It features over 600 printed objects from the industries of health care, art and even cycling.

Watch the video below to learn more.

MGX by Materialise Leads the Charge in 3D Printing and Artist Collaboration

At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago, Joris Debo talked about a brave new art world pioneered by Materialise with their Mammoth Stereolithography 3D printing technology. Materialise is a Belgian based company that is involved in additive manufacturing (3D printing) in many industries like software development, rapid fit (automotive & aerospace), biomedical (CT & MRI scans) & orthodics among others. Debo is the Creative Director at MGX, which is the consumer goods division for Materialise and he is especially passionate about using 3D printing technology to “create objects that are both art and functional.”

MGX has become a company that closely works together with artists to come up with new pieces that would be very difficult and extremely labor intensive to make without 3D technology.  Joris noted, “When I arrived in the company eight years ago, there were two people that were not engineers. Over the years, we’ve commissioned people, like Patrick Jouin, for a new era of digital aesthetics.”

MGX is in multiple collaborations with artists and fashion designers like Iris Van Herpen for example. Van Herpen has revolutionized fashion with mesmerizing futuristic designs that push the boundaries of art and fashion. In fact, a lot of her pieces are found in museums after they hit the runway. Debo notes how like Van Herpen, the “people that make these dresses are the new craftsmen.”

3D printing also allows the combination of traditional art with very high end furniture that matches the art. Joris pointed out how if you have a Jackson Pollock in your home and you want something to match the Jackson Pollock, an artist can custom create a piece or multiple pieces of furniture to match the Jackson Pollock using MGX’s 3D printing technology. Debo further noted how it’s “not only about 3D printing but about craftsmen that can finish the pieces.” This applies to pieces of furnitures, sculptures and even art replicas like museums have begun to use recently.

The Root Chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald

Joris discussed how art pieces or historical artifacts are sometimes too fragile to travel the world and thus insurance companies will not cover their repair if broken. Moreover, some artifacts, like King Tut’s mummy for example, are irreplaceable and is too risky to move regardless of the financial cost. To show King Tut’s mummy in New York City, National Geographic partnered with MGX in order to make a perfect replica that allowed people to feel they were actually looking at the real King Tut. These kinds of partnerships make it clear as to why museums like the Smithsonian is investing in 3D printing technologies that allow for their rare pieces from fossils to sculptures to be replicated.  In sum, 3D printing technology is not only revolutionizing the industrial world, but it is already changing the aesthetics and culture around us, from clothing to furniture to historical artifacts and art pieces.

Authored by On 3D Printing contributor Rodrigo Garza Zorrilla, technology entrepreneur and advisor.

MakerBot Presents Groundbreaking 3D Masterpieces from Artist Cosmo Wenman at 3D PrintShow London 2012

MakerBot unveiled the incredible work of California-based artist Cosmo Wenman at the 3D PrintShow London 2012, October 19-21. The work is displayed in the MakerBot booth at the show. The pieces include: Head of a Horse of Selene, Acropolis, Athens, 438-432 BC; Portraits of Alexander the Great: -300, 1440, 1945, Hellenistic Greek 2nd-1st century BC; and Antikythera Mechanism, Hellenistic Greek, 1st century BC.

Cosmo Wenman is a prolific contributor to MakerBot’s Thingiverse website that is home to approximately 25,000 digital designs for real, physical objects. On Thingiverse, Cosmo has charged users to follow his example and capture scans of actual people or notable things in the world (like an asteroid or the deepest spot in the Earth’s ocean). He is on a mission to digitize the world and to challenge notions of materialism; his personal website notes that the “next couple years are going to be a big, exciting mess.”

“Cosmo’s latest work is some of the most compelling I have ever seen done by a MakerBot 3D printer,” said Bre Pettis, MakerBot ceo and founder. “Cosmo’s work calls into question the limitations often attributed to our machines, and they show beyond a shadow of a doubt that MakerBot desktop 3D printers can create pieces of incredible size, form, and beauty.”

These pieces were scanned from originals in the British Museum. Cosmo modeled them to print on a MakerBot Replicator desktop 3D printer in MakerBot PLA Filament. He then treated them with various finishing processes to create remarkably authentic, museum-quality replicas.

The first generation MakerBot Replicator Desktop 3D Printer was named “Best Emerging Tech” at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The MakerBot Replicator 2 was just announced in September. The company has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Wired, The Colbert Report, Fast Company, Engadget, Make: Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, IEEE Spectrum, CNN, Financial Times, NPR, Vogue Italia and many others.

Via MarketWatch.

Cosmo Wenman photo courtesy of MakerBot blog.

At the Google I/O conference in San Francisco this week, 3D printing was a popular theme. We reported earlier about the 3D Systems Cubify team hosting a printing station. Also at the conference was the Autodesk 123D team.

They were showing off their design software called 123D Catch, software for your laptop or iPad that lets you import a series of photos of a physical object and create a precise 3D model from those photos. The software is powered by the cloud and takes about 10 to 15 minutes to produce a model. In the example they were showing, the team had taken 30 photos of a marble statue in a museum and the software created a rich 3D model that was ready to print.

The Autodesk team was also printing objects on the MakerBot replicator.

Read more about Autodesk and 123D in our previous coverage.

Photos from Google I/O by on3dprinting.com.