In a year packed full of incredible news coming through the 3D printing space, there are a few particular stories which have really stood out, from my perspective. One happened just last week at the International Manufacturing Technological innovation Show in Chicago, Il, when buy cheap adobe software printed an total car, called Strati, within a 44 hour span. Generating the feat even far more incredible is the fact that they did this in front of spectators, and once complete drove the car out of the showroom, and into the road.

Another major piece of news within the industry was first revealed back in May possibly by Autodesk, when the $12.2 billion software company announced their Spark platform and 3D printer. Spark is a platform which Autodesk plans to roll out later this year, to simplify the 3D printing approach for material scientists, hardware makers, product designers, and software developers. The platform aims to streamline digital data to 3D printers in an efficent, and easy to understand manner. Spark could potentially be the "buy windows 7 " of the 3D printing world; a unified operating system to run a a variety of different 3D printers, from desktop devices, all the way up to large scale manufacturing machines.

Today it was revealed that both Autodesk and Local Motors will be working together to integrate the Spark platform while in the production approach of Local Motors' Strati 3D printed car.

Local Motors utilised a massive fused deposition modeling 3D printer called the BAAM (Big Area Additive Manufacturing) machine, which was provided to them by Cincinnati Inc. They will now integrate the Autodesk Spark platform into the production approach, enabling the team at Local Motors to connect automobile digital design data to the 3D printer for a streamlined approach, which includes quality visualization tools.

Local Motors intends to eventually begin selling their 3D printed cars, and feels that the Spark platform would be perfect in helping them reach those long term goals. This will be Autodesk's first industrial application of its open source platform, one which should give the company a boost in convincing other companies to follow suit.

Let's hear your thoughts on this interesting collaboration, while in the Local Motors/Spark 3D printing forum thread on 3DPB.com