If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you know is SolidWorks, everything you design will look like RoboCop. You can do better.
“It must be nice to be your own boss.” As a self-employed person, I hear this a lot. Problems: (1) it’s not true, and (2) if it were true, I would hate it.
I’ve been self-employed for over eight years. For those who’ve never tried, it’s way harder than you think. But it’s worth it. 10am Lunch I can work anywhere. A month in Hawaii? Aloha. Six weeks exploring Greece? Pass the souvlaki. Six months in the UK? So long as there’s Wifi, cue the dancing beefeaters. I…
If you want to fail at self-employment, I know every trick in the book. Lemme ‘splain.
CLO is to soft goods what SolidWorks is to machine parts. Game, consider yourself changed. https://youtu.be/wvS2QZdysDo How we can illustrate this? Hmm. Ah yes… Form-fitting Spandex Activewear. For Dogs. You awake with clammy forehead skin, itchy fingers, and the germ of an idea that will change the world. You roll out of bed, gorilla walk…
Like Creo and Inventor, SolidWorks can now add non-native CAD files to assemblies without translation. I hopped up to Boston for D3DLive last Monday. It rocked. I met up with our old friend Jeremy Regnerus (the man is back!), and he walked me through the new 3D Interconnect feature in SOLIDWORKS 2017. I was impressed.…
MegaBots wants to have a real-life mech battle. Preferably without dying. So far it’s not looking good. When I first heard about the MegaBots Kickstarter project last year, I definitely giggled like a ten year old. Anybody who wants to build big robots and make them fight is okay by me. We wrote about it…
TechShop first popped up in SF circa 2011. Think gym membership, but sub a CNC mill for the Stairmaster. Our own Dan Slaski swears by it. Adam takes a field trip to see what he’s been missing.
My last post was ostensibly about my new SpaceMouse, but within half an hour I had not less than five different people ask about my stylus. What the what? Stylus? For CAD? In short: yes, I use a stylus for CAD. And everything else, actually. I don’t even own a decent mouse anymore.
A few weeks ago I started using a SpaceMouse Wireless. It does not disappoint. It’s every bit as quick, responsive, and sensitive as the other 3DConnexion goodness, but it fits in a case about the size of your average bar room beef slider, and look, ma! No wires!
3D models of humans are incredibly useful for designing wearable products, ergonomic studies, in-situ renders. The best-looking human scans we’ve used are from 3DScanStore by Ten24, and they’re surprisingly affordable. (warning: frank human nudity)
In this video, we’ll build on last week’s hex nut code to add a drop-down list of standard metric nut sizes. We’ll begin with a simple example using simple reusable code snippets, and then use that knowledge in our live code. Don’t know what FeatureScript is? Look here. Onshape FeatureScript: Pump Up the Presets This…
Create your first useful Onshape feature: a hex nut. I walk you step-by-step through building 58 lines of simple, human-readable code, explaining helpful tips and tricks along the way. Onshape FeatureScript: Hex Nut This will be the first in a series of videos using a simple hex nut as the foundation. Through these, we’ll cover…
FeatureScript is easy. Even if you’ve never coded before, Adam gets you up and running with 15 mins of free video goodness.
Adam shows you how to use FeatureScript for Onshape, and possibly also how to be Mr. Handy Pants around the house. But mostly FeatureScript.
Presented by When Onshape added linked documents a few weeks back, I don’t think I even looked out from my box of Cheetos. On second look, it might just be the most important feature of the year thus far.
The Onshape guys think Part Studios set them apart from other multibody CAD systems. I’ve been skeptical. After a few weeks of testing, I have some thoughts.
Presented by “No way” you say. “Cloud services aren’t ready for prime time. They’re not secure/fast/reliable/full-featured enough for my business.” Let me tell you why you’re wrong.
Presented by Collaborating with CAD data sucks. In fact, you told us it’s the third most annoying thing in CAD back in late 2014. Onshape wants you to think they’ve solved it. Have they, really? Let’s think this through.
#AU2015 was space-time-distortingly gigantic, impeccably designed, meticulously planned, and flawlessly executed. And yet, behind the razzmatazz, I’m conflicted.
