CAD, BIM & 3D

A new (?) CAD application will soon be launched. Really free? 2D-only? Windows-only? I assume the answers would be: yes (but with limitations), yes (with limitations), yes. Check out http://www.acadnow.com . If LT is up to compete against AutoCAD LT ($1200 is not cheap, I believe), than it might be interesting. You can submit your mail address and some info to receive notification mail.

The cross-platform, Open Source Processing environment has just turned into an official 1.0 release. It is available on all platforms, uses Java and is free to use and to adapt. It can be used for teaching and learning programming, with a strong emphasis on interaction and visualization. You still have to write code, but the treshold has diminished to a very low level, which makes it accessible for many more people than, let's say, C++ or C#, certainly when you are interested in graphics, video, animation, 3D, audio, PDF and all kinds of other things. Highly recommended, but remember that you still have to write code and you need to have a basic understanding about mathematics. And if it's good enough for video clips from Radiohead, TV-commercials, several highly respected universities and visual artists, than it might as well work out for you as well. [sorry for the slightly less objective posting...]

http://sketchuptips.blogspot.com/2008/11/plugin-rptreemaker.html This free beta-plugin for SketchUp allows for the creation of 2D trees, based on fractals. The tree is stored as an image in a component. Currently, the polygon outline to generate proper shadows is not created. Available for Windows as a 30 day trial, so it seems...

A free (for non-commercial usage) plugin for SketchUp to assist with the delivery of proper meshes for output to a 3D printer. It has some additional new tools for SketchUp too. Currently available for Windows (SKUP 6+7) and OSX (SKUP 7). http://www.cadspan.com/tools

With this plugin from the Russian LEDAS company, you can add (some) parametric capabilities into SketchUp: modify the dimension and the connected geometry is modified. They will try to add more parametric features into this plugin and also enable it for other software programs. http://drivingdimensions.com Freely available, but only for the Windows version of SketchUp Pro 6.