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additive manufacturing and professional 3D printing

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Design,collaborate and

make in the Cloud

ICR3ATE is an ambitious project that hasso far been five years in the making andthat still has several months ofdevelopment to go before it is unleashed.The man behind it, Manfred van der Voort,is an IT consultant, designer, carpenter andtechnology enthusiast in the extreme —and the partners that are working towardsmaking ICR3ATE a reality read like anenviable ‘who’s who’ of the 3D design,collaboration and manufacturing world...But what exactly is ICR3ATE?

Perhaps the best way to understand the ICR3ATE platform is tolook at the problems that it is setting out to solve. In a nutshell itaims to be an accessible, secure and safe online platform thatcovers the concept creation, 3D design, global collaboration andflexible production of things. A huge undertaking then, but onethat could revolutionise the way we think about the entiredesign, development and production process. See Sidebar 1.

While the challenges can be overcome in-house by the largestOEMs through deployment of bespoke systems, small andmedium enterprises (who generate far more data than do the bigOEMs) do not have a sensible solution. Through extensiveresearch and surveys, the team behind ICR3ATE hope toproduce such a solution. Manfred van der Voort, the lead behindthe projects, has taken up the challenge to specify, design,develop and release this solution in the form of ICR3ATE.

The ICR3ATE platform consists of six user options coveringeverything from data capture and creation to manufacturing:

Scan-ThisThe commercial name of the input channel for inputting a scan— the system is able to deal with all 3D scanner data fromMicrosoft Kinnect through to high-end laser scanners.Geometry, texture and geometry modificiation are all catered for.Cloud service partners are involved in taking scan data andtransforming to CAD solids, or 3D digital capture — essentiallyany way you can get 3D data about the real world is compatiblewith the ICR3ATE platform. Once the scan data is imported itis optimised and made available to the 3D design tools.

3D Design AnywhereThe ICR3ATE platform aims to bring 3D design to the cloudwithout platform bourdaries. The company has huge ambitionsfor this section of the project including getting the likes ofSketchUp, Rhino, Spaceclaim and others to collaborate as cloud-based creation partners. The cornerstone of the technology iscitrix XenDesktop that transforms desktops and apps into on-demand services — allowing access anywhere, at any time and onany device.

The citrix system also puts security first, meaning that users candesign and collaborate with confidence. The platform puts digitalrights management at the heart of the system with the Collada filestandard (and its .dae digital asset exchange file standard) usedacross the platform along with an as-yet-undisclosed partner withan exciting rights management system that will help to ensurethat all IP created in, imported into and collaborated on throughthe ICR3ATE platform.

Perceived Business Problems in 3D Design

n 130 different and often incompatible file formats, resulting in

inefficient collaboration for 3D designers

n Traditional CAD doesn’t support a 3D co-design process across

organisational borders

n Without exception they don’t apply open and promising web

standards (WebGL, HTML5)

n Some invested in Flash…

n Current sharing of 3D model source files lacks IP security, leading

to 2D collaboration on 3D designs resulting in release and change

management challenges

n Net result is relatively high number of physical model defects in

the development and prototyping phase

3

[Software]

Design

Draw

VisualisePublish

Promote

CollaborateVisualise

Run SketchUp Pro• anywhere• on any device & OS

View the 3D model• interactively• realistically• physically

Collaborate with 3D model• near real time rendered• interactively• asynchronously

Validate

Publish-in-3DWhat Manfred calls the ‘simple’ bit of the platform, publish in3D allows users to publish their 3D models on the web with fullIP control and social sharing. Again there is more than meets theeye with this aspect of the system with a number of high-profiledevelopment partners helping the team to address some of theproblems inherent with publishing 3D content in a collaborativeand safe environment as well as managing material librariesacross multiple applications.

The ICR3ATE platform will also include a cloud-based near-real-time rendering solution that will allow geographically distantteams to develop collaboratively in close-to real time.

Collaborate2GoAnother well-known set of tools tweaked and integrated to theplatform. The kicker here, like for the rest of the tools, is thatcollaboration will be open-standard, secure and — unlike mostcurrent web-based systems — independent of plugins.

Make InstantlyOnce you have scanned and imported you model, or created iton your device in the cloud, published it and collaborated withyour global team, you might want to make something. Thatsomething could be a digital model, a physical model, an imageor something else. By connecting to a myriad of outputmechanisms from 3D printing services, prototyping services,manufacturing services and others teams have the ability toseamlessly get the desired end-product.

ConclusionThe ICR3ATE platform is an ambitious project but one thatcould be revolutionary — with much of the back-office stillunder wraps there is sure to be more to the platform by the timeit is launched at TCT Show + Personalize in September.

i ICR3ATEwww.icr3ate.com