Ladies and gentlemen – start your engines or as Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap would say “These go to eleven!”. This is Fiat S76, more famously known as The Beast of Turin from 1911 and it easily goes to eleven and beyond. This magnificent car was built during the short Edwardian (or Brass) Era, spanning…
Parasolid-based Mechanical CAD, for free. You read that right. Unfettered use of the entire Onshape system for up to 5GB and five private documents at a time is completely free, and a mere $1200/yr for unlimited documents. That’s right folks, the much ballyhooed Onshape just stepped into the ring swinging, and they are poised to…
Yes, we have a fancy new website and a kick-butt new end-to-end MODO modeling course with over seven hours of ooey-gooey hard-surface SubD goodness. But that’s not all folks, no way no how. From now on, friends, cadjunkie has no memberships and no recurring payments. Download and enjoy anywhere, on any device, forever. What were…
The newly announced SolidWorks Industrial Design product is ostensibly similar to Autodesk’s popular Fusion 360 product. Like, really similar. And at $2280 per annum, the confusing mish-mash of overpriced and overlapping subscriptions in the new SolidWorks offering have us asking hard questions. Here’s why. Before we get into details, our hats are off to the…
I was finally able to get a proper live demo of the new SolidWorks Industrial Design product at SolidWorks World 2015, and while we still lack some really critical information (Uh, price?), a lot of the fuzz is finally coming into focus. We spread some misinformation on The Twitters yesterday, so today we set the…
If data portability is so annoying, what format(s) are we talking about here? We asked what formats people use when sharing data with 1) collaborators, 2) clients, and 3) fabrication shops. The results were generally unsurprising, but lead to some interesting conclusions.
Are 3D CAD companies adding the features that users really want? We asked you, SolidSmackers, to tell us what you find most face-bashingly frustrating about 3D CAD tools today, boy, did you deliver. As it turns out…
Delightful piece over on D3D today. Definitely worth a skim. IMHO digital design is the new craftsmanship, and manufacturing–additive, subtractive, injection, stamped, punched, pressed, rolled, or whatever you like–is the new craft. Am I less an artist because my chisel can cut ten thousand sculptures at a time?
As a self-employed person, the boundaries between business and self are pretty blurry. Josh and I have often been advised to make EvD Media more about “us,” and to leverage our “personal brand” to make it great. While the ultimate substance of the advice isn’t bad, the nomenclature is, well, dehumanizing. EvD Media is indeed…
Definitely a must-read, just don’t tell the SolidSmack content team. (Sorry guys.) “…publishers are looking for ways to have more and more content (feeding the goat) for less money, because more content means more page views, which enables them to squeeze a few more drops of blood from the stone of online ad sales. So…
As the sweat beads drip across my sun-scorched face, my mouse hand quivers and cracks in the cruel dry heat. “This was a bad plan.” I think to myself. “Setting up an outdoor office in the middle of the Mojave looked good on paper, but the reality is rather different.” If only I’d been wearing my bracelet, this never would have happened.
We’re workin’ on something pretty smokin’ for The Smack this week, and in the process we put together a quick tutorial. Check it out on MCADForums. While you’re there, consider posting a question or something so we can make fun of it help out. Have fun kids.
Just finished up The Norm Chronicles after reading a stellar review in The Economist (my typical morning read, if you follow). Which of the following is most dangerous in statistical terms: Skydiving, a typical week of MDMA (ecstasy) use, or running a marathon? (Hint: Pheidippides died doing the first one.) What are the actual odds…
My BFA was useful in landing my first job. Since then, it’s been about as useful as the “most likely to get into an argument” high school superlative. (True story.) By now it’s a truism that the cost of college in the US is unreasonable. Very few would argue otherwise. But most of the debate…
It’s been a busy week. Despite all appearances, Josh and I have not (yet) stepped into an alternate dimension (only to be abducted by Jamie Farr space aliens…). Yes, we still occasionally record the odd something (emphasis on ‘odd’), but mostly we’ve been working on Other Stuff:
Ahhh… the smell of freshly-cut urethane foam in the morning. The Nomad 883 delivers a 25 micrometer (.001″) repeatability on the X and Y (2.5um on the Z), a minuscule 18″ square footprint, and an impressive 8″x8″x3″ build volume… and we want it. We want it bad.
