It is always important for any company to build up a market for their product. As cigarette manufacturers have found out, it’s best to start users when they’re young. All DCC companies bank on the fact that so many of us went to the movies or played computer games in our childhood and said “wow, I would love to make something like that!”. Now, Solidworks, a 3D CAD company, is taking a new approach to build up their products for children to guarantee a market later: they are making 3D modeling programs for kids!
From what I know, Solidworks’ Cosmic Blobs is the first true attempt to create a fairly sophisticated 3D modeling program for peoples aged around 7-14. Cosmic Blobs is the ultimate extension of the “democratization” (or, making easy enough for most of the population to use) of 3D modeling software.

I can just imagine the brainstorm meeting where they came up with the idea of spending time and resources to make a 3D modeling program for kids: “We should make our products so easy to use, even a seven-year-old would understand it!”, says one executive. “Not a bad idea…” responds another.

The product itself is quite impressive. To make it much easier to use, they’ve done away with menus. Everything is done graphically: just click on the object (or “blob”) you want to appear on the screen, and viola, it appears. The controls are semi-intuitive, based off their pictures (and they all come with sound-effects to make the use easier to remember).

However, I feel that it goes a bit over-the-top. They chose some sort of mad-scientist theme for the look and feel of the product and took it to the n-th degree: the borders are covered in green slime, all the primitives and models like spheres are in lab beakers, etc. It is a bit overwhelming. It seems as if they tried to dazzle it up to make it more attractive to kids, but instead it ends up making the tool look more complicated than it is.

That is not to say that Cosmic Blobs is uncomplicated. It suffers from the same basic problem that all this talk of democratizing 3D seems to conveniently forget: modeling in three dimensions is a difficult, time consuming task. I have to give credit to the creative minds at Solidworks for making Cosmic Blobs as completely simple as it seems it possibly could be without sacrificing very basic functionality, however I don’t know if it’s basic enough for a kid aged 7-14 to pick up intuitively.

If you are planning on buying this for your child to get them interested in what you do, which isn’t that bad of an idea, I suggest you set aside an hour or two to sit down with them and go through the instructions manual with them. If they get a tutorial from a real pro, I bet that this program can be a fun way of making art on the computer.

One last, important thing: it’s cheap. There’s a free downloadable demo available at www.cosmicblobs.com, and the product is only around $50 if you do decide to purchase it. That makes it just affordable enough to make a nice present to any deserving, creative, and particularly talented 7-14 year old.