For a company which makes its living from 2D/3D drawing- and visualization software Autodesk is late to the 3D printing market.
They hope to gain entrance to this promising market by releasing a (so far nameless) resin-based printer as well as a software platform called Spark.
The software should give users more control over the actual printing process and can be licensed by other 3D printer makers. Expect the software to focus on converting from existing 3D formats (Autodesks stronghold), model integrity checks, print previews and the crucial publishing and sharing of models.
The printer will be a reference platform for the Spark software and Autodesk will make the design publicly available. It will be in the $5000 range. Autodesk promises to explore new materials and hopes others will use the open hardware platform to experiment as well.
Is this the breakthrough for 3D printing or is Autodesk already too late?
http://inthefold.autodesk.com/in_the_fold/2014/05/accelerating-the-future-of-3d-printing.html #Tech
For the well designed office it will be hard to find a better looking choice. In that respect it might be late but early enough to convince those who considered outsourcing the actual printing.
Autodesk are the wrong company to get into 3D printing. Although it's numerically controlled, 95% of the effort is in the mechanical machine build and operation. Stick with what you know about, Autodesk, i.e. software.