Yeah, so here’s the thing. When your kid ask why you have a superhero’s head with knives stuck in it sitting on your countertop, you can say, “Did I ever show you how to make Chimichangas?” But why do… “CHIMICHANGAS!!” It’ll all make sense. And how do you get a superhero’s head on your countertop.…
The muscles tightened before we could even jump. It was high, but shorter than the last fall. It’s the last 20 feet that gets you. Hitting the thrust reversers at just the right moment, so you don’t finish the descent with a splintered femur, or disturb the beast by charring the landing pad, that is…
In March, Tech Soft 3D finally released Tetra4D Enrich. For those who are working 80 hour weeks and not awares, Enrich is how you crush it with 3D PDFs. It’s a tool to make interactive tech documents quickly, from inside Acrobat.
My parents often joke that there were five things I was holding in my hand at birth. I have no idea why it was only five, or what they all were, but one of them was a crane cabin joystick. That’s right, a joystick you would see in a flippin’ tower crane.
Flipping along the line, high above the glassy churn, the wisps hit the wind before finding their way onto our arms. Being this high was never a problem. It’s when we neared the surface that the fear sunk in. They looked like glass, cut like glass, but their sound was much more like these links.…
Presented by Here we are. Part 4 of this epic exploration of Fusion 360. If you remember our first post, we are working our way through five aspects of Fusion 360 that, which Autodesk suggests, makes it more than CAD. To recap in a sentence, it all revolves around the idea of Fusion 360 as…
Well, this snuck right past us. In mid-March, a Monday no less, IntegrityWare/nPower Software published a press release announcing the release of something new. You might be familiar with their ‘Power Surfacing for SolidWorks’ or ‘Power SubD-NURBS for modo’ plugins. Well, this announcement wasn’t about a new plugin, or an updated plugin. It was about…
We all know you can’t first become a Jedi Master until you get all whiny about droid maintenance and zapped in the ass a few thousand times by a remote training droid. And yeah, we all know good ol’ uncle Ben gets his chuckles from seeing young Padawans zapped repeatedly by a floating, laser-shooting orb…
In total, there were enough to overtake us blindfolded with all of their whip-arms tied behind their backs. But we had a tub of things they would never suspect. A toothbrush used by Neil, A hollow can enchanted with cat tears by a welder named Larry, two tufts of hair pulled from the back of…
It’s not often I can say a laptop serves well as a shield, serving tray, pillow, media center and power serving CAD/Render workstation, but that’s exactly what this HP ZBook 15 G3 Mobile Workstation has done over the past few months I’ve used it, with emphasis on the last item, of course. I had thought…
Presented by It’s time to talk about everyone’s favorite topic. Mating. (You two in the back stop snickering.) We’re in part three of our under-the-covers *snicker* peek at Fusion 360 and this time, we look at Assemblies. Over the years we’ve passed along tips and tricks, best practices, and overall bad-assery when it comes to…
You know what that mop of yours is missing? Nope, not a 3D printed hat. A 3D printed LOW POLY hat, sucka! No funky floral patterns or flare on this icon of 3D printed fashion. It’s pure, triagular, ear chafing discomfort, ready for a night out on the town.
They flared. We stepped back. Who know what those things could have done. There were stories of them taking the skin right off you, clothes still on. What seemed so strange is what they were lined with. Yes, it was strange. And true. The nostrils were lined with these links. Wojtek Fus – Wow environments.…
If there’s one threat I’ve always given when being kicked repeatedly in the lung sacks, it’s “If you kick me one more time! I will open my steampunk spectacle! After which you will incur the wrath of 5000 hungry steampunk ladybugs! That willst shoot from my steampunk face orb! Engulf your body! And commence dismantling…
“Tim! Shut the door!” Brin always made the crew nervous before a launch. She was on edge most the time, but always after a particularly messy run in with Lorackian pod hoppers from the outer reaches. This time, we would all be strapped in, ready to fire the blast rockets, when the attack came. We…
Every once in a while, I get out from behind the computers here at SolidSmack. When I do, I run for the hills with nothing but a tent and sleeping bag… and a van of food, water, emergency supplies, chairs, pop-up tents, bikes, Frisbees, electrical cords, a luggable loo and a healthy supply of toilet…
Presented by Two weeks ago we did the unthinkable. We taped back our eyelids, slapped on some CAD spandex (that exists right?) and launched a series of articles on Fusion 360. It’s finally time we took a deeper dive into the toolset and explore: Part Modeling, Assembly Modeling, Simulation, CAM, and Collaboration. This week, we’re…
It rose, within a wave, and the shrieks were muffled but a second before the water shed from the five orifices, gasping the air and wrenching the deepest guttural sounds ever heard. We readied our blades, we steadied our base and triggered the liquid that would slay the beast with the oil of these links.…
You know, Mother’s Day is coming up, and there’s one thing yo’ mamma (or future mamma) really, really wants… You’re not going to guess are you? … No? Ok, it’s a 3D printed self-watering planter. Don’t act like you knew that.
