Dreamforge (YC S12): Make your own superhero | Hacker News Reader

Dreamforge (YC S12): Make your own superhero

toys.dreamforge.me

59 pointsnemild49 comments

I was sad to discover there was no way to create a female superhero. The editorial in the newspaper page (homepage) mentions a female but she is only the ex-girlfriend and a fashion blogger. Disappointing.

Thanks for the note. We're definitely adding her soon. We had to start somewhere, but she's coming next.

I was also hoping for a female superhero to make one with my niece. Looking forward to that announcement.

marquis, please drop us a note at contact@dreamforge.me and we'll definitely send you an email when we have the female superhero added

Interesting.

So for those of you who know of Figureprints [1] its like that except only one guy. Clearly the market here is for over sexualized super-heroines but stepping back from that moral abyss for a moment, I like the integration of webgl as the 'design stage.'

One of things I keep thinking we could do with 3D printers (of the ABS variety) is to create a service whereby an owner can 'register' their printer with the service and take on 'jobs' on occasion where a web API effectively selects from the list and throws and STL file at it. Creating a spot market for printing services. This is how I imagine it might work:

Person who owns a printer registers it with the service.

To complete registration service sends a test STL file and a shipping label PDF.

The user gets activated once the printed test case is received and verified.

Now when a print request goes out the service flings it your way, with a shipping label. As soon as the shipping label shows up 'in-transit' by the shipping service your account is credited with your print commission. Ideally enough to cover the cost of materials and scaled for complexity/time to print.

In practice person says "Oh I need 500 of these (insert STL file)" which gets distributed to 500 printers and then the mailman shows up with 500 boxes of widgets.

Entirely unclear if that is 'practical' but it is certainly disruptive...

[1] http://figureprints.com/

Sign us up - we'd actually love to send orders your way, if you can set this up. Quality control is just super important for this to work, but we'd be happy to be a pilot customer.

We're small right now (2 people) with ambitions that do surpass our size.

FYI, I hit this glitch: http://imgur.com/QxQT0

In retrospect, I should've ordered it...

Sorry about that. We noticed a few bugs like this during development that seem to be due to the 3D renderer rather than the code to resize the superhero, but we'd love it if you could save the superhero if you encounter this again and pop us an email (to contact@dreamforge.me) linking to it.

Am I missing something or is the only thing you can make a generic looking man in different colours?

Also the rotation controls are strange. Why would I want to do anything besides rotate around the vertical axis? I don't really need to see what my hero looks like leaning like the tower of Pisa.

Thanks for the comment. For our first product, we have a standard looking superhero which you can morph musculature, change colors, and pose. More different figurines to follow.

Neat. Very similar to something we're working on for a client (http://www.actionfigurelabs.com).

There's probably no chance I live near you (Houston here), but if I did I'd REALLY love to grab a beer and chit chat about some of the battles we're both fighting with WebGL, and the different choices we made as a result.

And for anyone who plays with it, please forgive some functionality on Action Figure Labs at the moment. It's not meant to take web orders for another few days, as we built up the tech to show off at some local comicbook cons and take orders there.

http://www.myrobotnation.com/ is similar and it has a much larger set of styles/parts/colors.

Huge props to My Robot Nation. Especially on their 3D tech. In some ways they have it easier doing robots instead of human shapes (e.g. performs better on hardware that can't render as many polys), but in many other ways, they really knocked the ball out of the park. Especially some of the drag-and-drop stickers and little add-ons like gears and what-have-you.

Don't know if they are leveraging three.js (the way action figure labs and dreamforge are), but it seemed like they have their own custom rendering. Props indeed.

Wow they are doing an amazing job. I feel like Dreamforge is launching a bit too early. Every design looks very generic at the moment.

YC encourages this, they can grab a lot of feedback and iterate on what they have with the attention they are getting from launching.

Cool to see custom toys taking off, http://makie.me launched something similar earlier in the year.

Interestingly I see different sites in different browsers. I don't see pages http://toys.dreamforge.me/users/sign_up and http://toys.dreamforge.me/assemblies in Firefox for instance...

Thanks for the heads up - could you email us some more details (contact@dreamforge.me)? It seems to work fine in Firefox for us so we'd really like to get to the bottom of this for you.

Just ordered my very own 3D printed superhero! First YC S12 company to get my money!

Super! Really happy you like it - we'll be in touch about the delivery.

This is really cool. Does anyone know if there's something like this for making Bobbleheads? Most of the Bobblehead services I know require you to send them photos, etc.

Do you plan on making it possible to use custom images for clothes etc ? A customized costume with a Kid's name on it would certainly help me find ideas for birthdays.

Absolutely - it's really high on our priority list

Great stuff! Very cool, wish I had this when I was little.

I wonder if there will be copyright issues to worry about. E.g. Can we expect Marvel to "DMCA" the design of physical goods (or even the goods themselves)?

Thanks for your comment. It's an interesting question and quite a bit of of certainty. Here's a bit of an overview: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-05/31/3d-printing-c...

The site told me how to enable webGL in my browser (Safari) which is helpful, but I wonder how many Safari users will actually follow said instructions.

It told me how to engage webGL in Safari, but I was using Chrome. And apparently it recommends Chrome to anyone using firefox... fancy a game of three-browser monte?

An image of what we luddites are missing out on would improve the no-webGL error message, and make me more likely to take the time to turn webGL on. (Yes, I hunted down the gallery, but no, that's not the same.)

Weird, I got the error in Chrome but it worked fine in FF.

I got the same notice on my Android phone.

How big is the ceramic figurine market?

Are you going handle ordering and shipping for other companies? Like a cafepress model?

Very cool! But does he have to stand like that? Or can we change it?

Thanks for checking it out! That's right, you can change his poses in our product. We're adding some crazier poses in the days ahead - drop me a note if there's a particular pose you're envisioning and we'll add it in.

Thanks! Would love to see other models too!

Thanks nemild, just ordered one. Took a few tries, but once I got it, I made sure to pin it, tweet it, facebook it! Good job guys!

That is awesome, can't wait to deliver it to you :)

Add the Tebow pose!!

Second the Tebow pose. +1

Btw, are you using WebGL?

It would seem so, when I visit in a non-WebGL enabled browser there's an indication saying it is required.

Hi! Yep, the viewer is WebGL. We're using the Three.js library (http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/) to handle the actual rendering for us, and there's lot of programming magic behind the scenes to customise the meshes and textures on the fly.

Read landing page, <insert gender-alienation lecture here>

nemild, I was the founder of CloudFab - we did 3DP sourcing and mass customization interfaces. Would be happy to help connect you guys if needed.

I want a good 3D Printer!!!

In my Firefox 14.0.1 it says " Sorry, WebGL is required Your browser doesn't support the technology we use to help you design superheros. Please consider upgrading to a better browser" linking to the Chrome. Are they paid advertisers of Chrome, or do they really think the only browser in the world which supports WebGL is only the Chrome?

Typically they just recommend whatever browser the guy who wrote the error is fond of. I wouldn't take it as anything more than that.

You're spot on. No slight meant to Firefox, and we'll change the wording.

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