At CES, Sculpteo, a French company specializing in additive manufacturing—otherwise known as 3D printing—was showing off a new smartphone app that allows the uninitiated to create personalized, usable ceramic objects from a photo. The firm was also demonstrating a new "cloud engine" that allows designers and small businesses to create customized products they can sell through their own websites—basically aiming to become the Etsy of the 3D printing world.

The app side of Sculpteo's pitch is fairly gimmicky: snap a photo of someone in profile with an iPhone or Android device, and the app will recognize the profile. Then it exports data derived from the image so that the user can create a custom object based on it, derived from prebuilt designs. Those include a coffee cup with the profile in relief and a vase made from a rotational volume of the profile.

Sculpteo's CEO, Clément Moreau, told me that the ceramic objects were created using a plaster-based 3D printing process to create objects that could be glazed and fired. He wouldn't say what the process was, but from the materials shown, it's apparently based on laser sintering. The company also offers personalized "avatar" figurines based on front and side facial photos.

But Sculpteo's bigger play is a custom 3D printing network for small businesses, online retailers, and design shops. The cloud app allows anyone to design an object in a modeling tool such as Blender, along with manufacturing outsourcing and e-commerce that lets designers and small businesses upload digital models of products and sell them through their own websites.

There are already a number of fabricating services that allow designers to send CAD drawings, but Sculpteo's Cloud Engine provides a way to embed designs built in Wavefront, AutoCAD, and a number of other formats directly into in a Web store (there's a WordPress plug-in, for example) so that customers can order and pay for them. Sculpteo handles the technical details of setting up printing, fixing designs as required, and then arranges for localized printing, finishing and delivery of the finished product through a network of partners in Europe and the US. Aside from the ceramic process, Sculpteo also prints objects in a variety of plastics and resins, as well as silver (by coating plastic).