In 2015, Ryan Weimer and his wife started a non-profit organization called Magic Wheelchair. His own children were born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy and he wanted to bring hope and awareness to this condition as well as those afflicting children all over who are confined to their wheelchair. He began the non-profit organization and started working on recruiting builders.

Now they would like to give to kids in wheelchairs an unforgettable experience by creating custom costumes for them at no expense to their families. Their vision is "to put a smile on the face of every child in a wheelchair by transforming their wheelchairs into awesomeness dreams."

BREAKTHROUGH IDEA

• Connect builders with vendors and professional fabricators
• Help vendors package starter kits and special offers for charity builds
• Nurture a community of mentors and novice builders sharing best practices and content
• The entertainment and special effects industries can have first-hand experiences with 3DEXPERIENCE as they do charity work and potentially bring the tools back into their existing professional workflow.
• Inspire 3DEXPERIENCE Labs and regional Fab Labs
  • DS employees can help design and build costumes for the children
  • Each build done in a 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is an epic story of technology, artistry, community, humanity, and partnership.

 

Accomplishments:

• Started with 8 costumes the first year (2015) and grew to more than 100 this year (2018)
• Bring together a community of elite special effects artist, fabricators in Hollywood, artists, doctors, nurses, puppet designers, garage builders, hobbyists, makers, students, and professional engineers behind the same cause and same mission to unite and share knowledge, best practices, techniques, materials, and technologies to get the epic builds done.
• Because of the great story of Magic Wheelchair, Ryan has networked with fabrication houses and special effects artists from across the United States and more recently across the world. This organization has attracted the talents with the likes of Adam Savage (from MythBusters) to Fon Davis (creator of many Star Wars Characters).

• Comic Con 2018 - Behind the Scenes of the X-Wing Magic Wheelchair Reveal
• They partnered with Stan Winston School of Character Arts where each build team has free access to the online course material from the school.

BENEFITS TO USE 3DEXPERIENCE PLATFORM ON CLOUD:

• Provide DS tools for builders to use while planning, designing, and fabricating their costumes.
• Create a platform community and roles to support the use of products like xDesign, xForm, xRender, MarketPlace, 3DPartSupply.
• The build team contacted a SolidWorks customer who made the wheelchair that Jonah was using, Permobil. This customer was able to work with us to provide the CAD model native to our software. This saved a lot of time on our end during the modeling phase. 
• We used the 3DEXPERIENCE Dashboard to manage the creative ideation, team dynamics, content, tasks, schedule, and supplies throughout the build process 
• SolidWorks was used to model the design mostly. Our team wanted to be able to speak with the other teams if they needed any guidance with the CAD. The hope is to move into our other tools as they become more available for the build teams to use.