Onshape + Shapeways Meetups

Presentation after the tour here in New York

We recently had a number of meetups cohosted by Onshape. We invited the Shapeways community over to tour the factory and listen to a presentation by Onshape about their cloud based CAD app.  We also presented publicly at Onshape’s headquarters in Boston and at Catalyst in Chicago.

Folks listening intently during the presentation in Boston

Onshape offers a free plan to makers that gives access to all their professional grade parametric tools. Upgrading to professional provides unlimited cloud storage. What struck me about the Onshape presentation is how excited designers are to see the features they’re developing. In Boston, they showed off the ability to compare two different versions of a part against eachother, even with a special visualizer that includes a sliding bar to morph between the versions. The crowd was audibly in awe of these previously unheard of tools, these are things CAD designers have only dreamt of before.

Engineers and makers learning about CAD design at Catalyst in Chicago

Even more interesting to me is similarly both of our services approach developing with live feedback from the community. Onshape not only has developed novel tools for CAD, they release them on a monthly basis. They tweak and add according to what they see from their users. Shapeways applies this agile approach to ur materials and 3D tools as well. CustomMaker, Porcelain and others all started as pilots that could be opted into as soon as they were ready.  With the community’s feedback we’ve been able to hone these new programs into what they needed to be today.

If you are interested in more meetups with Shapeways you can visit here. If you’d like to learn more about CAD design with Onshape, they have an excellent network of local meetup groups you can sign up for here.