Empire Cycles’ 3D printed titanium mountain bike brought by Renishaw
Every year when we start organising DEVELOP3D LIVE we wonder how it’s possible to top the previous year’s event. We really appreciate everyone’s efforts to get to Warwick to experience a very unique event.
The editorial team travels far and wide each year, gathering material for articles by seeing great technology and hearing from fascinating and innovative designers.
We then spend months inviting designers and industry developers to come and talk on a variety of topical areas.
A designer, inventor and artist, Dominic Wilcox provided a great opening keynote
Those that attended this year would have noticed the beautiful BAC Mono that graced the mainstage area, brought courtesy of Autodesk. This amazing single seater road-legal Formula One car is designed and made in Liverpool by Briggs Automotive Company.
Renishaw also provided my on-stage opening session with the first fully titanium metal 3D printed mountain bike, which it had created for Empire Cycles – and I suspect probably cost as much as the Mono to produce.
Both wonderful examples of the kind of innovations that are happening in British design and manufacturing.
Our two opening keynotes were extremely different. Dominic Wilcox is a designer with a unique attitude and approach to coming up with ideas, from stain glass cars, desks that turn into coffins and luggage with legs not wheels.
Then we had Andy Claughton from Ben Ainsle Racing (BAR) describing how you go about designing a world beating America’s Cup yacht.
We don’t have permission to upload Dominic’s talk but we do have Andy’s online now and it’s well worth thirty minutes of your time.
Industry talks
Thankfully this year it was much easier to identify the most pertinent industry topics.
With the old SolidWorks team reforming outside of Dassault Systèmes and launching Onshape, a cloud-based 3D modelling tool to join Autodesk’s Fusion 360 cloud application, the next generation of modelling tools was now turning into a battle.
Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, and John Hirschtick of Onshape were our first speakers to confirm and attendees benefitted from $1,200 of Fusion 360 Pro, as well as guaranteed access to an Onshape account.
While all the established CAD systems offer years of in-depth development and capability, their Windows-based architectures limit them to operating at a desktop level.
Onshape and Fusion, while embryonic, have been developed from scratch to leverage the strength of cloudbased collaboration and compute power.
Given the low cost and subscription nature of these products, they could revolutionise the industry, or the internet could prove just too bandwidth limited, unreliable or insecure.
Onshape’s Jon Hirschtick explained its vision for design on the cloud
Of course Autodesk and Onshape aren’t the only game players in town. PTC has had a version of Windchill available on the cloud for several years and recently revamped this offer.
Siemens PLM is also experimenting with cloud-delivery of its latest SolidEdge trials.
We were honoured to have Dan Staples, VP of Mainstream Engineering R&D at Siemens PLM, and PTC’s Paul Sagar, Director of Product Management at Creo Parametric, give keynotes on product developments and the impact of the Internet of Things (IoT). We expect to hear more from both these firms on cloud strategies moving forward.
No industry event would be complete without SolidWorks and we were blessed with Gian Paolo Bassi, the company’s new CEO who spoke about the latest developments in SolidWorks, together the recently announced ‘3DExperience’ Industrial Designer, which uses a combination of desktop and cloud infrastructure for design teams.
A virtual reality experience on offer at the HP/AMD stand
We were also very fortunate this year to get an exclusive presentation from J Scott Schiller, Worldwide Business Director at HP 3D Printing.
Schiller’s talk gave a lot more insight into what HP is developing with its forthcoming ‘Multi Jet Fusion’ technology, which promises big, strong 3D printed parts, fast.
For the final session on the mainstage I got to question all those involved in bringing next generation cloud-based CAD tools to the market in the panel session.
It seems that those with existing products are more cautious about transitioning their customers to new technologies, while ‘upstarts’ like Onshape were keen to mix things up a little in terms of price and business model.
Nikola Bozinovic, founder of Frame, was also on the panel and his company currently offers a technology that enables any Windows application to be hosted online.
The panel session at the end of the event
For the first time we broadcast the mainstage live and attracted an audience of an additional 2,000 people around the world to the UK event. Videos from all the mainstage have been uploaded onto the develop3dlive.com website, with more to come from the other rooms.
Sessions
Al Dean hosting the ‘Building a Start-Up Business’ track
After the first coffee break, DEVELOP3D LIVE explodes into four tracks: Product design, Industry Talks, Make/ Fabricate and Design Visualisation.
For the first time we also ran a track on how to go about getting funding for start-up ideas.
With speakers from so many different aspects of design there was plenty to choose from: jewellery design, rendering, 3D printing, motorsport, bicycle design all the way to Game of Throne’s effects and costume design.
Many of these will be uploaded over the coming weeks.
Conclusion
Our fourth year and another record breaking event for attendance.
There was more exhibitors, more speakers, more free software on offer than we have ever managed before and the live broadcast and delayed feeds to North America help put British design and engineering in front of a lot of our peers.
We’d like to thank everyone who made the effort to get there on the day, we realise that the unlucky combination of M6 motorway lane closures, roadworks and building work made the trip in and out arduous for many.
We will see you next year in the same place on 31 March. We have already started planning and it’s going to be even better!
Top tweets from the day
@DEVELOP3DLive Is there a US “equivalent” for this? Would love, love, love to attend. @Aicher
@DEVELOP3DLive thanks for a great event yet again, need a bigger venue but that might spoil the special atmosphere. See you next year. @p2dme
@greenape: absolutely awesome talk @DEVELOP3DLive! @jhirschtick
@DEVELOP3DLive Seen so many great new tools for starting businesses. Helped me to finally pull the trigger on starting one myself. Thanks! @DriesVervoort
I loved Mike Payne’s @develop3dlive panel quote “The rest of us up here are now following @carlbass and Autodesk to the cloud” @buzzkross
Well invested day. Thanks to the @DEVELOP3DLive team! @XavieMX
Best part of @DEVELOP3DLive for me was @77A and @greenape. Real, honest talks with meaning. No waffle. No fence-sitting. Quality! #D3DLive @nick_chubb
Post @DEVELOP3DLive sitting in #coventry cathedral under the sun sketching new ideas using @dominicwilcox book as inspiration @Rigaero
@_riut thanks for sharing your #startup story yesterday at @DEVELOP3DLive – love the back to front backpack @Mushcado
@alistardean @dominicwilcox @DEVELOP3DLive Too bad some of Dominic’s inventions weren’t raffled off at the conference. Love the square peas! @DarrenCAD
@DEVELOP3DLive Certainly did! High points for me were talking to the Ember crew and seeing what that little wonder can do.@Pot8oSh3D
Great presentations today from industry leaders @gpbassi @jhirschtick @carlbass @DEVELOP3DLive. Each have unique value propositions. @MusicCityTTM
My first @DEVELOP3DLive.. I really enjoyed a great day… thank you so much… @OpenBoundaries
What an absolutely awesome and inspiring day! Thanks @DEVELOP3DLive – can’t wait for next year! #cad #design #productdesign @StiffRob
Incredible day @DEVELOP3DLive by far the greatest event of the year. Simply ran out of time this year #D3DLive @talktonickgray
@DEVELOP3DLive West Coast feed just ended. The about face of the industry to face the cloud underlines the huge industry shifts on the way. @kat5
We look back at our most exciting live event yet
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