Interesting evolution: Bricscad independent from IntelliCAD

According to a mailing I received from AECCafe, Belgian CAD developer, Bricsys, announced that their Bricscad software, an alternative to AutoCAD to produce DWG files, has been rewritten to be completely independent of the IntelliCAD source from which they started. They are not a member of the IntelliCAD Technology Consortium anymore.

An important aspect of the Bricscad platform, is the possibility for extensions through the API, and of course, AutoCAD DWG compatibility, through the ODA libraries, but without the price-tag of AutoCAD.

As a result of this transition, future versions of BricsCAD will also be ported to Linux (currently in testing) and OSX (end 2010). But until then, the software only runs on Windows.

Info on http://www10.aeccafe.com/nbc/articles/view_article.php?section=CorpNews&articleid=786652 and of course on the Bricsys website.

Unity Game engine with free basic version

I have tested the Unity Game Engine and it is quite interesting for architectural visualization.

This engine works on Windows and on Mac OSX, can create standalone or web-applications and you can even create WII and iPhone games, but then you need the Pro-version + additional (non-free) modules. I have been playing with the OSX version and it takes some (not that much) learning to get started. Try the help files and the video tutorials on the Unity site and you are ready to go.

The free version, which is very complete, misses realtime shadows, which is quite frustrating. You could try baking in your shadows using Lightmaps, which is possible in must up-to-date DCC programs, such as 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D and even Blender.

The following part is a small example (provided you have installed the Unity player for your browser. The whole scene was modeled in ArchiCAD 12, exported to Cinema4D 11.5, exported into FBX and loaded into a simple Unity Scene. After some attempts I got it working more or less fine.

Digital Toolbox site

New site with resources for digital procedural modeling, focusing on Grasshopper and Generative Components.

http://www.digitaltoolbox.info

Some words on the future of 3ds Max

As discussed on the AREA website, there are plans at Autodesk to redesign and restructure 3ds Max over the course of three "phases" (don't read releases). As these plans were leaked from AU2009, they have now been officially mentioned.

No word on platform-support, which probably means that it stays a Windows-only application.

Free meshmixer for Windows

A nice freeware application, which allows you to mix and match mesh geometry from different models. The video displays it better than I could in a short text.

Maybe the mesh topology (the clean edges and aligned series of edges) will suffer from it, but as a sculptural approach to modeling with library objects, it seems to function really well and smart.



Freely available but Windows-only.

Or to use the description from the owner:

meshmixer is an experimental 3D modeling tool developed by Ryan Schmidt, a computer graphics researcher at the University of Toronto who is also responsible for ShapeShop and some other stuff.

Free beta version of Punch! Shark

If you like to test unreleased applications, you can apply for the free beta-test of "Shark" by Punch! Available for Windows and OSX. Shark is the "professional" CAD application while ViaCAD is a much cheaper "consumer" version. Check both as you might have enough tools at your disposal with ViaCAD. And if you are on OSX, it is good to know, since not too many CAD applications run on this OS.

Apply on the punchcad blog.

Free Unreal Development Kit 3

If you have interest in using a professional game engine freely, at least in a non-commercial context, you can try the Unreal Development Kit. This is the Unreal 3 Engine and the kit is complete with the runtime engine and the editors required to make levels and interaction.

PC-only and ensure you have a decent graphics adapter with support for shaders.

Virtual Passes to Autodesk University free for educational users

If you are a member of the Educational community from Autodesk at http://students.autodesk.com than you can get free access to the (virtual) presentations from Autodesk University in Las Vegas.

By pure chance I already got an entrance pass from the CGArchitect mailing list. Now I feel a bit spoiled. Maybe I can transfer it?

Autodesk Project Cooper : free drawing tool (for now?)

Project Cooper is a new and user-friendly drawing and presentation application, which should appeal to casual users, people with no CAD background and home-users. But nothing prevents you from trying it out as professional architects.

It actually contains enough precision for proper drawing on scale and uses the DWG format for interoperability with CAD software.