When we first looked at the upcoming SolidWorks Apps for Kids, we had only a quick glimpse of what SolidWorks intends to shape our children’s minds with. But we just had to know more. Fortunately Chin-Loo Lama, Senior UX Design Engineer at SOLIDWORKS, has been all too kind to answer a few more questions we…
I can’t even recall the first time I thought about using SolidWorks on a tablet. It was years ago, but let’s go back even further. I started using CAD software with AutoCAD and a digitizer. A digitizer, if you’re wrinkled enough to remember, is a bit like a touchscreen, off the screen. Similar to a…
Blasts of fur sent bits and stings rippling across our bony structure. They were no match for us. However, we didn’t expect what they had, lain and buried beneath the loose soil we tread upon unknowingly. The burn was intense, like biscuits soaked in the gravy of these links. Teun van der Zalm – Nebulas.…
There’s one thing I’ve been looking forward to since SolidWorks World. And now that I have that shower out of the way, I’d like to reveal what Lenovo shoveled me off from the event to the dark corner of a hotel restaurant to show me secretly whilst enjoyed an assemblage of assorted meats and cheeses.…
Presented by You have to hand it to Autodesk, they wiggle their marketing nose and out pops some brand spankin’ new content. I caught their latest What is Fusion 360? video, where they show Fusion 360 doing collaboration, freeform modeling, animation, rendering, simulation, CAD and CAM, claiming, “it’s not any one of those things –…
Ever since I was a kid, blowing Play-Doh through letter shaped cookie cutters, I’ve had an interest in typefaces. I like to think I’m the one who confronted my second-grade teacher about the font choice and kerning on that awful “Mister Seahorse’ bulletin board. I imagine Loren Kulesus, a Brooklyn-based designer, has had a similar…
Tendrils stretch between the slender thicket, lining the path, worn through over the centuries. The smell was like oranges, but slightly rancid. That when we saw it sitting there. Large, half-blind of years without light, thumbing an Outdoor Living magazine, and gnawing on these links. Antonis Karidis – Incredible set of aircraft–real, conceptual and spacebound–with…
Presented by Once upon a time we shoved pounds of paper into binders and carted them off to the conference rooms for design reviews, sifting through them under bad lighting and a hazy caffeine buzz from coffee that was clearly past the expiration date.
I have no earthly idea how we walked down dark halways prior to having smartphones. Anyone remember? Surely it was too dark to even venture out or, my goodness, GO DOWN STAIRS?! Smartphones have changed things. Soon, we may be asking, “How did we 3D print things before smartphones?!” If the OLO 3D printer is…
When we pulled them from our pockets, sopping wet, ready to be hurled through the blades, we didn’t realize how many we needed. Then it happened. In one fell swoop, hundreds landed around us carrying thousands more milk balls, contained solely by the mesh-like energy of these links. Wadim Kashin – Absolutely delicious impressionist style…
You’ve heard the joke. An engineer walks into a bar, unboxes a Chromebook and says, “I bet you, I can load Onshape on this here Chromebook in 10 seconds flat.” The bartender say, “No flippin’ way! You’re high on the crack cocaine! You can have the finest whiskey in this fine establishment if you can.”…
Autodesk just revealed their plans to jump from desktop 3D printer/platform development to taking on high-production industrial machining. And it goes way beyond hardware. A few years ago, we wouldn’t imagine Autodesk even getting into hardware. We joked about them producing their own 3D printer, then they did. But one little ol’ 3D printer, with…
It’s no use. You can’t convince me there’s anything more practical to have on your desktop than a 3D printed SkullBot. Somehow, this bot finagled a human skull to use as it’s body. That makes for one creepy ass blade-wielding machine… or a practical use of spare skulls laying about. Don’t worry, this is just…
Presented by We’ve given you a quick overview of Onshape, but wow, there is so much more. More than I thought actually. It’s hard to keep up when they’re releasing new features every three weeks. But that right there, that is just one thing that makes Onshape such a powerful 3D modeling platform.
