CAD, BIM & 3D

At http://www.suplugins.com/index.php you can find information and an evaluation version of a rendering plugin for SketchUp. It's not free and for Windows only (at the moment), but has very little setup, so it might just be what you want.

At http://www.gvsig.gva.es you can find more info (also in English, if you click the right flag). gvSIG is a tool oriented to manage geographic information. It is characterized by a user-friendly interface, with a quick access to the most usual raster and vector formats. In the same view it includes local as well as remote data through a WMS or WFS source. Available as both binaries and source-code, for Windows, Linux and OSX.

The commercial company Altiris has a user community at http://juice.altiris.com/ where you can find info on the application of a layer of virtualisation between applications and the Operating System. This allows you to install an application in a separate layer, allowing you to activate, deactivate and even reset the layer. This is very useful for trying out several applications, demo versions, incompatible applications and mainly anything you want to be able to deinstall without leaving any trace in your system. I can recommend this software when experimenting with several of the applications mentioned in this blog. In fact, there is a user community offering (legal) full applications prepared as a virtualised package, allowing you to install-deinstall them at any time. Visit http://www.svsdownloads.com . Windows only... although Mac users suffer less from these problems

The free version of the Russion KOMPAS-3D MCAD software can be found at http://www.ascon.ru/english/download.php . Assembly modeling is not possible with this version and commercial use is not allowed.

On http://www.solidedge.com/free2d you can download a free 2D version of Solid Edge. This is not based on IntelliCAD and inherits some of the additional "intelligence" of the Solid Edge 3D MCAD software. Support is not free and the company probably assumes it can lead users to evaluate and grow up to Solid Edge 3D. Only for Windows XP and you need to use Internet Explorer to download it. (read in upFront.eZine NEWS #486)

At http://www.plasticbugs.com you can download the GIMPshop, which is a modified version of the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GIMPshop version is meant to be more familiar to Photoshop users and is available, free and with sources, for all major platforms: Windows, MacOSX, Linux and even Solaris. If you don't have the budget for Photoshop or even the smaller, but very usable Photoshop Elements, you can try to see if this program fits your needs.

At http://sfx.realviz.com/Autodesk you can download a free tracking plugin for 3ds max or Maya. MMTrack by RealVIZ is temporarily available (untill august 1, 2007) and allows tracking of video footage directly inside the 3d animation software.