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?…

Rust never sleeps, especially in Ohio. The heart of the steel manufacturing has suffered more from the decline of the industry and the recession more than anywhere else in America, and 3D Printing has been hyped for how it could bring jobs back. It might, but the story is more complicated than what it seems.

Home-cooked meals are supposed to be special. They’re also supposed to be organic, free-range, cruelty-free, gourmet meals custom-made to suit your desires – because everyone’s picky. And why not? 3D Printing both the food and the preparation tools might just make that easier. Or sillier. We think we can have both. Remember the Burritobot? Printing…

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…

Matt Strong has begun a Kickstarter campaign to sell the Tangibot, another 3D Printer. Wait it’s not just any 3D printer – it’s an exact copy of the Makerbot Replicator, and a relatively cheaper one at that. $1,199 instead of $1,749 for a single extruder and $1,299 instead of $1,999 for a dual extruder. Discussion and…

The Ditto 3D Printer is one of the best 3D Printers I’ve had the pleasure of seeing up close. Smooth lines, high-quality parts and superb prints. Like Brad Sublime’s Tantillus, it’s produced in Vancouver, Canada. During the unveiling of the Rygo at VanDusen Botanical Gardens, I invited Eugene and the Tinkerine team to bring out…

Thomas Edison would have been impressed if he was alive today and could see what’s coming out of Kickstarter. Zombie Edison is impressed and wants your braaaaains. Some argue, Edison never invented to much – he just had the money to hire the right people (like Nicola Tesla) and get them to churn out ideas, cherry picking…

Luxion is dishing out a a slew of render tech this week at SIGGRAPH 2012 and even though I work for the company, it’s a refreshing look at visualization on the web. Visualization I didn’t think we, in the 3D world, wouldn’t see so soon. A couple weeks ago, I caught the first glimpse of…

While the rest of the world was freaking out about 3D printed guns, Stratasys released a positive story about how 3D printing is impacting the life of one little girl. Emma was born with Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita, a condition that has left her with limited movements. There was an Orthopaedic prosthetic called the WREX, but it…

We’re mobile. We want to be more mobile. Dell is unleashing their latest business class device with the new and improved Precision Mobile Workstations. With the release of the M4700, M6700 and the blazing red, fully-loaded M6700 Covet, Dell is reaching even further into maximum computing power with maximum portability. Available today, the updated Dell…

Point your camera phone toward your face and post your reaction–This week, Autodesk announced the acquisition of video shooting/editing/sharing app Socialcam for an approximate $60 million. Socialcam is the year-old video app that has taken over social video sharing and thrives as an integral part of your Facebook feed. It’s a move that makes the…

As we’ve seen, Airbus thinks big. They made monster airplanes like the A380 and they took on aerospace giants like Boeing in the 1970s. They think big, really big. like 3D printing an airplane big. Not tiny little airplanes–big, honking super planes. 3D printing is primed to take off (pun intended) in the aerospace industry…

If you’ve felt a weird tingling sensation in your AutoCAD blueprints, you may be victim of a new worm that has been infecting machines over the last half of the year. The ACAD/Medre.A AutoCAD worm is suspected to be an industrial espionage tactic to get the hands on drawings. Here are the details.

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,…

TeamPlatform is boosting the cool factor of CAD on the cloud. This week the web-based 3D project collaboration platform launches 3dFile.io. View the largest number of 3D file formats right in your browser. Just drag and drop your 3D model, grab the link and share it. Best thing, it’s absolutely free.