I know, the last time you thought ‘fully-animated 2 cylinder 4 stroke engine’ is right before you had one tattooed across your entire back. This one, however, is one you can admire without having to re-break a fused spinal column and has 100% less back hair.
Last time we looked at Opendesk, they were nestled amongst freshly cut timbers and the warm glow of computer screens, a new site with a few pieces of furniture you could download and make or have made locally. Since then, well, let’s just say they’ve grown. The founders of FabHub have constructed a site that include…
We jumped two by two into each puddle. It could have gone on all day, poppin’ and hoppin’ like those small, mechanical bugs we would squish on the walls, just to see them spark and explode. Those bugs. Yes, the same we use to ride in the summers. But the memory of what happened between…
In 1995, I got my hands on some crazy future tech, an IBM ThinkPad Pen Computer. The first wave of pen tablets had arrived. As it goes however, when a college student needs money for a new drum kit, they sell cool things to pilots who pay a lot for that kind of stuff. I did…
Business cards?! Who uses those anymore? Well, just about everyone. After someone has emailed and connected with you on Linkedin, it’s still fashionable and polite to hand them a slip of paper with your name and status on it, before they chunk it in the can. And though most of your business cards are in…
Fours years ago, I remember hitting New York, plastering SolidSmack stickers around town with our Managing Editor Simon Martin, for the very first Inside 3D Printing event in New York. It was small, but larger than expected, with tracks that not only covered the tech, but also the business side of 3D printing.
The cheese was curdled and it took all you could just to throw it far enough. After all, think of what would happen if you didn’t. Now was the time of thieve-meal, when anything was free to be taken no matter the cost, when the air was unbreathable and moss grew on all sides of…
From Nintendo’s Virtual Boy in the distant past to the Oculus Rift now, VR has been sputtering into our future. This year however, is truly the year for VR (if there ever was one) with even more companies getting in on the advancements being made in replacing or augmenting our reality.
Have you ever surrounded yourself in wood building blocks, then jumped out and scared the cleaning lady? No? It’s good fun. The only thing that would make it better is these. This is the Blockitecture Garden City building set. They smell of pine wood and are the brainchild of James Paulius, an artist who believes that…
A rabbit with a stinger? Never had such a creature shown itself, but when the bolts fell, nothing but embers, a faint crackling and its growl filled the room. We thought using them as shields would save us, their backskin thick as an ox hoof, but it seemed that nothing could stop its claws soaked…
Who doesn’t love a kinetic sculpture? If I was an inanimate object, my one dream you ask? To be made into a kinetic sculpture of some sort. Preferably one that is cool, mesmerizing and makes people question their sanity. One like this simple, and quite beautiful, kinetic sculpture modeled by GrabCAD user trinityscsp.
They’ve built desert racers, motorcycles, drift trikes, cruisers and the world’s first 3D printed car, but one thing on their collaborative, open-source product development list of vehicle innovation isn’t a vehicle at all. It seems their sight are set toward the sky. The company just revealed that newly formed Airbus Ventures has made a ‘significant…
The tall man flitted about, skipping across the cracks and dancing merrily, whistling, humming, strumming his broom. Perhaps there were a few times we wished he would stop, but the glare he gave warned us of a consequence that would deliver the full force of his song, sung violently from the bowels of these links.…
When I was a kid, our “modeling app” was a pile of mud and a stick. Two sticks if we were lucky. Nowadays kids have more apps than they can shake two sticks at, but creative apps for kids have been limited to stacking cubes, coloring puppies and decorating cupcakes. SolidWorks is changing that with…
Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel never fails to entertain. (Check out our interview with him.) He can make a slingshot from anything. His latest video proves that, with the complete process of how he weaponized his beard.
Locked in the moss-clad, iron-sided shed the sound reverberated with each drop. It fell from the sky, shifting the color, filling any exposed crevice, leaking in through the cracks where the light changed from orange to white and back. Thicker and thicker they grew, watery meat sniggles, hatched by these links. Ai Shah – It…
This weekend, Super Bowl 50 takes place. Panthers vs. Broncos. Newton vs. Manning. One will walk away with the coveted Super Bowl World Champions Ring. Jewelry designer Diego Taccioli, from Slice Lab, and former artist-in-residence out at Autodesk’s Pier 9, imagined what the ultimate Super Bowl Championship Ring would look like.