I think you’d agree. There’s just not enough visual clutter surrounding us as we go about our daily lives. It would be so much better if we were surrounded by an orb of interface efficiency. Fortunately, there are people thinking the very same thing, but not only thinking it… creating it and putting together 3D…
Hands down this has been the biggest giveaway on SolidSmack and you all made it an absolute BLAST. I know you’re all anxious to know who won, or if you won, or didn’t, so I’ll cut tho the chase real fast like. The winner of the the HP EliteBook 8740w Mobile Workstation is…
Sometimes when you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can throw mashed potatoes through a propeller blade. Or, you can throw propellers through a wall of mashed potatoes. Other times, you can sit down for a few minutes and model up a propeller in SolidWorks while eating mashed potatoes. Azim Hamid did just that, although, in his…
The gaff-rigged dory rocked calmly in the quiet waters, but the sound that came from the deep wasn’t familiar. Neither were the tentacles coming over the side. They were after one thing… a cod sandwich, wrapped in lettuce and smelling strongly of these links. Erik Desmazières – His surreal, geometric style print work is not…
I’ve got a bat. Actually, I have 10 little bats and they’re shaped suspiciously like fingers. Don’t worry, they’re mine and they’re ready to gouge the eye of technology… repeatedly, with lots of details, photos, unnecessary screaming and a skull that looks oddly like meat. Yes, it’s time to take a look at the HP…
No, don’t look away. It’s not scary at all. However, the awesomeness may cause the skin to tighten across your face as the excitement in your teeth push you jowls back over your head. If you have teeth. If you don’t, don’t worry, because we can sculpt some in and render them gold faster than…
Well, that’s it. You and the design school that spit you out… suck. Toss that portfolio in the rubbish heap. Gadi Amit, president of NewDealDesign in San Francisco has an article this week over at Fast Co.Design called American Design Schools Are a Mess, and Produce Weak Graduates. Agree or Disagree?
Click-click-click-click. You feel the cold steel against the back of your head. You’ll never forget that sound again… you know, if you survive. Back in the days of frontier life, hard winter nights and cattle drives the very distinct sound of a certain gun loading a bullet into the chamber encapsulated all the risks, restraint…
So, PTC has launched Creo elements with full-blown Creo 1.0 to come out Summer 2011. It’s replacing Pro/E and the smorgasboard of other programs you’ve mastered over the years, so obviously there are bound to be a few questions. Now, I typically don’t put spoons anywhere near my ears… or open fans. That’s just dangerous.…
You’re sitting in a design review meeting. In a conference room. The dull buzz of the fluorescent lights match the mono-tone static of some voice in the room, but who cares, you’ve got a pen. Before you know it, you’ve inked an entire mural across the wall, the whiteboard and your boss’ face. He would…
Actually, these guys would fill two space helmets and then some. You may have been a small child when the Apollo 13 spacecraft launched, you may have been non-existent, or you may have just recently learned of the space mission on a TBS re-run of the film starring Tom Hanks. No matter your age, you’ve…
It happens so often. You go to squeeze some cheese on your cracker, then suddenly you snap from a daze to find the most stylized form of your initials oozing down the wall. Nevermind that everyone around you is staring, you have a talent. If you are the slightest bit interest in cheese spread sculpting,…
Take those gear pegs out of your nostrils and look at this. I think I just found a reason for you to visit the nearest LEGO store, purchase every gear available and spend the next month cogging up your workspace with bits and blocks. You could recreate 2,000 year old mechanism that predict the future.…
He drifted along the rail, not realizing that eventually he would reach the drop-off. There he would find a melon, a melon the size of his head, spitting small seeds and these links at him. Jake Parker – His style is fresh. Illustration, character, and comics with heavy lines, adventure and more fun that you…
Imagine sliding your hand… across a bed of scorpions. Then stop doing that, relax your neck tendons and imagine sliding your hand across the smooth transition of a touch interface that flows from vertical to horizontal. Ahhhhhhh. It’s like buttery rays of light coating your fingertips. Really, take a look. The Media Computing Group, researching…
Hot bags of greased hardware! It’s officially two weeks and two days away from Christmas which means it’s officially time for a bakin’ hot tray of high-end hardware to be thrown into webosphere for ONE lucky person to WIN. You may have seen the unboxing yesterday. Now, we’re giving away HP’s top of the line…
