The Generated Creator is here... - Shapeways Blog
The Generated Creator is here…
September 28, 2010
The next step for our Co-Creator platform is here. We call it a Generated Creator.
It allows you to modify a shape with pre-defined modifiers and generate a preview of the customized shape. If you like what you have made you can save and order it right away or you keep on modifying it until you are happy.
We already have real time Creators showing any modifications in 3d right away. Once you’re done modifying the 3d shape it’s ready for production right away.
Some of our current examples are:
- The LightPoem
- The RingPoem
- The Photoshaper
The other option we currently have are our Human Creators. Within this setup you can simply let the designer know how you want the product to be personalized. The designer gets this notification and will customize the product in its own software and upload it to the site again. This process is far from real time but it’s easy to setup and allows you to quite easily offer a customizable template.
The templates that are customizable in this way can be found in this Co-Creator platform gallery
The Generated Creator is positioned somewhere between the ‘Realtime’ Creators and the Human Creators. The results are not realtime (when you press ‘preview’ it takes a few seconds to render a new image), but they are much more flexible and allow us to create new Creators very easily.
It has some very interesting advantages such as:
- The development is done in such a way that new modifiers are (relatively) easy to implement and old modifiers are reusable
- This Button Creator is made with Blender but this is not the only software enabling the development of these kinds of tools
- The user gets a good visualization of the modification made before ordering it.
<< Click on the image below to go to the Button Creator >>
I am very much interested in your feedback and ideas regarding our Generated Creator concept. The buttons come out very nice and they look good in many of the materials we have so go play with it and let me know what you think of it, how you envision the future for this and how you can benefit from it.