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…
What’s everyone saying about Creo? From other CAD vendors to Pro/E power users, there’s a wide range of sentiment. Here’s a round up of what the buzz has everyone talking, screaming, taunting and joking about.
Here’s something you’ll absolutely love. If you’ve ever had a fan, screen or keyboard go out, most laptops require you to purchase new tools, tear the laptop completely apart, then stab the tiny screwdrivers into your eyes after becoming completely frustrated. So, if you’ve ever taken a dremel to the back of a latop (like…
If it was that large, you would have to strap more than the usual amount of spoons to your fists. However, you could alway flatten it out with a large bat and sprinkle it with these links. Silvio Aebischer – I could live is these environments, with these creatures. Definitely check out the mech section.…
If you’ve been waiting to see what PTC’s next move is, your wait is over. If you’ve been waiting to see what direction product development tech is taking, stop. Nearly every CAD vendor has shared their vision of what the future of product design is going to be like. Thursday was PTC’s turn. Thursday, October…
Update: Just an update… I’ve got the overview with my thoughts up on what project lightning turned into… PTC Launches CreoWhatcha think now? There’s a peculiar odor of CADmospheric ions in the air and all the blustery bits of activity are swelling up over the US East Coast. Tomorrow, October 28th, PTC will reveal their…
Mesmerizing. There’s nothing like seeing the modeling and rendering process from start to finish. Oh, and then there’s showing how it can all be done within the time span of 20 minutes. That’s exactly what Cut & Paste is all about. You, three others, music thumping, crowd watching… Intensity. Adam O’Hern is all about it…
This Monday, Adobe fired the Acrobat X cannon out across the interwebs. You may have felt odd vibrations emanating from your screen creating a feeling that something was going to affect your career-long affection with PDF’s… or that feeling could just be some indigestion from that lunch burrito. Either way, a new version of Acrobat…
It once tilted, down into the chasm where strange soups lie dormant, heated beneath a layer of membranous light, with nothing other than the blind, bearded settler to keep the roto-healm alive. It was quite there, and these links bubbled to the surface. Kekai Kotaki – If there was ever someone that could inspire you…
Well, once again the superiority of the Design/Engineer CAD Geek has been completely blown over. People should be hurt… badly, with mean looks and cold coffee, but instead we’ll sit back and say, “The massive coolness of the CAD Geek lies firmly outside the realm of any guanine/adenine-based geek mutation… so there.” …OR maybe we…
Yellow is for me graphic by Azrol Kassim using Sketchbook Pro You remember that time you won a spanking for sketching all over your little brother with permanent marker? No? You’ve probably just repressed that event. No matter, because you can channel your creative sketching ability once again and win 1 MILLION spankings… in the…
Don’t you just love the smell of a new operating system? Goes well alongside the boiling adrenaline shooting out your eyes as you become familiar with it’s functionality and problems, doesn’t it? Actually, there are a lot of people and companies in the design and engineering community who still use Windows XP. There are many…
Well now, if you think those intricate clay micro-structures you’ve squeezed out through your teeth are amazing, you’re going to love this. Up till now it’s been nearly impossible to create complex 3-dimensional carbon nano-shapes, partly from the limitation in the process of creating them and partly from the hexagonal structure of the fullerene molecules…
Completely random and also completely rockin’. This image is from a circa-2004 drawing I uncovered. That was so long ago… I believe they made meat out of dirt back then… so long ago. It, as well as its model table, is quite epic. Wouldn’t you agree?
Last week, Siemens launched what is very well the most feature-busting update to the Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology craze thus far. It’s Solid Edge ST3. I’ve not been able to get inside it yet, so I’m holding off on a proper review till I do. In the meantime, I went to Siemens with some…
There are a few things I don’t enjoy watching repeatedly – boiling cabbage, videos of cats, and anything with Ben Affleck. The one thing I can watch repeatedly are the 3D façade projections being done by NuFormer, a digital media company out of the Netherlands. They have pretty much perfected the art of mapping 2D…
Sculpteo, the 3D print service we featured last week, will announce tomorrow (October 19th) that their print service will be available to U.S. makers, fabbers or any other person that enjoys the feel of layered plastic.
Tighten your corsets folks. Actually, you can loosen them, because this design will make your eyes pop no matter how you’re compressing your innards. Last May we featured an iPad Canvas Wrap concept designed by Jeff Bare. Well, the design has come full-circle and the result is amazing. We’ve just uncovered images and video from…
Eventually, the dishes just pile up so high in the sink you spray them with the nearest alcoholic beverage and light them on fire. When you see the result is only a light charring, out comes the broom handle you use to awkwardly jam them down the garbage disposal. There’s a better way, a better…
Open your mouth, it’s here. If you’re in charge of implementing SolidWorks or in charge of bribing IT with chili-cheese fries to install it, you now have to consider the ramification of upgrading to the new version… or throwing caution to the wind and just going for it. Either way, if you’re on subscription, you…
I enjoy a good 3D print as much the next stark-raving mad 3D print fan, but there’s something cool about being able to upload a file to a faraway land via a slick interface, pay a fairly high price and get a freshly fabricated 3D print delivered to your front door. One of the latest…
Imagine being so CAD savvy, that you emanated CAD wherever you go. Yeah, you would be the life of the party and everyone would say, “That guys wears CAD crap, and looks FABULOUS in it.” They would also cry, because you are way more prepared than they, in the occasion a random, chest-size CAD reference…
And then suddenly, without warning, five enormous insectoids entered the capsule. They breathed heavy and looked famished from a long day of harvesting dew droplets, weedlings and these links. Richard Anderson – If you blur your eyes fast enough, Anderson beautiful abstract style nearly moves right off the screen. A picky eater taxonomy – Personally,…
Frankly, you may tear your leg muscles out in disbelief when you see what you’re about to see, but it’s for real. It may be even more shocking to believe it’s possible to do anything but wither away at a desk while performing design and engineering tasks, but yes, it is. To stay in shape,…
You see that hot looking Camaro up above? That’s a thousand features of SolidWorks surfacing coolness you’re about to create. There’s an even cooler aspect to this as well. Matthew Perez, a Certified SolidWorks Expert (CSWE) and designer of injection molded parts, created this tutorial for you to learn all he has learned about modeling…