French 3D printing service provider Sculpteo and Polish game developer Infinite Dreams today announced a partnership that will allow users to turn digitally rendered pots into the real thing.
Infinite Dreams’ popular “Let’s Create! Pottery” app lets users shape, fire, and paint a piece of pottery in a virtual environment. The new relationship with Sculpteo makes the experience tangible by allowing users to purchase full color, printed versions of their pottery directly from the app.
“We like the idea that 3D printing is a tool to transfer things you create in virtual reality into physical reality,” says Sculpteo CEO Clément Moreau in an exclusive interview with MAKE.
The promise of the desktop manufacturing revolution is to go from idea, to 3D model, to printed object with just a few clicks. In spite of the ease with which people can build objects in 3D, Moreau says the real satisfaction doesn’t sink in until you hold a physical version of that object in your hand. The Sculpteo-Infinite Dreams partnership will make that possible with this decidedly personal experience in desktop manufacturing.
Let’s Create! users have created more than a quarter million virtual pots. Just as 3D modelers can upload and download 3D files from Thingiverse, users of the Let’s Create! Pottery app can upload and view other people’s creations on its community portal. The maximum height of a printed pot is 10 inches and prices start at $4.99. All pots will be printed with on a Zprinter.
Head here for information on the iOS version of the app and here for the Android version.
“This partnership demonstrates how ineluctably the division between the digital world and real world is disappearing thanks to 3D printing technology,” says Moreau.
The erosion of that line is happening before our eyes. If pottery isn’t your thing, you can use AutoDesk’s 123D Creature app to sculpt your own character right from your iPad and get it printed from Sculpteo as well.
What’s next? Will video game companies build in support to allow users to order prints of their characters? Let us know what you think.
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