A large moon rose over the hill. On the edge of the firelight, wood shavings fell against the ground. Carving the face of a laughing horse was one thing; the one thing that could only be done with a blade sharpened by these links. Adam Kuczek – No, I can’t get enough sci-fi production paintings,…
I’ve got a soft, gooey spot for vintage designer chairs. Mostly, just for looking at them though, thinking, “That looks like a chair I could sit in with a pipe, a tumbler of scotch and an expensive looking mustache.” The Eames chair is exactly one of those types of chairs. It’s manufactured at the Herman…
SpaceClaim is spreading its mechanical design tentacles across a wider range of end-users today. With the 10th release of the amiable CAD beast, those tentacles become electrified grapplers sending shocks of manufacturing and mesh-pulling joy into the users. SpaceClaim 2012+ brings new connections to CAM software, mesh and solid comparison and a pattern shifting feature…
At this point, I’m pretty sure an infographic could be made about the rise and fall of 3D printing infographics. Nevertheless, here’s an oddly informative and very gray infographic on 3D Printing that has no mention of large-scale 3D printing or bacon. Haven’t we seen enough of these? Yes, yes we have. However, there’s one…
Bacon. Impossible to eat while working on a touchscreen. It’s an awful, AWFUL problem that needs to be dealt with. Ya know, we’ve toyed with the idea of touchscreen interfaces for interaction with CAD data, but it’s always been a bit of a transitional solution to working in 3D. I don’t know why grabbing loose…
This contest is now over. Thanks for everyone who participated in the contest! We had nearly 200 entries!! You can view them all here. Winners will be announced Monday, November 19th on the blog and also listed here. This is it. It’s here! SolidSmack is putting on the contest of the year and giving you…
The brush thistles lifted. The children slept atop their elephant pillows, chattering dreams of elf and sprite. Fog and seed and mossy green cushioned the sighs against the leaves. And hidden there, glowing white, with the glow of joy’s delight, these links. Feng Zhu – Page upon page of glorious concept art depicting scenes of…
The 3D cloud collab fire keeps burnin’ hotter and today’s news is sure to stoke the flames. Sunglass.io started out as a simple way to share models online and was one of the first to bring in a WebGL-based, plugin-free approach to sharing CAD Data. They had a basic annotation tool at the time and…
Lookout Creo users. Sharing 3D views, with your family, of the widgets you model all day just became ‘a two-finger pinch and a gleam in your smile’ easier. Creo View is now available for iPhone and iPad devices. What’s in store? Let’s have a look.
Today, the biggest news for CAD/CAM in years happened. Autodesk announced it has acquired HSMWorks. That Autodesk acquired another company isn’t surprising. What is surprising is this–HSMWorks is a CAM Solution for SolidWorks. If you use it, you also know it’s the best integrated CAM solution for SolidWorks. Obviously, Autodesk sees this, loves this, wants…
Last week Luxology and The Foundry announced a merger. The CG/VFX scene was all abuzz and many a product designer head was popping out of cubicle, office windows and coffee shop to see what the craziness was all about. We caught up with Luxology CEO Brad Peebler to get the lowdown on the merger and…
The chilling victory of the Racth Chaoal had severed the crowd of their voice. Deep outside the battle torn valley, isolation thickened the fair winds with mist and settling spore. The quiet so still, it shook them loose–the tiny sprites encased in these links. Rhads – What’s not to like about epic mountain and cloudy…
If you thought B-Peeb’s render god rap was good stuff, wait till you see this–It might just be the greatest thing in the history of all things nerdcore. Luke Parnell, a long time SolidSmack reader and a SolidWorks master, weaves the words about complex curves and sheet metal burrs in this video he put together…
I was really excited about this project (and still am) but Kickstarter has left a bad taste in my mouth with their silly policy change banning product renderings and simulations. That said, I’ll focus on the excitement I have for a project I jumped on earlier last week. Boys have robots, LEGO, and a ton…
Autodesk is pushing its globulous mass (I mean that in a nice way) into every corner of everything that has anything to do with creating–Engineering, Architecture, Manufacturing, Media and the community-minded machine of fabbers, modders and tweak-freaks. They delivered their 123D software to make it all so much easier, but as Wired reports, the software…
I’ve marked today as the day I’ve seen the largest number of ‘WTF’s ever recorded by man… in the field of product development. Three new policies for product design and hardware projects were set in place by Kickstarter as described in their blog post, Kickstarter is Not a Store. It’s a game changer for those…
The tunnel stretched out before, unraveled in the morning light fraught with moss spores lifted by the rain. To think this was the last time she would see that light left a chill. Yet one hope remained. Where ever the tunnel led, she would hold in the vile, the essence of these links. Simon Cheng…
