CAD, BIM & 3D

Scultpris is a free, cross-platform (Win+OSX) 3D modeling and texturing software, from Pixologic, famous for their ZBrush sculpturing top software. It allows you to work with e.g. Wacom tablets and can handle both 3D meshes and the texturing, although you can combine this with Photoshop and other 3D software. After some minutes dabbling with a small Wacom tablet Info on  http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/  (current version is Alpha 6, indicating it is not fully finished) Real example from Sculptris website (artist: Barry Croucher) While the ZBrush software is seen as the logical "next" step, when you outgrow Sculptris, it is already quite complete: dynamic tesselation (refinement of the mesh when sculpting) to support details in the regions which require it, without having to overwhelm the rest of the model with more smooth, flat surfaces. painterly-like interface , dark color scheme, icons, lots of rounded edges. If you use this only occasionally, this might be...

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.

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 ...

Alchemy is an Open Source, cross-platform drawing and sketching software. It is not CorelDRAW or Illustrator, but it is also not Photoshop. However, it has a nice mixture of vectors and bitmaps, a minimalistic interface, some effects which makes it worthwhile to sketch on a computer instead of scanning hand-drawn sketches. All in all, it is really worth the try. There are effects such as mirror, distort, pull, generate shapes etc.. Also strange: no undo, no real editing. You just keep on sketching and overpainting. End results can be saved, obviously. Give it a try.

This time, no software or CAD. But just thinking for a moment. What is Architecture? Architecture from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo . This is a short film by MAYA Design about architecture in its broadest sense. This film is a companion piece to our film about information. For more information visit: http://www.maya.com/the-feed/what-is-information-architecture

While not yet complete, the " sK1 Project " aims at developing a professional DTP illustration software, for the prepress market. And the ambitions are good: Open Source, Cross-platform (Linux, Win32, OSX) and (very important) compatible with several industry formats, such as Adobe Illustrator (and various PS forms: PS, EPS, AI, PDF) and CorelDRAW . The CDR-reading capabilities ticked my interest, as I was a CorelDRAW user (bought r7 and also used r9 at university) before I switched to OSX. While I currently have an educational license for Illustrator CS4, I'm still more fluent and productive in CorelDRAW. I tried Inkscape recently and created a poster for the MACE project with it and a poster for a conference. But when I had to reinstall it (due to Snow Leopard compatibility), I notice CorelDRAW and Illustrator file support, much to my surprise. But the software asked for the Uniconvertor library , which is created in the sK1 project as a by-product for CorelDRAW and I...

As read on the Digital Urban blog : Gephi is an Open Source tool to visualize graphs (networks with relations between objects). As the focus is on the visualization, this will probably appeal to designers and researchers. It is still in alpha/beta, but you can download it and play with it on all major platforms.

The new upcoming release of the Adobe CS5 Suite is getting a lot of attention these days. One of the directly appealing features in the Photoshop must be the context-aware fill and eraser . This tool will remove a selection of paint over with samples from the region around it. However, when compared to the existing Spot healing brush, this new version is a lot smarter, as it uses several samples which are merged. However, it seems that you can get a long way using a GIMP " resynthesizer "-plugin as well. For completeness, the following article displays both the (nice) Adobe video demonstration and a recreation of the same procedures using GIMP. Photo-editing is getting better and better. http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2010/03/free-photoshop-cs5-content-aware-fill-with-the-gimp/ Painting out complex items while respecting the rest of the image was never that easy and it will not be perfect with this system either, but it will get you most of the way into perfection. Now yo...

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

If you want to look at alternatives for CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator, this list gives a brief overview of some possible applications to look at. They all handle drawing, layout of (usually) single pages and insertion of bitmap images. Go to http://www.junauza.com/2009/09/free-vector-graphics-editors.html . I have used Inkscape twice, to create posters. Starting from a PDF and once starting from a PowerPoint template saved as a PNG file to use as background. Support of layers, snaps and grids is there and also insertion of images, clipping, Boolean operations and decent font support. While I still believe I am more flexible and productive in CoreDRAW (which I used quite a lot), it gets the job done. On Windows, OSX and Linux, no less. Native format is SVG, but it has decent support for other formats too. I don't know Xare Xtreme , but if it used to be commercial, it might have some good productivity laying behind it. I tried the 3.0.0 version of OpenOffice.org Draw once and it b...

The researchers from Microsoft created this free gem, called Microsoft ICE, which is to be found at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/ . You can use it to merge your snapshots into stunning panoramic images (or other projections). Windows-only, obviously.

As read on tenlinks , Quadrispace has made the Personal Edition of Document3D available. While not as complete as the full package, it might be worth to investigate. Go to Quadrispace Downloads to obtain the software (Windows-only). There are different versions of the software: Pages3D for website documents, 3D PDF, CD-ROMs and executables. Publisher3D has vectorial illustrations and animations Document3D combines all features of the two packages

Hugin is an Open Source, Cross-Platform application to create seamless panoramic images by stitching. A free and open alternative to RealVIZ Stitcher (now bought by Autodesk). Go to http://hugin.sourceforge.net and download the precompiled application (OSX, Linux, Windows) or the sources if you know what you are doing. Added: You can also use if for the correction of perspective, removal of distortion. It can call some external tools for automatic stitching (autopano) and automatic blending (enblend).

A nice gesture: you can freely download a full book on Photoshop for Web Designers in PDF format. http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/f948f3 . You have to be willing to provide your e-mail address. The offer expires in about a month from now.

The Pencil application is an Open Source vectorial drawing application, with animation support. It uses the Qt toolkit making it compatible with Windows, OSX and Linux. You can also create bitmap images and the support for "onion skinning" allows you to see previous (and next) frames when creating animations. As always with this kind of applications, having a Tablet/Pen/Stylus and artistic feeling will improve your results.

Photoshop Express is a new variation on Photoshop, for 'any' user, without cost. Sing up at http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopexpress and see what happens. We have been using Photoshop Elements in our classroom, instead of the full version, since it does enough for our students and the educational price was reasonable (which is not true for the full version).

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.

MapZone is a free (Windows-only) editor for textures. Unlike regular bitmap-editing software, such as Photoshop, MapZone uses procedural methods to come at its results. Download the software at http://www.mapzoneeditor.com .

While Impression (aka Vespa) has been available for quite some time on the Autodesk Labs, it was timebombed. After all, it is a commercial application ($495). Since it has not been released worldwide, it is currently still available as a technology preview. The version on the Autodesk Labs expired on may 1st, but you can receive a sustained version from local sites. The overview is given on http://impression.autodesk.com/blogs/blog/5/blogpost/3089 where you can find the correct place to download Impression Preview. Be sure to check the system requirements, as you will need a fairly heavy graphics adapter and up to date system. Windows only, as usual.

As mentioned on http://www.righthemisphere.com/forum/announcement.php?forumid=50 , the old 2D version of Deep Paint has been discontinued. However, it was turned into a freeware application, which is a kind gesture. You can use it for painting, using a mouse or (even better) a Wacom Tablet. It has support for layers, has a direct link with Photoshop (but not the latest versions) and has some tools to introduce a bump-map effect (for which you can alter the lighting afterwards). Give it a try. It can be found on http://www.download.com/Deep-Paint/3000-2191_4-10398243.html . [Autodesk should have done this with the old LightScape]