Dassault Systèmes has sponsored this post.

Part of the fun of surveying new technology is predicting where the world’s next big innovations will appear, and this is no small task. While the world of product design is handled by professional designers and engineers, the emergence of the “maker” community has expanded vast new possibilities.

Kirby Downey is a huge proponent of this maker community, and he has found himself at an interesting crossroads between professional engineering and amateur “making”—or to put it a slightly different way, the crossroads between professional making and amateur engineering.

Kirby Downey works with CAD software as both a professional and a hobbyist. (Image courtesy of Kirby Downey.)

Making Things Professionally

Downey is traditionally trained as a product designer and has a background in using SOLIDWORKS. “That's where I kind of really saw the potential for a tool that can allow me to literally create anything that I wanted,” he explained.

“Everybody at university would make their drawings according to what they knew they could make in SOLIDWORKS. For me, I would take my drawings and be saying, ‘What can't I design?’ And then, let me figure out how I can design it. In that way, I taught myself a lot of tricks and techniques.”

Originally from South Africa, Downey found himself in the U.K, for his higher education. Exposed to 3D printing in college, he quickly realized the possibilities of CAD and using additive manufacturing.

“I have this tool that can make anything I want virtually and here is this tool that can copy and paste that into the physical world,” he said.

That’s when he started working for iMaker and MyMiniFactory, which operate as 3D printer farms for various institutions, including major engineering OEMs as well as organizations such as Warner Brothers.

While working a day job managing and operating an array of 3D printers, Downey also finds himself using 3D printing and SOLIDWORKS in his free time.

Downey’s first online project was the Thunderlord gun from the first-person shooter game Destiny, which he created in SOLIDWORKS. (Image courtesy of Kirby Downey.)

Making Nerds Happy with 3D Printing

Downey quickly took to the video game bandwagon and started making props, creating 3D files in SOLIDWORKS that people could download for free. His first project was a gun from the first-person shooter video game, Destiny.

After working on the prop, Downey fell in love with the game, and he has been a player ever since.

“I realized that I can actually just make whatever I want. I can even make props from video games. I can make nerds like me really happy. I felt like I really enjoyed that.”

Downey continued to crank out different Destiny weapons and quickly found himself in contact with a number of well-known Destiny YouTubers. This all led to him working directly with PlayStation and Bethesda on official projects making props for their events and showcases.

Downey 3D printed a Guinness Book of World Records prop for Doom 2016. (Image courtesy of Kirby Downey.)

“I did one of the big props that they had at the special event, the launch party for Doom 2016, which they then entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest, heaviest 3D printed prop from a video game,” he shared.

BFG from Doom

Work done with PlayStation

His experience in the constantly growing YouTube community of makers drove Downey to dig into the community side of CAD and SOLIDWORKS.

“I started to realize how connected the SOLIDWORKS community is. I would have loved to have a community like this around when I was first learning, where I can ask those questions.” He has embraced the connection with his fellow designers and engineers.

“I saw that there was a SOLIDWORKS user group in London but it hadn't been active for years, so I just gave up on that search,” Downey said. “That's when I discovered that if you don't have one in your area, they encourage you to just start one. So, I restarted the London user group network and now I'm helping them build more. I'm their community representative for Europe, helping SOLIDWORKS open up a bunch more user groups and networks around Europe and England.”

SOLIDWORKS Embraces the Maker Community

As Downey has discovered, there is a broad and expanding community of “makers” floating around the Internet. This community of tinkerers has long been hungry for new opportunities to create and the 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers offer has emerged to fit that bill.

“I think 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers is perfect because of all the people that were seeing this content I was posting and videos I was sharing on how I made these 3D printed props. The most common question was regarding what I used to design everything. I always said I was using SOLIDWORKS and then my audience would realize the cost of it,” Downey said.

3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers is offered at $99/year, which is far more approachable than the professional version for folks doing amateur design or even toying with the idea of starting a business with a new product. That’s where many of these makers exist—in the middle ground between tinkering and operating a business. Users of 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers are limited to $2k/year in revenue from products created from the software by the license agreement.

“What's going to happen is that these users are going to start tinkering and playing with the software. Then they're going to start realizing that they can make a business out of this and start building a business from that. That’s where the future user base is going to grow. And eventually, they will go back and buy a more commercial version of SOLIDWORKS because the organization has helped them grow,” he added. These users could “graduate” to the SOLIDWORKS Entrepreneur program, for example.

Everything that Downey designs, he puts online for free because his main goal isn’t to make money or do this work as a side business. In fact, he gets lots of audience members asking to purchase his creations, but he always encourages them to learn from the plethora of resources on YouTube and create the props themselves.

Downey really appreciates that he can essentially use what feels like the same version of SOLIDWORKS from his professional training, but for the cost of a Netflix subscription.

“The Maker version is exactly the same as SOLIDWORKS standard,” he said. “You get the typical desktop install, but the main difference is that you do cloud saving instead of keeping files on your computer. But you also get access to their two online software programs, xDesign and xShape. And if you get stuck, if you have questions, you have access to ‘Made in 3D,’ SOLIDWORKS’ community for Makers.”

The Maker Community at Work

Magic Wheelchair is a non-profit organization that builds epic costumes for kids in wheelchairs. A wheelchair can create a challenge for kids that want to experience cosplay or dress up for Halloween, but Magic Wheelchair helps them experience their magical and superhero dreams.

Depending on the chosen design, these costumes can sometimes require a range of engineering skills. When the Magic Wheelchair organization wanted to launch in the U.K.—they had not previously done any costume builds outside the U.S.—they asked Downey and his podcast partner, Jonathan (Johnny) Harrison to put together a team.

Downey gathered a team of SOLIDWORKS Champions to collaborate and create a Magic Wheelchair project. (Image courtesy of Kirby Downey.)

They took to the SOLIDWORKS Champions Program to build their team and things quickly came together.

“I had that reach of talented people,” Downey explained. “We sat down with all these different users, and we delegated to each person. We said to them, ‘You've got access to 3DEXPERIENCE platform tools and SOLIDWORKS for Makers,’ so basically everything we needed to make this dragon costume that we were building. The plan was that Johnny and I were going to fully assemble it, but everything else was all done remotely. We had one guy design the whole organic structure of the dragon in xShape, while Johnny did the frame in SOLIDWORKS. We were able to work together with a network of SOLIDWORKS users, as well as using the tools in the Maker version to create this wheelchair for a kid.”

The whole production happened within 24 hours and included a number of different SOLIDWORKS community members.

“It felt real because it was community members doing it. It wasn't like corporate was trying to do a write-up. It was a fun way to kind of show off what you can do with 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers; you can build this massive wheelchair costume for a good cause,” he said.

Downey and his team helped develop a dragon costume for a young wheelchair user through the Magic Wheelchair program. (Image courtesy of Kirby Downey.)

The community of makers is quickly beginning to blend with the community of professionals—or maybe it has just become more apparent as they collaborate within these new platforms. Either way, community-building behind making stuff is expanding quickly, and accessible tools such as 3D printers and the affordable 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers—as well as users like Downey and other YouTube designers—are part of what is making that growth happen.

“When I get to speak to those people who really appreciate the stuff that I create, it helps me let loose and start to realize I'm doing a good job—not just making props, but helping to build a maker community,” Downey said.

To learn more about the 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers offer, visit discover.solidworks.com/makers.