Talk With Your 3D Clients With talk3D

Another business-oriented 3D cloud service is preparing for launch: talk3D.

The new service hopes to capitalize on the difficulties encountered by 3D designers working with clients by providing a series of easily-used functions to simplify the process. 

In today’s world there are far more people who don’t know how to design in 3D than can do so, and thus there’s always interactions between the two as products are developed. Typically a business engages with a designer to produce 3D designs that are subsequently 3D printed or otherwise manufactured. That interaction is the subject of talk3D. 

talk3D will provide these functions to manage 3D client to customer interactions regarding any project: 

• Communicate changes/modifications in 3D models with our new talk3D tool
• Mark the changes needed on the 3D model and track the status
• Multiple 3D models supported with integrated 3D viewer
• Send messages between team members of the project 
• Send quotes to clients online
• Start a project after the client pays. The payment is held in escrow until the project is completed
• Get paid via email

Murali Srinivasa, co-founder of Create Labs Inc, the makers of talk3D, explained to us how the service works: 

Its really hard to work with 3D designers remotely, without any streamlined software. Things like change requests/bugs on multiple STL files becomes really hard to track. Clients fear to pay in advance and designers fear their clients won’t pay after they receive the STL files. 3D designers work with multiple clients simultaneously and hard to track/manage in e-mails.

talk3D aims to make communication with 3D modelers + clients a smoother, more concise process. The tool has an integrated 3d visualization and communication platform which feels very similar to the kind of collaborative workspace that exists on google docs – except on a 3D platform! Theres also built in payment tools,invoice generator etc.

We think this type of service is essential to the future of 3D printing, as the bottleneck in the 3D printing ecosystem revolves around getting proper designs for print. One way to address that is to engage 3D designers to produce more 3D models. If there are ways to improve that process, then we’re all for it. 

It’s not clear how Create Labs will fund talk3D, but we would expect that they have several levels of participation, including a free level. However, there is no indication of their intentions yet. Even so, the company does face indirect competition from other services, such as 3D cloud design tool Onshape, which includes some ability to share models with customers.

Via talk3D