CAD, BIM & 3D

One of the employees of Pixologic, makers of ZBrush sculptural modeling software, has released a personal project of his for free. Sculptris is a small, Windows-only modelling application which you can use for free. Not sure how he sees the future of it, but nothing prevents you from trying it out.

The new release of Unity3D is available now. Unity3D is a full game-creation system which you can combine with (almost) any modeling software. You use it as your main game management system, where you import models and textures (assets), create scripts for all interaction and directly assemble game scenes or levels. It is cross-platform (Windows and OSX) and allows you to make games for Windows, OSX (even if you have the "other" platform only), for a web-browser and with separate licenses for the creation of games for Android, Wii, XBox and iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad), if I'm not mistaken. Some thoughts about Unity3D in general Nice highlights for me: realtime physics prefabs for basic camera navigation easy environment skies directly interact with your game in the Unity editor reasonably straightforward scripting (although I have learned a few things from the Game Development Essentials book as well). We have used it last year in our CAAD classes to learn...

As reported earlier , the Autodesk Education Community provides free licenses for students. However, if you are a school which uses Autodesk software for teaching, you have to buy a classroom license, which is not free, but, considering the amount of software you got, is priced fairly low (about €1.000 for 10 licenses for a suite with most Autodesk software included). So far, nothing special, you would think. Unless you start to mix things. The EULA for the student version only allows (apart from the obvious non-commercial) this for work at home only and not for the classroom sessions . It is primarily meant to ensure classrooms will buy a lab-license on their computers. We had a rather heavy discussion in a meeting with CAD teachers yesterday, where this seemed really problematic. Everybody assumed that they had bought a sufficient amount of licenses, while the educational responsible for Autodesk seemed to suggest we needed to buy additional licenses. Why am I not sur...

The team at 3DTotal.com has worked on a royalty-free Image Library, which you can freely use in your projects. As long as you respect the end user license (e.g. not redistributing the images themselves nor mass-downloading nor blocking the advertisements), you can use them in your creative work. Info at  http://freetextures.3dtotal.com .

DraftSight , on which I already reported, has now been released for OSX as well as Windows. And a Linux version should be coming. This is free 2D CAD, but not Open Source. http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsight/draftsight-overview/ It's based on the ARES Commander software from Graebert, but only 2D. I loaded an old AutoCAD drawing and found the interface not too snappy. And frankly, while AutoCAD r13 or r14 was a good program, it has evolved. As a "copy" of an old AutoCAD 2D CAD program, I wonder why they don't try to do something original themselves. Draftsight reads DWG files, uses them as native format, and allows export of a drawing into SVG, PDF, bitmaps and, wait, STL? What? A 3D format to be exported from a 2D file? What were they thinking? Well, the STL export did not work due to missing components. And exporting the drawing into SVG crashed the application... Damn. Well, the SVG could be loaded into Inkscape, luckily, but then it was slow as hell. And the DX...

From the Design Express Website (the VectorWorks & Cinema4D dealer for Belgium & the Netherlands) we found a nice list of 7 video-tutorials for VectorWorks. They are in German, but were clear to understand. http://www.vectorworks.be/nieuws/vectorworks-tutorials/modelleren-met-vectorworks-zeven-interessante-tutorials/ Panton Chair BIM & Freeform modeling Tower based on Gehry Design Niche from a partial sphere Thiais Bus Center (Paris) Meier's Jubilee church (Rome) Freeform bench

When you go to https://myarchicad.com/ you can register for a free download of ArchiCAD (as a trial, as a student, as a teacher and as a classroom version). The software is the "real" thing, but with banners on the output for the educational versions. Apart from ArchiCAD, you also get access to additional add-ons, such as EcoDesigner, MEP Modeller and many of the popular plugins. You can also register for Artlantis from there and there is a large collection of learning material as well.