CAD, BIM & 3D

Read on http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2007/12/make-your-own-custom-styles-with-style.html : The SketchUp Style Builder is currently in Beta for SketchUp 6 Pro (Win+Mac). It can be found at http://www.sketchup.com/index.php?title=2090 and is free (for now?). It adds a new application alongside SketchUp to thoroughly improve the styles possibilities from SketchUp, which were already impressive.

OZBreed provides australian plants and provides a sample of their offerings as a freely downloadable set of files for ArchiCAD, SketchUp, Photoshop or in plain TIFF, TGA and JPEG formats. High resolution and usable in any application, but the plants might not be relevant for where you live... http://www.ozbreed.com.au/3DGraphics.html

Not strictly CAD or 3D, but this page gives an overview of someone who installed several different Operating Systems on his laptop (a Mac Powerbook). http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/vpc . When you have a more recent computer, there is much better support for multiple systems, especially when your processor supports "virtualization". You can use VMWare (or fusion for IntelMacs), Virtual PC (Windows only), Parallels (PC's and IntelMacs) and some Open Source solutions (qemu, PearPC etc). I wouldn't advice using this for intensive 3D applications, but for many more common tasks it is usable. In the case of CAD software (e.g. running AutoCAD or Revit or 3ds max on a Mac, you are best to use Bootcamp from Apple to boot into Windows, to take full advantage of Hardware Acceleration of the graphics). Graphics Acceleration is still the bottleneck in many emulations or virtualization applications.

A series of tutorials on the use of Blender for Architectural Design (mostly for Visualization) Architectural Design Parametric Objects Urban Design

The official Blender page has a section on video tutorials available on http://www.blender.org/education-help/video-tutorials . Additionally, on the 3D Buzz forum, someone has compiled a full list of video tutorials on the free and Open Source Blender 3D Animation software. http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=90825