CAD, BIM & 3D

ROBOT Millenium Freeware is a Windows-only structural engineering program, with a direct link to Revit Structure, 2D and 3D Frames (limited to 200 members) and plates and shells (up to 1500 nodes). Registration is required. Edit: it seems that the page is unavailable at the moment. Would the acquisition by Autodesk have something to do with it?

When you register and download the evaluation version of PFTrack (PC/MAC/Linux) it will continue to work as a Personal Learning Editio n (although with all exports disabled). You can save your project and work with the full functionality to learn about matchmoving. The commercial version is not cheap, although there is also a student version available. Register for the trial/PLE version This firm also sells a cheap version called PFHoe which is not free (about EUR 50), but is fast and streamlined and can be used in many cases. As an historic aside, the software was originally developed in an academic project, called Icarus , where it was freely available for quite some time.

When you buy 3D World Magazine, issue#100 , you receive a full license of Carrara 5 Pro (PC/MAC). This is a full version, previously sold for about EUR 500, including modeling, rendering and animation and is allowed for commercial use. You need to create an account at the DAZ3D website to register for a serial number.

MapZone is a free (Windows-only) editor for textures. Unlike regular bitmap-editing software, such as Photoshop, MapZone uses procedural methods to come at its results. Download the software at http://www.mapzoneeditor.com .

On http://crazybump.com you can download a free beta version (Windows only) of CrazyBump, which promises to generate displacement, normal and occlusion maps from photographs.