rock, we don’t need to get into specifics about Autodesk’s Fusion 360. That said, at $40 per month (or $300/year) for a professional subscription, the integrated CAD, CAM and CAE platform isn’t necessarily a bag of peanuts unless you’re committed to using it regularly. For those of…

Presented by Here we are. Part 4 of this epic exploration of Fusion 360. If you remember our first post, we are working our way through five aspects of Fusion 360 that, which Autodesk suggests, makes it more than CAD. To recap in a sentence, it all revolves around the idea of Fusion 360 as…

Presented by It’s time to talk about everyone’s favorite topic. Mating. (You two in the back stop snickering.) We’re in part three of our under-the-covers *snicker* peek at Fusion 360 and this time, we look at Assemblies. Over the years we’ve passed along tips and tricks, best practices, and overall bad-assery when it comes to…

Presented by Two weeks ago we did the unthinkable. We taped back our eyelids, slapped on some CAD spandex (that exists right?) and launched a series of articles on Fusion 360. It’s finally time we took a deeper dive into the toolset and explore: Part Modeling, Assembly Modeling, Simulation, CAM, and Collaboration. This week, we’re…

We’ve seen 3D printed shoes as far back as 2012. Adidas has innovated with ocean waste, and some even adapt to your foot. Now, Under Armour has created the world’s first commercially available 3D printed training shoes.

Presented by You have to hand it to Autodesk, they wiggle their marketing nose and out pops some brand spankin’ new content. I caught their latest What is Fusion 360? video, where they show Fusion 360 doing collaboration, freeform modeling, animation, rendering, simulation, CAD and CAM, claiming, “it’s not any one of those things –…

Autodesk just revealed their plans to jump from desktop 3D printer/platform development to taking on high-production industrial machining. And it goes way beyond hardware. A few years ago, we wouldn’t imagine Autodesk even getting into hardware. We joked about them producing their own 3D printer, then they did. But one little ol’ 3D printer, with…

For those who grew up in the 1960s, making toys took on a quite literal sense, thanks in no small part to toy manufacturer Mattel. The company, which had only just introduced Barbie and would later introduce Hot Wheels, managed to bring the same manufacturing methods used for mass manufactured toys into living rooms around…

The new Line/Shape/Space site has an interesting read by Autodesk CTO, Jeff Kowalski. It is, of course, to promote Autodesk’s Dreamcatcher project, a parameter-based, generative design project, but the headline is nice and controversial, just the way we like’em.

Although it may not have the field of view that many were originally hoping for, Microsoft’s HoloLens is still no less of an amazing tool on the horizon for many involved in hardware development. Earlier this year, SolidSmack reported on ten reasons why the HoloLens could change product design and the way that consumers interact…

#AU2015 was space-time-distortingly gigantic, impeccably designed, meticulously planned, and flawlessly executed. And yet, behind the razzmatazz, I’m conflicted.

Most everything in the maker community is becoming more open source. It’s almost a requirement–allowing modification of the original hardware or software design, through a free license, to suit the needs of the end user. Companies such as Raspberry Pi Foundation, Arduino and LittleBits all support the open-source initiative and even some of the larger…

There’s a shift going on in the 3D CAD industry. The shift from perpetual license pricing to monthly subscription pricing. Some will bring up those who have tried it before, the benefits and why it needs to happen faster. Suddenly however, it’s nearly 2016, and pay-as-you-go pricing models have been around a few years. We’ve…

Between Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks’ recent announcements of their SolidWorks for Entrepreneurs program (which has created some confusion for existing small businesses and freelancers) and an update to their subscription policy (which seeks to close out or penalize those who don’t upgrade each year), many of the the CAD software’s most loyal users feel as though…

Thanks to a number of new platforms, tools and infrastructures, bringing a viable hardware product to market has never been easier than it has been in the past decade – and the momentum is only continuing to grow. In 2014, venture capital investment in connected device hardware startups alone reached nearly $1.5B – more than…

When it comes to the near future of how things get made, generative design tools are slowly but surely becoming yet another useful component of the modern day designer and engineer’s tool kit. The generative design process, which centers around infinite computing power to find optimized design solutions based on parameters that are set by…

When it comes to learning 3D CAD tools in today’s age – be it SolidWorks, Rhino, Catia, Fusion 360, MODO or most any other – motivated self-learners have more options than ever before ranging from random tips and tricks videos on YouTube to more organized online courses from multiple providers. But as educational tools as…

It’s no secret that CAD tools are among the most complex pieces of software to learn and – perhaps most importantly – use effectively with intent. Unsurprisingly, learning these tools has been a brutal experience for many that can test even the most patient of learners and take them to their limits. More recently, video…

Since announcing that they would be bundling the premium features of Fusion 360 Ultimate into the significantly cheaper Fusion 360 offering, many in the CAD community have deemed Fusion 360 as a true “next-generation contender” and “the (CAD) program to beat these days”. Although many existing design studios and firms may still be plugged into…

As if the release of Onshape back in March of this year didn’t spin the CAD world into a frenzy, things are only about to get a little more crazy up in here. Yesterday, Autodesk slipped a little message onto their Fusion 360 homepage to notify users (both new and existing) that they are rolling…

Between the latest developments behind the HoloLens to the announcement of their Internet Explorer replacement product, it’s already been a busy couple of days for Microsoft at their annual Build Developer Conference, which runs from April 29th through May 1st in San Francisco. Of course, the conference wouldn’t be complete without some updates on Windows…

It’s been a wild ride for Carbon3D and their CLIP technology ever since CEO and co-founder Joseph DeSimone presented the technology live on stage during his TED2015 presentation in Vancouver on March 16th. “What we think of as 3D printing,” said DeSimone, “…is really just 2D printing over and over…slowly.” If the live Carbon3D CLIP…

In what was certainly one of the product design events of the year, DEVELOP3D Live went down last month in Warwick, England and featured a host of talks and workshops centered around CAD and the near-future of product design. Among others who were on-hand to talk about their latest technologies included SolidWorks CEO Gian Paolo…

Most ‘zen’ practitioners will tell you that reaching a state of higher consciousness is not an art but a way of life, where “awareness” is “consciousness”. The emphasis on the present moment is perhaps Zen’s most distinctive characteristic. In modern times, finding the time and ability to disconnect from technology, busy schedules and sensory overload…

It was a sad day when My Robot Nation was gobbled by 3D Systems and subsequently buried on the Cubify website. (You can find it here now: http://cubify.com/en/store/app/JOW97UI59Y.) They were onto something. It’s the first site where I sat down with my kiddos, talked bots, made bots and bought bots. A year later, a man…

We managed to wrangle Jon Hirschtick (Founder and Chairman, Onshape) and Carl Bass (CEO, Autodesk) into answering the same six questions about CAD in the Cloud, including the ultimate, whiz-bang question of the year at the end: “How do Fusion 360, Onshape, and 3DEXPERIENCE differ?” You saw it here first, folks. A SolidSmack exclusive, side-by-side…