Note/Warning: If you are looking into the purchase of this printer, be warned. The manufacturer has not delivered. Please read the comments below the article, before making a decision to send your money to Sumpod. Fantastic technology has been cooking up on the other side of the pond. I’m talking specifically about the SUMPOD 3D…
The 3D Mouse. Quite the visage of refinement in the 3D CAD World. Sitting slightly to left of your keyboard in all its glory, carried in its padded case to and fro, even securing a special place on the nightstand next to your bed… ahem. The 3D Mouse. People love’em or… don’t use them. We’re…
KeyShot 3 came out a mere three months ago. Now, KeyShot 3.1 is here. It’s a mere point release later, but they’re slamming out a slew of new features and improvements with the update. Features like Environment Editing, Material Templates and Network Rendering. They’re adding supprt for 3DConnexion devices and improving the animation debuted with…
It’s a mouse. It’s a 3D mouse. Actually, it’s BOTH. It’s the Lexip 3D mouse and it combines the rotational power of a 3D Mouse with the click control of a traditional mouse. Lexip is a start-up out of France with a recent patent on the idea of a multi-axis mouse. If you’ve often feared…
I declared a couple of months ago that Lenovo had marketed its ThinkPad Tablet to the wrong crowd. It’s 10″ screen and pressure sensitive stylus made it stick out as the first real contender for the title of Cintiq-on-the-cheap. Lucky me, someone at Lenovo read the post and offered up a review unit. Of course,…
The viewing area is six inches smaller than my television. The front of it is sitting six inches from my face… give or take a few inches. It’s an HP ZR30w 30″ Monitor and, well, it’s massive. I had the opportunity to receive one from HP and the subsequent joy of basking in 1.07 billion…
After I wrote about the ThinkPad Tablet last week, I was contacted by Lenovo and offered a unit to review for a month or so. Of course I took them up on the offer. This is a quick post which will be followed up in a few weeks with an in-depth review.
So, you’re toolin’ around the neighborhood in your hatchback, boppin’ your head to the best of Van Halen when suddenly an idea pops in your head. You need to sketch. Now typically, you would grab anything within reach – a receipt, a napkin, a freshly shaven chihuahua. But let’s just say you have a laptop…
I’m convinced ‘Reality’ is a guy named Milo with a spray tan and a well-groomed mustache. He gets up at 6am to have a semi-artificial, vitamin D fortified breakfast, then heads off to work to sit at his laminated desk for 10 hours, during which time he rocks out ultra photo-realistic renderings. He may use…
Imagine the possibilities of having all the raw GPU power you can handle. Then imagine a bit less, then just a tad more. That’s where NVIDIA’s Quadro 2000 sits, right in the middle. The Quadro 2000 is NVIDIA’s latest mid-range graphics card pushing memory up to 1GB from the previous Quadro FX 1800 and updates…
It came to my attention this morning that Wacom, the purveyor of drawing tablets for your computer, has issued yet another iPad product under their Bamboo brand: Bamboo Paper. It’s pitched as “a natural and realistic writing and sketching application tool” as a “perfect complement to the Bamboo Stylus for iPad.” After playing with it…
Don’t you wish you could just shake someone vigorously and have a beautiful rendering pop out? I do. I’ve tried it and the results are not beautiful and you’re no closer to a rendering than you were before. However, there are programs that can do for you what your firm grip can not. Bunkspeed Shot…
After my rant about Wacom’s announcement of their aluminum Bamboo Stylus for iPads—and all other capacitive screens—Shapedad’s Ivo Beckers got ahold of me and asked me to try out his Eco Stylus. Turns out, it is actually made of bamboo. I waited until I had a good bit of experience with the new stylus before…
3D? in Photoshop? Wait. Don’t hide your screen from the people around you. It is possible. Not long ago, you had to take a screenshot of your 3D model created in another program, paste it into Photoshop and use your background removal tricks to get a nice clean product shot. Then they added the ability…
Can you believe there’s hardly a minute that passes without someone thinking about pushing a button and eating a bag of corn chips while running a benchmark? It’s true. Even if it only takes two minutes to run the benchmark… two minutes, bag open, bag of corn chips… GONE. I’ve tackled the hardships of doing…
