BROOKLYN, N.Y., March 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- MakerBot's popular website, Thingiverse.com, a place for anyone anywhere to share files and instructions for making things, is announcing the winners of its Customizer Challenge, that concluded on March 8, 2013.  Winners will be showcased at SXSW Interactive at the MakerBot exhibit at Feed Powered by Twitter on Sunday afternoon, March 10, 2013.  Thingiverse was created even before MakerBot was a company to create a universe of things that could be downloaded, and made or printed in 3D.  The site has become so popular that it is home to more than 40,000 designs that have been downloaded more than 10.8 million times.

The MakerBot Thingiverse Customizer is the first app on Thingiverse, and it turns anyone into a 3D designer. Built on the program OpenSCAD, the Thingiverse Customizer lets experienced designers upload templates that other users can change and tweak in any number of ways.  To celebrate the growing excitement around MakerBot's Thingiverse Customizer, MakerBot held a Customizer Challenge and challenged designers to create new items that can be customized.  Winners were selected in three categories:  Artistic, Useful and Wearable.  And the winners in each category will receive MakerBot's newest 3D printer, the MakerBot® Replicator® 2X Experimental 3D Printer – made for the "Doc Browns and MacGyver's" of 3D printing.

Designers uploaded original designs to MakerBot's Thingiverse.com website and tagged their entry with "Customizer Challenge" along with the category they were entering.  Once the designs were uploaded, the Thingiverse community itself helped with the voting by others using these designs in the MakerBot Thingiverse Customizer to create their own custom things!

Winners are: 
Parametric Music Box by Thingiverse user Wizard23 in the most Artistic category.  This music box is a 100 percent printed customizable music box.  By placing the printed nubs at different intervals, different songs can be played.  See the 3D printed Parametric Music Box play Frere Jacques on YouTube.

Wall Plate Customizer by Thingiverse user TheNewHobbyist in the most Useful category.  NewHobbyist created an OpenSCAD model that allows you to pick from a list of 18 types of connector/outlet styles which then generates a 3D model correctly oriented and modeled to be immediately 3D printed.  The design allows users to pick any width from one to five "plates" wide and should match existing screw holes in your existing electrical boxes.

Bird Pendant by Thingiverse user Benjamin in the most Wearable category.  This bird pendant generator allows the user to customize the opening angle of his tail, the number of feathers on it, and the ratio of separation between the upper and lower part of his beak.  Everything is parametric!

Winning designs were showcased at SXSW Interactive at the MakerBot booth inside of Feed Powered by Twitter and the Made in NYC: Austin event.

MakerBot started Thingiverse.com in 2008, even before it sold its first 3D printer.  In 2012-2013, MakerBot Thingiverse went through an evolution with several new updates to improve user interaction, including launching its first API with the MakerBot Thingiverse Customizer App.  The MakerBot Thingiverse Customizer lets users customize 3D designs right inside their browser.  The MakerBot Customizer is so simple and easy to use that you no longer have to be a designer to create amazing 3D designs and print them in 3D. 

MakerBot is all about creating a 3D printing Ecosystem that makes designing and printing in 3D even easier.  The MakerBot 3D Ecosystem includes MakerBot Replicator 3D Printers, the MakerBot Store, Thingiverse.com, the MakerBot Photo Booth, MakerWare, MakerCare, the apps inside Thingiverse, including the popular Customizer app, the recently announced MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, Bre Pettis' book "Getting Started with MakerBot," and partnerships with other 3D design and like-minded companies, such as Autodesk, Nokia and Adafruit.

The MakerBot Thingiverse Customizer Challenge winners will be featured on Thingiverse.com for the coming week and everyone is encouraged to visit the site, see the amazing designs, download and print them.

About MakerBot
Founded in 2009, Brooklyn-based MakerBot has grown to be a global leader in desktop 3D printing. There are more than 15,000 MakerBot Desktop 3D Printers in use by engineers, designers, researchers, and people who just like to make things.  The MakerBot Replicator Desktop 3D Printer has been named Popular Mechanics "Overall Winner" for best 3D printer and has numerous awards, including being honored as one of Time Magazine's Best Inventions of 2012; "Best Emerging Tech" at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show; won Popular Mechanics Editor's Choice Award; the Popular Science Product of the Year; and recently was awarded a TechCrunch Crunchies Award for best hardware start-up; and Fast Company 2012 Innovation by Design Award, as well as being named by Fast Company as "One of the World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Consumer Electronics." The company has been featured on the cover of WIRED, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Inc., Worth, The Colbert Report, Fast Company, Engadget, Make: Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time.com, IEEE Spectrum, CNN, Financial Times, NPR, Vogue Italia and many others.

Prepared by: MakerBot
Makerbot.com

SOURCE MakerBot