I had made a posting here, one that I feel bordered on genius, around the time
of Siggraph. No one commented on my idea so it either got lost in the hoopla of
the trade event, or no one recognized its signifigance(It could not be that I am
overestimating it's value of course).
The idea was to help the RP industry become more mainstream by sponsoring, in
conjunction with the various CAD software developers, an online CAD University
to offer several levels of CAD training. It is my opinion that the only thing
keeping RP from mainstream use is that very few people outside of engineers
working for large manufacturers in their R&D department have a firm grasp of
CAD.
In my case, I knew about RP and wanted to purchase a Sanders machine but what
stopped me for over a year was figuring out which CAD software was best and how
in the world I was going to learn to use it with tutoring costs at $300/day and
up.
I decided on FormZ, which many of you may look down on as a low end CAD, but for
my purpose it was great, and I have since purchased a ModelMakerII. I chose
FormZ because I was able to take a semester long college level architecture
course which centered on solid modeling using FormZ for around $1,000. I felt
that the training and escalation up the learning curve was more important than
the ultimate power of a software which I might never utilize without signifigant
training.
So I believe that the RP bottleneck is in making CAD more accessible and
mainstream through industry sponsored training, not necesarily in making RP less
expensive. With more users, service bureaus will likely flourish, thereby
increasing RP manufacturers volume and ultimately bringing down the unit price
for all of us.
Comments?
Steven Pollack
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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