This is what it comes down to… After getting kicked out of a parakeet aviary while attempting to unbox an HP EliteBook 8740w in the midst of thousands of birds, there’s only one thing left to do… unbox it on top of a bear. This past weekend I received a VERY loaded HP EliteBook 8740w…
Well, shove some translated geometry in my eye! Here’s something you may not have known. Dassault (SolidWorks) has developed a CATIA to SolidWorks translator so you can import the hundreds of millions of CATIA files you’ve stored up over the years. It doesn’t ship with SolidWorks. It’s not anywhere in the software. It’s not a…
Our models. They’re dead… dead, pasty monoliths of engineering excellence plagued by the cold touch of a default color scheme. It must end. You must show the world what you’ve got and as the result, risk the chance of winning the ultimate in speed rendering technology, a license of KeyShot 2 Pro. GrabCAD and KeyShot…
The pickles flew by as stood there, poised, ready to take on whatever came next, but little did I know it would be the juice of a thousand more pickles, mixed in the fire of five types of garlic and boiled in these links. Marek Okon – A handful of Marek’s amazing illustrations, some walkthroughs…
When collaborating on a design, there are just so many blood vessels you can pop before you scare your co-workers to jaw-tensing tears. It can be frustrating. Collaboration and discussion about a design should be simple, visual, and not leave you feeling completely defeated… Get ready for this. CADFaster is taking on design collaboration and…
I’d like to say that what you’re about to read might be the most interesting things happening at AU2010, but I won’t… because they ARE the most interesting things happening at AU2010. You may have seen some of the Autodesk projects and programs coming out. They’re exploring the options of product development software and giving…
It’s grueling isn’t it? Every time you turn your Droid on and start nub flickin’ the screen through your favorite apps, there’s that special one always missing. That app which allows you to create abstract art of yourself standing next to a glimmering pond holding 50 pounds of ground meat in one hand and a…
Autodesk University 2010 is off to a design romping start and there’s already been a massive skull buttering of product announcements, tech previews and tid-bits of information coming in from all directions. Autodesk has no qualms about mentioning hybrid modeling approaches, cloud computing or delivering software over the web. Mostly because, well, they’re already doing…
Ahhgg!! the AGONY. It’s like I’ve been wearing the same pair or socks on my eyes for the past few years. The SolidSmack Logo, the fanciful one with three cubulars in the site header, yeah, that thing… is getting kicked to the far reaches of space. We’re coming upon a new year, and what better…
There’s been a rebellion of sorts. SolidWorks, to the mild dismay of the regular PR and ad agency channels, has gone out on their own. Not in any permanent way, mind you. Regular programming will soon return, but in the meantime, SolidWorks is getting back to their roots and dishing out a little emotive attitude…
You could hear the crumble. Cracks wrapped their spreading fingers around the base of it’s entire length, then, suddenly, as if the gates blew off their hinges, these links came spilling forth. Dennis Zilber – Should I say it? I should. One of the best editorial graphic art and character artist ever. Natural Disaster Hot…
It’s baking time. And when I say baking, I mean surface modeling. And when I say surface modeling, I mean Lamborghini Gallardo baby! I know your remember the Audi R8 Surfacing Tutorial. Daniel Lavoie, the guy behind the splines on that bit of magic has been taunting us for months about an upcoming Gallardo Tutorial……
Of all the interesting things you could do with little toy cars, from gluing them on your face to throwing them at cats, this has got to be one of the best ideas yet. It’s a massive kinetic sculpture by Chris Burden designed to run 1,200 Hot Wheels and 13 Toy Trains on 18 lanes…
After you shut down a dangerous cave system to allow a hibernating bat population to thrive, there’s only one thing left to do… scan it with lasers. That’s exactly what 3D Technologies R&D has done to the entire Piusa Cavern in south-eastern Estonia. As a matter of fact, they scanned it, modeled it in modo,…
I know, you may be 5 layers of neon-green acrylic away from overdosing on your custom design addiction. Too bad, it’s about to get 1,000x worse. Ponoko and CloudFab have teamed up to combine the goodness of 2D laser-cut design and the multi-dimensionality of 3D printing to bring you… Personal Factory 4. This is probably…
It was a slow journey into the unknown. There we stopped. The ground fleeders stopped trembling… dead, ear deafening quiet. Suddenly. the color peeled off the sky, raspberry tarts tasted like strawberry light beams, and a wide assortment of prairie dogs got up and threw these links. Pavel Elagin – Can I just make a…
You’re in the city. Your watch stops. Your car breaks down. A flaming tub of pudding lands in front of you. No worries. You have on a 686 tool belt. It’s stylish, it’s debonair and it may just help you fix the car.