Do you have a soft spot for hardcore hacks, fanatical fabrication, robots, steampunk and funnel cakes? Do we even need to ask? It’s exactly why we were at this year’s Bay Area 2012 Maker Faire featuring all of that and a mass of 3D printers, tons of guest speakers, Tesla coils set to music and…

GrabCAD just may be the latest and greatest resource in the world of CAD – a massive online community of engineers and designers building a user-generated CAD library with a litany of features to encourage collaboration on design projects. GrabCAD bagged a cool $4 million in venture capital recently. Now, they’re looking for the top…

You now have the perfect reason to slap on the sideburns, Wayfarers and open up the .STL files of your British-motif 1970 Jaguar E-Type. Today, Stratasys (Nasdaq: SSYS) announces their all-in-one 3D Desktop Printer. SolidSmack was on hand at the Stratasys media event a few weeks ago and got to see first hand the factory tour…

I know you have long dreamt of taking your blueprints with you wherever you go. Well, it’s possible, or could be. The Softsheet concept by Gautham Varma is a foldable, touch-sensitive screen you can toss on your dash when you’re off to the shop or construction site. You can use it to view site plans…

There were rumors floating around about the acquisition of Google SketchUp. It was thought the buyer may be Dassault Systemes. SpaceClaim was even in there at one point. Turns out that the acquisition rumor was true, but speculation on the buyer? Waaaaaay off. Today, Trimble, producers of advanced location-based hardware and software, announced they have…

Just when you thought 3D Systems was getting big and scary, the unexpected/expected happens. In an all-stock transaction, the merger of Israel-based Objet into Minnesota-based Stratasys, leaves the new entity with a $1.4 billion dollar equity value and a bigger slice of the market share.

Geomagic has a hankering for haptics. You know them for their reverse engineering and inspection software. Now, they add 3D software and haptic control devices to their line-up giving them a very strong portfolio of engineering/manufacturing products.

A new player in the 3D collaboration space is on the scene with a site that steps up sharing, syncing and neck slappin’ your project management effort with the blazing efficiency of a web-based collaborative environment. TeamPlatform it’s much more than meets the eye. We had a chance to use it and talk with Scott…

Founders and TEDfellows of web-based collaborative design solution Sunglass.io, Nitin Rao and Kaustuv DeBiswas, have raised US $1.7 million in seed funding from from top tier investors. We’ve got a pipin’ hot, fairly fresh interview with the founders of Sunglass.io with all the details web-based collaboration platform and a look at how the future of…

KeyShot 3 came out a mere three months ago. Now, KeyShot 3.1 is here. It’s a mere point release later, but they’re slamming out a slew of new features and improvements with the update. Features like Environment Editing, Material Templates and Network Rendering. They’re adding supprt for 3DConnexion devices and improving the animation debuted with…

Turns out good, energy efficient engineering is a lot more than removing a few extra ribs on a design and slapping a low power motor in it. James Dyson has something to say about that. This story at Fast Co.Exist gets the vacuum innovator’s take on lazy engineering.

That’s right, friends: modo 601 is here, and to say we are ‘excited’ would be an understatement. In fact, we burnt ourselves on some celebratory, half-baked brownies we cooked up for the occasion while feasting our fingers on new modeling and rendering tools, a slew of new shaders and – oh yes – character animation…

As of the next update, Linux users will have to use Chrome (or other as yet non-existent PPAPI compatible browsers) if they want to use the latest version of Flash. There is also speculation that Adobe is building an outdoor toilette for Linux users, and is planning the construction of “separate but equal” housing projects…

Day three of SolidWorks World 2012! It came and went with a quickness. Then the travel and the catching up. But not to worry, we’ve got the final overview video and some more details coming at you. As you may know, the Day 3 General Session is the day when the top ten enhancement requests…

Intense! SolidWorks World Day Two is always the craziest. Announcements, interview, lots of technical sessions and the off-site event that probably has people feeling a little shaky the next morning. We’ve got the highlights for ya and guess what… there’s one more day to go!

Day one at SolidWorks World 2012. If there was such a thing as a firehose of flaming CAD vodka, this would be it. Attendees have been drenched with inspiration in the keynote, getting their geek on in the tech sessions and livin’ it up at the evening parties. One product, 5,300+ people, insanity. We caught…

CAM Mania is going down at SolidWorks World 2012 in the HSMWorks booth #313. If you recall, HSMWorks is the makers of the free CAM solution for SolidWorks, HSMXpress. They’ll be showing the CAM features integrated directly into the SolidWorks interface. And, you’ll definitely want to take the CAM Mania challenge with first prize being…