You’re in a meeting discussing schedule. The manager pauses mid-sentence and says, “Pop!” The boxy device in the middle of the table fires a fluffy popcorn morsel directly into his gaping mouth hole. Buttery, popped-corn heaven. The Popinator is a device from purveyors of fine popcorn snacking, Popcorn Indiana. They’ve revealed an internal project, designed…
What if I told you that you could stop sending models off to the simulation goon you have locked away in the basement server room. What if you are the simulation goon and would rather be cooking lentils while running a simulation instead of cooking your motherboard? Well, the time has come where you can…
Typically, the only sound that physically levitates objects is the scream from your vocal cords beating against the screen when that thin-extrude doesn’t work. Perhaps there’s another way to use soundwaves to manipulate geometry? Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) are successfully using an acoustic levitator to develop pharmaceuticals. Using the device originally developed by…
The first episode of Tech4PD is up at engineering.com. Your hosts? Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity and Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insights. They pose a topic of the century, debate over it, (kick each other under the table) and give you the opportunity to vote for who’s right. The loser eats wasabi (off the shaved chest of…
The buzzing lights among the trees glistened on the glowing brook. Green beads and hair of white passed just beneath the branch. She had arrived and just beyond the mounds, the ships she would soon lay to waste were loading these links. Adam S. Doyle – This is how you make a few brush strokes…
In Spetember of 1995, you couldn’t take photos with a phone and turn them into 3D data. Last week you couldn’t either. This week, you can. Hello future, nice to meet you. Yes, turning photos taken with your phone into a 3D model is now possible. Autodesk 123D Catch has been available for desktop and…
This week SolidWorks 2013 PR1 is released. Dassault (and SolidWorks specifically) has caught a lot of flack for not innovating, closing up their labs site, previewing an enticing product years ago and not delivering, showing and shifting releases of an equally enticing SolidWorks Live Building product, loosing Jon Hirschtick and Austin OMalley and revealing misconstrued…
When cycling, you typically don’t want invisibility to be any part of your ride. However, if you have a high sense of fashion and enjoy the wind flowing through your stylish locks, you will be glad to know there’s an alternative to the traditional bicycle helmet. The Hövding is the design thesis, brought-to-life brain-child of…
It just so happened once, when the nights where long and filled with mist, that small, glowing oxen would jump the fence, and once in the air, would spread their wings to shoot laser beams, from their chins, at these links. Ian McQue – So many new and wonderful airship creations from the floating palace…
Last week, while many off you were getting the kids off to the first week school or recovering from an intense, sun-infused vacation, SolidWorks snuck up behind you and launched a new version of their SolidWorks viewing app for the iPad right in your face. This one has ‘Pro’ slapped on the end of it…
Wood, steel, concrete. It’s a match made in design studio heaven and the perfect combination for an iconic, highly-priced reimagining of the chunky WWII era searchlights that entire Battalions were formed around. Having seen that New Duivendrecht launched the Barrel Lamp light design from design duo Tim Smit and Erik de Nijs of Nieuwe Heren,…
The stale air closed around. What else had they to do? Stretching out their arms, they open the door. Hundreds of blank, hungry, glazed-eyed faces staring back at them – some half-charred, others half-eaten – all, preparing to breath their last, undead breath, from the tidal blast force of these links. Simon Weaner – Oh,…
You know when you show up to the coffee shop (or office) and pull a small bamboo case from the inside pocket of your tweed jacket, people are gonna drop jaws, followed by their fraps and microwaved scones. The PHX-1 from Big I Design is a creation of the big idea duo Chadwick Parker and…
I have long been wondering who would sink their teeth into the succulent cad-driven tissue of Inforbix. Today, that happened. Autodesk announced earlier this morning that they have “acquired certain assets of Inforbix, LLC.” Inforbix produces product data applications with their main web-based product focus on visualizing your data wherever it is located from anywhere…
Too late! This contest is over! See the winners below in the comments section and stay tuned for more contests and giveaways on SolidSmack! It’s been a while since we’ve had a giveaway on SolidSmack. The tips of our elbows tend to get dry and scaly when that happens, so let’s spread the moisturizing bliss of free…
We usually save the less designy, more artisticy stuff for the Friday Smackdown, but these images are just too good to pass up. Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea is a surreal vision of life(?) on Mars as photograpghed and digitally enhanced by Kahn & Selesnick. The aspect we find fascinating is not only the…
