Shapeways Helps Users of Autodesk 123D Make Their Awesome Ideas Real with 3D Printing.

We are super excited to announce while we are mixing it with the 3D modeling glitterati at SIGGRAPH that users of Autodesk 123D can use the power of Shapeways 3D Printing to make their awesome ideas a reality.

123D is a free 3D modeling software program based on the same Autodesk technology used by millions of designers and engineers worldwide in software such as 3Ds Max, Maya and Inventor. With 123D's simple yet useful interface you can 3D model your own designs ready for 3D printing with Shapeways.

Once you have created your 3D model in 123D you can export your model in STL for most of our 3D printed materials or VRML to 3D print in full color.*

123D works as a solid modeler with tools ideally suited for creating objects for 3D printing.  You can start from a sketch or you can download and modify an existing design, this is a great way to get started if you are new to the concept of 3D modeling and 3D printing. There are also a number of tutorials to help you get started or to just introduce you to the tools and how they function.

Head on over to 123D and download it for free and give it a try, at the moment they only support windows but there are some rumblings in their forums asking for a Mac version which would be awesome. Also, when you download 123D keep an eye out for updates, 123D is in Beta version and they are rapidly adding cool new features and squashing bugs.

*There is an issue in the current build whereby when you export a file the scale can be too small by a factor of 10.  If you face this problem you can use the scale tool to scale your model up by 10 in 123D before exporting to correct this for now, but the bug has been reported and will be implemented in the next build soon to be released.  Also, you can export full color VRML's but there is currently no provision to export the bitmaps in a way to make it suitable for 3D printing with Shapeways.  You can assign color to geometry and print that in full color but no maps for now.