CAD, BIM & 3D

In the perpetual wheel of change that technology seems to be, I changed the layout of this blog. All blogger-provided stuff, which makes it easy to manage and ensure proper CSS and HTML is created. And I can focus on content. That said, I plan to improve my blog in the near future and publish more and more of my own work and the things we have been doing with students. Just to make it more personalized and not always quoting other peoples material.

Sure, the game is old... It was released in 1998. It was really successful (won about every award imaginable). I bought it about six or seven years later, really cheap. And did manage to install it on my older PC and on my iMac in 2008, running Vista. But then again, I never really got around to play it through. I read about the Steam platform being ported to Mac OSX and also about one of their games given away for free temporarily: Portal. Nice. And it ran on my Macbook Pro. But sure, never really got into it. And then, more than 10 years after the game was launched, Half-Life 2 became available. And in a really nice attempt to please Mac users, I was eligible to freely install it on my Mac, as I bought the PC game. The "official page" is probably http://store.steampowered.com/app/220/ , but there are millions of other pages dedicated to this game. Funny thing, the last time I really liked a game, it must have been Tomb Raider (at least, the first three or four of the series...

This is a nice video presentation, combining computer models on top of regular live action. It's in Danish, but subtitled, so we can even understand what is going on. 8H - The 8-House from BIG on Vimeo . 8-House is located in Ørestad on the edge of Copenhagen. 8-House offers homes for people in all of life’s stages: the young and the old, singles, families that grow and families that become smaller. Instead of dividing the different functions of the building - for both habitation and retail - into separate blocks, the various functions have been spread out horizontally. The apartments are placed at the top while the commercial program unfolds at the base of the building. As a result, the different horizontal layers have achieved a quality of their own: the apartments benefit from the view, sunlight and fresh air, while the commercial merges with life on the street.

As explained on http://geometrygym.blogspot.com/2010/06/ssirhinoifc-progress-industry.html , the "Geometry Gym" created a plugin for Rhinoceros3D to import and partly export IFC models. As hinted in the blog-post, putting Grasshopper in the mix as a generative system for BIM makes it really interesting. But at the same time, I wonder how to manage a structured building model, in a generic modeling software. Currently available as a trial license, which suggests that the software will not be free.

Somebody with way too much time has created a working printer, using LEGO pieces.

Dassault, owners of CATIA and SolidWorks, have launched http://www.draftsight.com , where you can freely download a 2D CAD Package, called Draftsight . The product was licensed from another CAD Vendor, so it is not their own development. It is not based on IntelliCAD as was their former DWGEditor, now called 2DEditor, but not updated anymore. Windows-only and activation is required. From the upFront.eZine NEWS #650: DraftSight has been in private beta for months, and was released as a public beta for Windows yesterday. It will be available for Linux and Mac versions by year's end.

Merkaartor is an openstreetmap mapping program. Merkaartor focuses on providing a visually pleasing but performant editing environment for free geographical data. Open-Source and cross-platform editing software for geographical maps.

If you want to create graphics, audio, music, but do not want to buy different applications or just want to try something (since your main work does not require it) you can try some of the offerings from Aviary . They have several tools (all made with Adobe Flash): Phoenix Image Editor (including layers, selections and FX) Talon Screen Capture (capture image from an URL, also available as browser extensions for FireFox and Chrome) Raven Vector Editor (like a very lite version of Illustrator or Inkshape) Peacock Effects Editor (like the filter browser in Photoshop, but with a node-based UI for chaining FX together) Music Creator (more like a MIDI loop editor, such as Cubase or Live - toggle notes on a sequencer grid) Myna Audio Editor (something like Garageband or ACID or Live - drag and drop audio loops on a timeline with different tracks) Falcon Image Markup (make notes on images, using circles, text and notes) Toucan Color Editor (palette and gradient creation). A nice touch: all of ...

As announced for some time, the Linux (and OSX) versions of Belgian BricsCAD, which positions itself as a cost-effective AutoCAD-alternative, are available. Currently, Ubuntu and Red Hat are targeted, but it is probably correct to assume that other distributions would be potentially compatible. More info on the Bricsys website .

On the Google Code Repository, there is a "su2rad" project , which contains Ruby scripts to export a SketchUp model into a prepared scene for rendering with the Open Source Radiance lighting simulation software. The Ruby scripts are apparently based on another Ruby script (ogre-exporter) and is a full plugin, including HTML-dialogs. I might have to take another attempt at re-installing Radiance on my laptop, as it has been a while since I last tried using it.

The creator of Modelfunction sent me an e-mail about this interesting plugin. Dear Stefan, ModelFunction Plugin by me is a plug-in for Sketchup that allows keep design intent to a template and apply the template to different shapes and sizes very easily and very quickly. ModelFunction is free for personal use. If you find it interested you can read more watch video and download link via http://modelfunction.com/ Best regards, Udi This add-on assists in distributing components over other geometry, such as placing elements on a curve. This seems to turn SketchUp into a more parametric-like modeling system, although maybe not with the depth (nor complexity) of tools such as Grasshopper or Generative Components. Take a look and try it out.