Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
The technology's been around for a while. Mainframe Entertainment used 3D scanning of the Beast Wars toys when creating the cartoon models, and some other toy companies have long done 3D scans of celebrities to create toys (e.g. WWE). But yeah, now more recently it's become available commercially for private home use.

I was listening to a story about this on Triple J last week -- one thing they discussed was rather the possibility of supplying replacement parts to customers by selling the design for 3D printing. You purchase the download of that part, then 3D print it yourself. This could make 3rd party stuff a lot cheaper -- rather than paying say for some custom 3rd party head for a Transformer toy, you pay a fraction of that price to download the design then just 3D print it yourself at home.

HasTak could also take advantage of this too -- they could provide special accessories that would only appeal a limited market like collectors. And they could also service customers looking for replacement parts. Imagine if they reissued accessories available for download.
It would cost money, right?
That would be a good idea, but probably might backfire and create a huge black market for designs.
Are you able to share things you have downloaded? There would need to be a lot of enforcing to do. Wouldn't you also need a large amount of plastic though, or are we just talking new printing.($$$)
I could see this work with lego, selling blank minifigure parts for collectors to make what they choose.
And finally, is this basically a mold-making machine? Because the TJ guys might be onto something there.