When the days of the pedestal kings came to an end, there was but one way to harvest the sill bugs. The gantry cranes erected by the sillers, once brought forth bountiful supply, and they have run for a thousand years on the essence concocted from these links. Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe – Splendid illustration with…
How do you stop sending your kitchen sets to the dumpster bin? If your IKEA, you bring on the power of 3D rendering. The massive Swedish furniture manufacturer is transitioning part of its photography effort from the studio to the screen, bringing on more virtual showrooms to tantalize your consumer tastebuds and at the same…
In 1983, the idea of traveling at unsafe speeds through the forest on a rocket, equipped with anti-gravity and a belly gun, became permanently ingrained, sealed and preserved in my young mind. Growing up in a forest didn’t help deter that dream and neither does this video. Aerofex, from Manhattan Beach, California, has been testing…
Have you tried to touch and move something on a screen that isn’t touch-sensitive? As my computer-screen will attest, my kids try it ALL THE TIME – flipping through photos, tapping ‘OK’, spinning 3D models – can’t be done on my monitor yet. We’re in that transition, and if the research that a PhD student…
I feel privileged to tell you that, not only, do you look fabulous in that new summer jacket/defense system, you have also cause excess perspiration in 80% of the alien super race that was this close to completing their plan for world domination. Good thing you listen to the SolidSmack Cool Tool of Doom n’…
The iPhone 5. Weeks away, yet there’s sure to be someone already camping out in anticipation of launch day being announced. Well, you yourself don’t have to neglect your better senses quite yet, and can get your iPhone accessory-buying fix before news of the phone even hits the web waves. FurnLab just launched a new…
Looks like GrabCAD is putting their 4 million in funding to good use. They’ve been pushing out consistent updates on their website and Friday they announced that two new people had joined the growing roster at GrabCAD–Jon Stevenson (LinkedIn) and Grant Thomas-Lepore (LinkedIn) are now among the top tier of GrabCAD employees. Heard of them?…
“Hey Hunny! Bring your belly over here and have a look at this!” I’ve seen disturbingly decorated decoupages of bosom and baby bump hanging on walls, bronze cast sculptures of the unborn, but this new keepsake puts all those other reminders of pregnancy to shame. A Japanese tech company called Fasotec is providing a new…
While some are worrying about high-efficiency this and fuel-economic that, others are putting the electrons pulsing through their cognitive, übercreative brain cages to much better use creating “an open-source, 18ft wide, 4,000 pound, 6-legged hydraulic robot that you can ride.” Project Hexapod is a robotics class turned Kickstarter project that hit its initial funding goal…
“It’s been lying there for weeks.” That was the last they were expecting to hear. Not only had the colors of the speckled paint mongrel coated the edges and patterned indentations, they had seeped into every crevice of the deepest grain. Slicing through, we found it, the class-4 hue extrapolator powered by these links. Gianmarco…
You’ve been hoarding it for years–shelves, containers, closets and hallways filled with cardboard scrap. Mounds of it. Just in case you ever had the opportunity to take on a project of epic proportion, with the ultimate honor of having your brilliance mentioned on SolidSmack. It has happened for Israeli designer Izhar Gafni, and just as…
I could have done a post on creating the cube matrix you see above, but what fun is that when we have an actual 3D (not really 3D) matrix that encapsulates the power and expanse of the 3D Scan-to-Print industry. Tuan Tranpham, the Community Managaer for Objet (soon to merge with Stratasys), in a perfect…
“Brilliant, you say?” Why, it’s only half a cockle shell I’ve fashioned into a sturdy set of gills at the base of my torso. Fortunately, they’re embedded beneath my skin, providing endless amounts of highly concentrated oxygen due to being soaked overnight in the SolidSmack Cool Tools of Doom n’ Stuff! Have something cool you’ve…
Perhaps high-priced, iconic sculpture added to a scenic seaside village leaves you yearning for a trip to the untainted wilderness, but if the site of carbon fiber and steel structures erupting from the earth make you feel alive, you’ll want to see the process of how this one was created. Bart Hoedemakers captured New Zealand…
Feats of Engineering. 3D Visuals. There are plenty of both. Projection mapping and slapping animated light effects on historic building seems to be all the rage. However, the way AntiVJ is interpreting a massive architectural masterwork of the past, in light of the architect’s thinking of the future, makes your blood pulse as much as…
Ten folds away from the edge we stopped. A forger had lit the beacon. Their shapes wouldn’t shift for long, but their numbers would increase. “On toward the edge!” I said. “We have but one shot with these links.” Vindictus – Not only is it a free, 3D co-op, multiplayer game, it has the badass…
What’s more fun than spending a few hours (days) building your very first 3D printer? Watching a videographic about those who have already built their first 3D printer (not really more fun). Stephen Murphey has put together this superb visualization of the survey results gathered by the “The Journal of Peer Production” in a global…