Today I received a friendly email from my local SolidWorks VAR, ending with a gentle nudge: “****THERE IS NO GRACE PERIOD FOR DECEMBER RENEWALS, ANY DECEMBER RENEWAL RECEIVED AFTER DECEMBER 31ST WILL AUTOMATICALLY INCUR A REINSTALLATION FEE – NO EXCEPTIONS.” Ahhh, the sweet taste of extortion in the morning. SolidWorks 2014 is upon us, friends,…
In anticipation of the cadjunkie SolidWorks 101 course official launch next Wednesday, we’re offering three completely free cadjunkie Professional memberships with access to every SolidWorks, Rhino, and modo video we’ve ever made. After that, we’re offering 50% off discounts for the rest of the week.
Here at EvD Media HQ we rarely receive FedEx packages that don’t contain hand-carved egg shells, Unicorn Meat, or that limited edition DVD/Vinyl box set of our favorite 3D printing jingle of all time* (*we wish). But today our freshly-pizza-grease-covered-nubs ripped into a surprisingly different–if a bit strange and decidedly anti-climactic–FedEx shipment: blue M&M’S and……
What’s better than a buttery-smooth webGL-based free 3D content sharing app? Why, a buttery-smooth webGL-based free 3D content sharing app with a retinal-hemorrhage-inducing material editor, of course! Now we know you’re all like “oh, another webGL viewer? I can hardly contain my excitement. [grimace]” We know, we know. Just watch the vid, and you’ll be…
Didn’t we just predict that acquisitions would be all the rage in 2013? Here’s a fun one: Autodesk buys German real-time rendering software Pi-VR, and when combined with the 2011 Numenus acquisition and Carl’s 2011 One Graphics System (OGS) initiative, we have a feeling AD is prepping to melt some faces.
Can we get a “great balls of 3D poly-mesh gravy!” up in here? 3D Systems has announced the acquisition of Geomagic, makers of a range of scanning, design software and haptic devices. This hit us like a ton of voxel-based bricks, and we’re all excited and terrified of what awaits us when the dust settles.…
Autodesk has been on an acquisition rampage this year, and most of us assumed that products like T-Splines and HSMWorks would cease to exist as we know them. Well folks, we just got off the phone with Autodesk HQ, and were we told in no uncertain terms that T-Splines for Rhino and SolidWorks are here…
The Objet 1000 is a seriously killer machine if you want ultra-high res large-scale 3D prints. No doubt about it. So why, Lord of mercy, did they want to associate it with an 80’s action cartoon jingle? Studies show that the Objet 1000 jingle reduces life expectancy to exactly 00:01:51. It is believed that no…
ShapeShot can scan a human face in 1/2000 of a second. The result is a high-resolution water-tight 3D-print-ready mesh file. A favorite S.L. Jackson quote comes to mind: “When you absolutely positively got to [scan] every m*f* in the room, accept no substitutes.” And that’s what makerbot store NYC is planning to do: scan every…
Oleg is right. PLM should—and will—be like more like Google. Not in its color scheme, but in its openness, its neutrality, its acceptance of bits and bytes as data-for-data’s sake.
I really don’t know if ‘awesome’ ever gets any more-gooder than this: National Geographic is casting for a new show, and… lets just say it sounds better than that time Josh chopped down a Ponderosa just to get to the ‘marshmallows’ inside. We’re not gonna lie: we plan to throw our names in this hat,…
To me, PLM always sounded like something that should be plastered across an anvil that Wile E. Coyote drops onto his own head. You could say that Road Runner represents happiness, and the coyote a frustrated humanity: the harder we work for happiness, the more our hackneyed schemes get the better of us. We’ve had…
We have a raging debate here at EvD Media. Harsh words have been spoken. Tears have been shed. And nameless individuals have found themselves sleeping in doghouses and whipping themselves in penitence for “being a meany-head”. The madness must stop, and in order for that to happen, we’re going to have to come to terms…
In the design consulting world, we’re accustomed to words like ‘Strategic innovation’, ‘qualitative and quantitative analysis’, ‘research synthesis’, and ‘concept ideation’. So much so, in fact, that it’s easy to forget just how pompous we sound to the rest of the English speaking world. The next time your significant other says “Honey, we really need…