Looking at Autodesk’s 123D Creature – 3D iPad app for making monsters!

Autodesk continues its iOS march with yet another App. This one, named 123D Creature, is a new iPad app that gives anyone the ability to create and 3D print three-dimensional characters like giant bugs and monsters. Autodesk 123D Creatures makes it an easy process by starting with a stick figure of your creature design.

“Now, for the first time , 123D Creature makes it easy for anyone to create a sophisticated creature on the iPad, and then have a 3D print delivered to their doorstep within a few swipes of their finger,” said Samir Hanna, vice president of Consumer Products at Autodesk.

“With our 123D family of apps, we strive to put powerful 3D technology into the hands of anyone who wants to be creative, and we look forward to seeing the original creatures people will create and share with the community.”

Creatures in Detail

Inspired by the same technology found in Autodesk’s professional 3D applications, 123D Creature begins with the making of a simple skeleton where users lay out the basic anatomy of their creature in digital clay.

Using Apple’s multi-touch gesture interface technology users thicken, stretch and sculpt their creature with many of the tools familiar to users of the popular 123D Sculpt app. (see image 01 below).

01 - Autodesk's new iPad app helps unleash your 3D creature creativity!

Once finished sculpting and shaping, you basically airbrush your creature’s body or adorn it with 3D decals and textures imported from the user’s iPad photo library. To then truly showcase your creature users can then bring it into a render room where they can customize lighting and shadows, apply filters, and import background photos to generate amazing images to share with their friends.

3D Printing Integration

The very neat thing about this iPad app is that users can take their 3D creature design into the real world with 3D printing. Within a few steps users can order a 3D print of their creature that will then be mailed to them from Sculpteo’s 3D printing service embedded within the app.

If artists want to enhance their creatures further at a professional level Autodesk has enabled them to bring in their designs into Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max. In fact the export format is OBJ and includes textures so other non-Autodesk tools should work as well.

The Autodesk 123D Creature app is the latest addition to the 123D family by Autodesk, a consumer-level oriented family of design and 3D applications for Mac, PC and iPad. Autodesk 123D Creature is exclusively available from the App Store on iPad for 7.99.USD. You can learn more here.