Materialise Partner With SketchUP
Materialise Partner With SketchUP
Though many in the 3D Printing industry think of Thingiverse as the de facto repository for 3D models, it is in fact Trimble’s 3D Warehouse which houses the most amount of CAD 3D Models. Leveraging those models, designed on Trimble’s popular software SketchUp, for 3D printing has always proved tricky. Enter Materialise.
In a partnership announced to the stock market today Materialise are working with Trimble to enhance the 3D printing experience of the repository and software, which will enable users to easily design, access and share 3D printable files that have been ran through Materialise’s powerful and award-winning software in the cloud.
The collaboration have developed an integration between 3D Warehouse and Materialise's Cloud Services, which are capable of analysing and fixing models to ensure printability. The integration gives 3D Warehouse users the ability to flag uploaded SketchUp models as Printable. These files are then processed by Materialise's Cloud Services to generate high-quality, printable STL files, that are then available to be downloaded from 3D Warehouse.
"Through our combined efforts, Trimble and Materialise aim to make 3D printing technology more accessible to the design community," said Mike Tadros, SketchUp Web & Mobile product manager at Trimble. "With its deep experience in providing solutions and services to the additive manufacturing sector, Materialise has substantially augmented our efforts to make 3D printing workflows more efficient, and to enable the sharing and exchange of Printable models on 3D Warehouse."
"For the past 25 years, we have been focused on developing software that empowers useful applications of 3D printing," said Stefaan Motte, director of the Software for Additive Manufacturing Unit at Materialise. "Through our new Cloud Services, we want to bring part of our industry-leading software to a broader audience, and SketchUp, and 3D Warehouse in particular, are a natural fit for achieving this. By partnering with Trimble, we hope to alleviate the question of 'will it print' and help designers, artists, makers and beyond focus on the design and creation of meaningful 3D models."
With over 2.8 million models serving up nearly 4 million downloads to over 700,000 visitors each week, 3D Warehouse has the ability to dwarf the other repositories. This partnership could prove a very fruitful one for both parties.
