CAD, BIM & 3D

If you have interest in using a professional game engine freely, at least in a non-commercial context, you can try the Unreal Development Kit . This is the Unreal 3 Engine and the kit is complete with the runtime engine and the editors required to make levels and interaction. PC-only and ensure you have a decent graphics adapter with support for shaders.

If you are a member of the Educational community from Autodesk at http://students.autodesk.com than you can get free access to the (virtual) presentations from Autodesk University in Las Vegas. By pure chance I already got an entrance pass from the CGArchitect mailing list. Now I feel a bit spoiled. Maybe I can transfer it?

Project Cooper is a new and user-friendly drawing and presentation application, which should appeal to casual users, people with no CAD background and home-users. But nothing prevents you from trying it out as professional architects. It actually contains enough precision for proper drawing on scale and uses the DWG format for interoperability with CAD software. As most Autodesk Labs projects, specifications and availability are subject to change and no info is given on later possible commercial pricing. Current release expires on April 30, 2010 and available in US and Canada only. Windows XP or Vista (32-bit) are required. More info on http://www.autodesk.com/pr-projectcooper .

Atangeo Balancer is a tool that puts your 3D polygonal models in balance. With Balancer you can quickly and easily find your perfect balance between visual appearance and the number of polygons; optimize your models even further for best visualization performance depending on your rendering method. Limited in amount of polygons in the free version (which actually defeats its purpose, so you might need the full version to do real optimizations). Check the Atangeo website for details.

Initially, when I learned about High Dynamic Range Images, I looked at the HDRshop application, which was simple, but at the time more than welcome. I just found out about Qtpfsgui, which is an Open Source application to load bracketed images (with different exposure) and turn them into real HDR images. Cross-platform (Windows, Linux and OSX) and Open Source. http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net

The Russian CAD program T-Flex is a general 3D Parametric Modeling solution, which offers a free (partially limited) student edition. Windows-only. Check http://www.tflex.com/student

Have you been impressed by Photosynth from Microsoft ? Well, the same underlying algorithms have now been used in an Open Source application, which has a similar goal: reconstructing the environment through combining several pictures. Points in the pictures are related and the more pictures you receive, the more complete the display becomes. Each picture is mapped to the same point-cloud-like reconstruction. http://da.vidr.cc/projects/pixelstruct/