Architectural Innovations 3D

The problem. Architectural firms had rich BIM data and polished renders, but a client standing in a room still couldn’t feel a building from a flat screen. Getting from a building-information model to a real, physical scale model meant hand-building or shipping the work out, which was slow and disconnected from the actual design data.

What it was. Ai3D was a small visualization service I co-founded (roughly 2016 to 2018) for architectural firms that wanted their designs both in hand and on screen. We produced 3D-printed physical scale models and digital visualizations, and we built the additive-manufacturing and BIM-to-production workflows that let a firm’s model data actually drive the fabricated result.

Origin

This one sat right on top of my background. Mechanical engineering plus real additive-manufacturing experience was the core capability, so the hard part was never “can we print it,” it was “can we make a firm’s BIM data print cleanly and repeatably.” It was a small co-founded venture, not a big company, but it was where I first learned that the interesting problem lives in the workflow between the model and the machine.