I’ve got a bat. Actually, I have 10 little bats and they’re shaped suspiciously like fingers. Don’t worry, they’re mine and they’re ready to gouge the eye of technology… repeatedly, with lots of details, photos, unnecessary screaming and a skull that looks oddly like meat. Yes, it’s time to take a look at the HP…
This is what it comes down to… After getting kicked out of a parakeet aviary while attempting to unbox an HP EliteBook 8740w in the midst of thousands of birds, there’s only one thing left to do… unbox it on top of a bear. This past weekend I received a VERY loaded HP EliteBook 8740w…
One of my favorite things to do in the morning is bake the plastic off the CPU cores in the ol’ computer and there’s nothing like a little rendering action to make that happen. As I write this, my CPU is maxed out at 100% while KeyShot 2.1 creates some of the renderings you’ll see…
Blow the beet juice out of your mouth. This week SolidWorks 2011 is launched. We could ask the same questions we did last year and we could also bore 1/4-20 screws into our head. We will do neither. What we want to know is one thing, is 2011 better. Is it better than 2010? Does…
You know the comments you keep hearing? No, not the ones about how you look in tight pants. The ones about how good the product you design would look if you only had a good rendering. Once upon a time, a simple rendering seemed impossible. No more. Over the past few years, creating amazing renderings…
Go ahead, open the fridge. What do you see beside the fruit salad? A fresh bottle of SpaceClaim 2010. It’s fizzy and brimming with all sort of new features that make 3D product developers say things like, “refreshing!” and “titillating!” but mostly, “I’m so excited, I’ve torn my eyebrows off my face!” Yesterday, SpaceClaim launched…
Stay calm… it’s a simple hardware review for a simple piece of hardware. A graphics card as a matter of fact. The NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800. A mighty GPU fit for many a CAD system, that five years from now will lie dead in a muddy trench of the IT underbelly. It’s likely you want…
Are you ever ‘dropping a beat’, and it’s just not flowin’? This won’t help. I’d actually love to see a raise of hands though. How many people use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for flow analysis in their designs? My experience with flow analysis and looking at scenarios surrounding flow of any kind has always been…
If you had one thing to change about how you discussed design iterations, what would it be? I can imagine a few ways, starting with destroying useless email conversations and firing that one guy who can’t seem to do anything on his own. Unfortunately, there’s no program to make people more competent, but there is…
Just when you thought everything was calm and it was safe to bring the kids in and show them the wonders of using a 3D mouse to create amazing products and fly around virtual worlds… 3DConnexion slaps a brand, spankin’ new 3D space manipulatin’ device on the table to completely shock your senses. Gather the…
Grab the nearest cardboard box and have a seat, we’re gonna take a look at a chair aimed at making you 17.8% more productive and your dwindling butt muscles more comfortable through those long hours of your busy computer-busting life. Designing and Engineering, browsing and writing tend to take toll on our bipedal bodies. You’ve…
Hey, I see you’re NOT rockin’ a desktop search program to find all your 3D CAD models. Ya know, one that indexes network folders and puts up cool little visuals to show what the models look like? Yeah, you’re probably making a bunch of shortcuts to your files or trying to find stuff through one…
The thick wire mesh guarding us against the experimental research inside the SolidWorks Labs Studio nearly had to be re-enforced when a new program leaked out which allows SolidWorks users to create a quick portfolio-style .PDF of their 3D solid model. Presentation Studio is an Add-in, a free add-in. Open a model, start a layout,…
One of the coolest things about PDF’s lately, is the ability to churn out high-quality documents with a 3D model embedded directly inside. Not an image, but an actual 3-dimensional model you can pan, zoom and rotate all about. Ya getting that tingly feeling? If you do have shivers in your geeky,3d-modeling spine about putting…
Hold on to your 3D lovin’ hats people. Shapeways is about to change how you feel about 3D Printing… and also how you go about doing it. The issue is getting a quality 3D Print of your design fast and cheap. ShapeWays is aiming it’s 3D hearted plastic extruders right at that market and plans…