As most Autodesk Labs projects, specifications and availability are subject to change and no info is given on later possible commercial pricing. Current release expires on April 30, 2010 and available in US and Canada only.

Windows XP or Vista (32-bit) are required.

More info on http://www.autodesk.com/pr-projectcooper.

Free version of Balancer Polygon reduction

Atangeo Balancer is a tool that puts your 3D polygonal models in balance. With Balancer you can
quickly and easily find your perfect balance between visual appearance and the number of polygons; optimize your models even further for best visualization performance depending on your rendering method.

Limited in amount of polygons in the free version (which actually defeats its purpose, so you might need the full version to do real optimizations).

Check the Atangeo website for details.

Open Source HDRI application

Initially, when I learned about High Dynamic Range Images, I looked at the HDRshop application, which was simple, but at the time more than welcome. I just found out about Qtpfsgui, which is an Open Source application to load bracketed images (with different exposure) and turn them into real HDR images. Cross-platform (Windows, Linux and OSX) and Open Source.

http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net

T-FLEX CAD Free Student Edition

The Russian CAD program T-Flex is a general 3D Parametric Modeling solution, which offers a free (partially limited) student edition. Windows-only.

Check http://www.tflex.com/student

Pixelstruct - Open Source alternative to Microsoft Photosynth

Have you been impressed by Photosynth from Microsoft? Well, the same underlying algorithms have now been used in an Open Source application, which has a similar goal: reconstructing the environment through combining several pictures. Points in the pictures are related and the more pictures you receive, the more complete the display becomes. Each picture is mapped to the same point-cloud-like reconstruction.

http://da.vidr.cc/projects/pixelstruct/

Open Source : Sweet Home 3D

I just read about http://www.sweethome3d.eu through a Sourceforge mailing. Apparently, it is a cross-platform (Windows, OSX and Linux) and Open Source home modeling application, with the possibility of running online. The export to 2D drawings uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is slightly similar to PDF, but in an open XML-based format and the 3D model can be exported into an OBJ file (the old ASCII-format from Alias Wavefront software, before it became Maya).

List of free Vector-drawing programs

If you want to look at alternatives for CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator, this list gives a brief overview of some possible applications to look at. They all handle drawing, layout of (usually) single pages and insertion of bitmap images.

Go to http://www.junauza.com/2009/09/free-vector-graphics-editors.html.

• I have used Inkscape twice, to create posters. Starting from a PDF and once starting from a PowerPoint template saved as a PNG file to use as background. Support of layers, snaps and grids is there and also insertion of images, clipping, Boolean operations and decent font support. While I still believe I am more flexible and productive in CoreDRAW (which I used quite a lot), it gets the job done. On Windows, OSX and Linux, no less. Native format is SVG, but it has decent support for other formats too.
• I don't know Xare Xtreme, but if it used to be commercial, it might have some good productivity laying behind it.
• I tried the 3.0.0 version of OpenOffice.org Draw once and it behaved really bad. Maybe it was the bad OSX port or maybe it was just released too soon, but alignment of text was not properly stored and I had lots of interface complaints. I hope, really hope, that the current version is better. It could not possibly be worse than the version I tried. Anyway, for a 3.x release it was unacceptable.
• Skencil has a nice name, but have not had the chance to try it out.
• sK1 is a "fork" from Skencil, meaning it derives from Skencil but has been growing on its own. They promise support for CorelDRAW files, which might come in handy to port my older drawings to e.g. SVG or PDF.
• Karbon14 belongs to KOffice, so if you run KDE it's probably installed already. I think I launched it a few times, but not much more.
• Don't know Xfig. Interface looks a bit dated, so it could need some getting used to.

Anyway, I still really like CorelDRAW and never got really productive in Illustrator, so if you need some vectorial graphics (e.g. presentation of a design project on a poster), be sure to al least try to see if any of these suits your working style. And let me know if you use any of these in architectural design!