CAD, BIM & 3D

RhinoBIM is a Ning community focusing on extending Rhino with BIM features: http://www.rhinobim.com/ Currently, they have a structural-oriented extension available as "Work-In-Progress" for registered members of the community. RhinoBIM is a suite of a number of planned plug-ins to enhance Rhino 5.0 for the Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industries. Developed by Virtual Build Technologies LLC, the first module now available is called RhinoBIM Structure, for 3D structure modeling, Clash & Clear analysis and structural analysis. [...] The first tool of the RhinoBIM suite of products has been released as a Work-In-progress (WIP). You must be signed up as a member of RhinoBIM in order to download the WIP and give it a test drive.

While not entirely related to CAD & 3D, this is still hilarious... Enjoy.

In CAD software, different approaches to modeling are used. Most successful MCAD systems follow the feature-based approach, e.g. CATIA, Pro/Engineer, Inventor, SolidWorks, SolidEdge. In these systems, you define the complete modeling (design) history of a model or assembly of parts, by starting from a basic sketch (often 2D), which is constrained and made parametric and which is used for 3D model generation (extrusions, sweeps etc...). Further manipulations include blending, fusing and making holes. To change anything to the final product requires making changes in the history, but as long as the whole chain of events is maintained, it can be easily controlled with a chosen set of parameters. From a CAD/modeling point-of-view, explicit modeling is an interesting approach. After the strong rise of the fully-parametric history-based modeling with features, people started to understand some of the limitations: to make minor adjustments, you have to dive into the modeling history tree, ...

PTC, one of the larger CAD developers worldwide, announced a new version of their entry-level CoCreate Modeling software, as a personal edition. Info on: http://www.ptc.com/products/cocreate/modeling-personal-edition-3-0/ This is a free, Windows-only, version of their commercial modeling tool. There are some limitations ( as explained in a PDF document ): You can model and create assemblies, but the maximum amount of parts is limited to 60. This practically limits its use in a commercial, real-world scenario, but does not prevent learning. Some more complex "explicit" modeling features are missing, such as "features on-the-fly", complex blends, direct editing with section planes. No sheet metal parts module included

Rhino.io is a new plug-in, combining Rhinoceros3D and Cinema4D is released. It allows you to transfer models from Rhino to Cinema4D and also update model changes into the Cinema4D scene, even with textures and materials and other visualization techniques applied. As an improvement of the workflow, this is quite powerful. You can use the NURBS modeling from Rhino and retain the adaptibility of the model. I imagine that it would also allow the Grasshopper generated geometry to be properly rendered, while still staying adjustable. From the "feature list": One important aspect, is the update feature: if you have already imported the 3dm file once, and if you change something in Rhino. you can update the file in CINEMA 4D, without the need to load the file new. simply use the merge command, and rhino.io will automatically detect the updated parts and only import them.all materials that have been applied, and no work or changes that have already be done in CINEMA 4D will be lost. I...