Oh to have the power over time and SPACE. The folding and bending and rotating. You take that too lightly and you’ve suddenly destroyed three planetary systems and a shrimp boat off the coast of New Jersey. Take that down a few million notches and you have all the harnessed energy of 3D computational manipulation…
Actually, coffee could make me grow arms out my face as long as I was able to have some. I’m sure there’s studies on this, but what there probably isn’t any study on is, “If bloggers get free flavored coffee, will Starshucks stop selling cinnamon scones and greeting people in a overly-friendly fashion?” Joffreys Coffee…
It’s official. Microsoft Office Live Workspace, that was previously invitation only, has launch its public beta for the entire world to feast upon. “An Online extension of Microsoft Office.” This is just one more way to share your documents, but if you company is built on spreadsheets, there are a few things unique to Workspace…
When you look out over the wall surrounding the meat and cheese paradise that is sketch-driven, history-based solid modeling, you’ll notice the rolling hills of free-form 3D modeling. It’s a wonderfully surreal place to escape to every once in a while, especially if you need to work in some unusual 3d formats or create something…
There’s usually a lot of change in a new software release that doesn’t get reported. There’s also most likely an equally sad employee that doesn’t get to bask in the brilliance of that small “mediocre” addition. Well, that’s about to change. Whether you’ve been noticed or not, we know you’re in front of your computer…
Gone are the days of your typical PDF. Adobe is cranking up the possibilities with Acrobat Version 8 3D and they’re on top of the issues to make you look as cool as possible. I wrote previously about Acrobat 8 3D. At that time it was great with small to medium size models, but there…
While many of use would be happy with a No. 2 pencil and a blank sheet of paper, it just wasn’t good enough for Richard Ziade who decided to make it possible, and might I add easy, to do it online. Sketchcast.com eliminates that old pencil case and allows you to create and share sketches…
MCAD, a UK based product development and manufacturing magazine, has put up a 4 page review of SolidWorks 2008 this month. It’s basically a rundown of the most talked about features. If you’ve seen a 2008 demo or have read other reviews it won’t really tell you anything new though. I would just skip to…
DELCAM has a CAD CAM product that allows you to open, view, manipulate, measure and save 39 different CAD formats. It’s called PowerSHAPE-e. The ‘SHAPE’ part is in caps cause they mean business… FREE business. They put out a press release about it today. Just last week, I was looking for something I could use…
Since their launch in March of 2007, SpaceClaim, out of Concord, Mass. has been making some waves with their new solid modeler. I’m even starting to hear more talk about it amongst the casual uninterested CAD users. Their assertions to a “highly flexible design environment” make some wonder if this is a fresh approach to…
I was gonna go through some more new features for SolidWorks 2008, but after the last two post on the interface and sketching I started feeling like a demo jock again doing a What’s New spiel, so I’m gonna dig down to the bone in the following… Top 5 questions for SolidWorks 2008 These were…
Monday we took a look at the interface enhancements for 2008. While there are things that can be improved, like being able to customize menus, I generally see it as an improvement because it gets you closer to your design. This is particularly important when you’re starting it out and that’s what we’re cooking up…
The launch of SolidWorks 2008 is quickly approaching and even though you may just be getting use to some things in 2007, the new version has some features that could bring you to the edge of your seat. If you’ve seen the preview demo, the new interface may be the first thing that stands out,…
Ok, I’m at the end of this series (Part 1 and Part 2) on Acrobat 3D and I’m going to finish it off with how it would work for data exchange of an assembly. I’m going to do what most would probably think of doing first and open up a SolidWorks assembly directly into Acrobat…
There’s nothing more enjoyable that seeing what a piece of software can do… except for maybe not doing it and going out with friends, but since all my friends are behind a computer like me, I’ll try to break me some software. I’m continuing today from yesterdays Adobe Acrobat 3D overview where we took a…