If you pour PDF’s on your shredded wheat in the morning, you may know that Acrobat X was officially released Monday, but that sour taste in your mouth… it’s not the milk. That ‘X’ stand for version 10. However, it’s got a little more significance to those who use Acrobat to create 3D PDF’s. Adobe…
It almost never fails. You find a nice secluded beach, a tree deep in the forest, or a pile of shredded newspaper to call your own, when suddenly, giant color blobs of 3D start appearing around you. It would be ok, except for one thing… the person creating the color blobs is YOU. You’re doing…
I’ve been on site earlier this week at the Dassault Systemes Customer Conference (DSCC) where Dassault was serving up ‘life-like’ scoops of web-based CAD and PLM. Part of the “What’s your dream” theme and conference highlights is a soon to be launched software, a collaborative web environment just for you, your team or your entire…
It quickly became evident where it was hiding. Nothing makes a noise like that. Not unless it’s been sprayed with 5 kinds of soup, put into a deep metal dish and sprinkled with these links. Andreas Rocha – Slightly, just slightly epic in scale and composition.Wooded glens, mountainous landscapes and eerie environments. 17 Signs your…
If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with SolidWorks, this is your day. Deelip Menezes was fortunate to have the ear of Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, for a good amount of time and got his thoughts on a wide array of topics, from cloud computing to the future of SolidWorks.
Are you ready? Really, you may want to cancel the cheese squeezing party you’ve been planning and instead plan on squeezing out some extraordinary 3D models. There is but one reason for this. You have till Friday, November 26th to submit your model for the GrabCAD 3D Printing Challenge. It couldn’t be more simple either.…
Here’s where it happens. Where the surly bonds of history-based design slip off into a miry pool of sketch-driven constraints. Ker-plunk. Yes, watch them sink… down, down, down. It pains one who has built models feature-upon-feature to see the control, the order, give its last fleeting breath. As it happens though, Siemens hasn’t quite let…
You know when you stick your hand in a jar of jelly, you’re in for a sticky mess… but you do it anyway. Maybe you do it to entertain the kids, but really, there’s nothing quite like manipulating bits of gelatinous grape paste into odd and inventive shapes. Interactive Fabrications is bringing you the same…
So, last week PTC announced their future Pro/E-CoCreate replacement, Creo. There were two bits of functionality that made me grab my jaw and yank hard. They had subdivision modeling happening within the history-based modeling environment, with the ability to drive it parametrically alongside the other geometry. They also featured an AnyRole app to take on…
Crunch. Crunch. Walking across the icy branches of dark Manitoban forest made the discomfort of the thumping unbearable. That is, until he realized this one thing. The thumping was he and the icy branches were these links. Giuseppe Severino – I love good air ship/space craft art. A few hatches, a few antennas and some…
Glass vases, metal vases, vases made of wood, vases made of bone, vases fashioned out of the screams of the undead… even though you hoard all these types of vases, there’s probably one you don’t have yet. A 3D printed vase created from the generative form of liquid entering an empty vessel. Sounds poetic doesn’t…
Matthew Perez is at it again. You may remember the Camaro tutorial he provided last month. This time he’s going a tad smaller, but blasting just as much sweet surfacing knowledge as before. Matthew’s tutorial is for a JBL Duet Multimedia PC Speaker. He shows, top to bottom, the process of laying out planes, lofting…
Cubicles. Do I need to say anything else or can I just start screaming? They’re the bane of the working world. However, they organize people, their paper and all their stuffed animals rather efficiently. They come in a variety of sizes and configurations ensuring you’ll always be separated from your co-workers just enough to make…
People are cruel. They sit around all day creating this and that, saving it here, copying it there and finally emailing it to everyone… multiple times. I’m one of those people. We pretty much all are… except that guy in the corner with the typing speed of a dead squirrel. We create, we store, we…
This seals it. There’s just no end to the ability you’re being given to create stunning 3D renderings that suck the eyes clean out your sockets. But you know what? Getting the lighting just right can still be a tedious task. HDR Light Studio changed that with previous version of their HDR creation program. Today…