Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco: Dress to Impress Exhibit

Autodesk makes software for people who make the world around us. If you've ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are you've experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything, but some segments of the general public are not yet aware of that.

The Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco celebrates design — the process of taking a great idea and turning it into a reality. With about 60 different exhibits regularly on display that showcase the innovative work of Autodesk customers, the gallery illustrates the role technology plays in great design and engineering. Autodesk Gallery Ambassadors conduct gallery tours as a sideline to their day jobs. The tours provide ambassadors with opportunities to practice public speaking in front of small groups. Autodesk Gallery Curator, Jason Medal-Katz, chose the title, ambassador, instead of docent because the correct way to address an ambassador is "your Excellency." Alas, this never happens.

The Dress to Impress exhibit is an exhibit that you see on the 2^nd floor of our One Market office in San Francisco:

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People

• Nervous System // more

Software

• Autodesk Spark Platform
• Kinematics Cloth and Fold
• Kinematics Fold
• Open Dynamics Engine

Nervous System is a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. They create using a novel process that employs computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, they write computer programs based on processes and patterns found in nature and use those programs to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.

The ~$5,000 laser-sintered nylon (formed by melting powder) dress consists of 3,000 triangular pieces and 5,000 hinges that, although rigid, behave like fabric.

Cloth is flat, but the body isn't. Once designed, a typical dress needs to be pieced together, but the Kinematics dress doesn't. Composed of over 3,000 unique triangular panels connected by nearly 5,000 hinges, the Kinematics dress is created with design software directly from body scans and then 3D printed in nylon as a single folded piece.

By creating the dress already folded, designers can make and compress complex structures that would normally be too large for a 3D printer. Once printed, the Kinematics dress simply unfolds into its intended shape.

Nervous System used reality capture and mass customization to shape each dress and print them as folded so that they would not be too big for the 3D printer.

While each component is rigid, together the elements behave like a length of fabric, flowing in response to body movement. Thanks to parametric body modeling, the dress can be custom fit, and style, flexibility, and pattern can be tailored to individual tastes. It's certainly not your mother's dress, and it might be the future of fashion.

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Thanks to the Autodesk Gallery team for the descriptive text for this blog post.

Autodesk has always been an automation company, and today more than ever that means helping people make more things, better things, with less; more and better in terms of increasing efficiency, performance, quality, and innovation; less in terms of time, resources, and negative impacts (e.g., social, environmental). Nervous System is an ambitious company that does this in the extreme.

The Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco is open to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. There is a guided tour on Wednesdays at 12:30 pm and a self-guided audio tour available anytime. Admission is free. Visit us.

Fabric is alive in the lab.