SolidSmack and SolidBox are bringing you the SolidWorks World 2012 goodness this year. We’ll be on site with cords and cameras we’ve unnecessarily hacked into our ocular cavities to scare off any would-be event security. We’ll be keeping those camera eyes open for anything that may be of interested or mildly offensive, covering the General Sessions LIVE…

Today, Dassualy slips further into becoming the social cybernetic giant of the virtual product design world, with a few big bits of info announced today. Their revenue was up from last year, they have a new head of corporate communications and, at the same time, they’ve announced the acquisition of Internet social platform Netvibes and…

I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with sustainability software. You jam some criteria into it and it throws a comparison of materials, location, the impact your choices have on the environment, and a pretty report you can give to your boss or client to prove you’ve done your research. The thing is,…

Imagine a Record Executive going over to a 3D file sharing site downloading a pair of patent-protected headphones, laughing as he jiggles and listens to his DRM’ed music list. Ironic. You may think ‘big deal’ when you hear it, but thePirateBay.org, a site infamous for file-sharing and online piracy is making torrent-tearing waves with the…

Moore’s Law (or rather Kryder’s Law) has just been decimated. Researchers at IBM just tore out those Wikipedia pages, sneered at them, then proceeded to show the world how five years of work has lead to new possibilities for mass data storage.

Like Adam OHern, I am very excited to announce that EvD Media is officially official. This joint effort between solidsmack, cadjunkie and engineer vs designer is bringing all the goodness of the design process to you in three glorious halves… err, sites.

Nothing screams I AM AWESOME like having the faces of the people you have vanquished surrounding you. But what if you could turn those faces into 3D printed vases (or coffee mugs), put some flowers (or coffee) in them and bask in the glory of your victories? Now you can. Sculpteo has released the Sculpteo…

You see that little girl? She’s happy because she just printed some little yellow shoes to match her little yellow shirt. THAT COULD BE YOU. We should have known by now, with sites like MyRobotNation and the taunting of Origo 3D Printer for kids, it was only a matter of time before big 3D print…

What do you do after growing an engineering community to 70,000 users and 20,000 models? You snag a massive 4 million in series A funding to add to the 1.1 million seed round previously achieved. The GrabCAD engineer and design community did just that to kick off the new year, with plans to grow the…

A beam of light has shot from the east, through my window, reflecting off a large bottle of whiskey milk sitting in front of me and directly into my eyes. Your custom HDRI dreams are about to get a lot more custom and a lot more powerful. HDR Light Studio 3.0 has been released by…

The idea of CAD on the cloud, i.e. modeling physically taking place on the cloud, has been a bit sidelined by not putting CAD in the web browser, but having vast computer arrays handling the heavy processsing over the web browser. Media and entertainment is going the other direction and IKinema is one company leading…

The organic lining of the universe, my eyelids and the inside of my colon is quivering quite vigerously at the moment. Early this morning, T-Splines announced that it has been acquired by Autodesk. T-Splines is creator of organic surfacing plugins for SolidWorks and Rhino. Here are the details we know.

I remember back in the day when we had to actually build mock-ups with telekinetic powers our hands to simulate mechanical motion. Fortunately, our fancy 3D CAD programs take away the need for cardboard scraps and paper cuts. The crew doing it up right on the SpaceClaim side is AR-CAD who has created SC-Motion, a…

How do you really upset a machinist? Show them an fully-integrated SolidWorks CAM solution that puts their 2D toolpath pickin’ to SHAME. That’s one angry CNC programmer. That is, until they realize how much time you’ve saved them. HSMWorks, creators of the product by the same name, is releasing the first free CAM solution for…

Whoa buddy, 3D Systems continues their 3D print related rampage through the additive manufacturing industry gobbling up companies to compliment their forward looking plans of content-to-print domination. It seems no company is safe from having MILLIONS of dollars thrown at them, if they’ve got the “strategic fit’ 3D Systems CEO, Abe Reichental, is looking for.…

Hear that noise? No? That’s because it’s the sound of stunned silence emanating from all those who’ve been waiting and clamoring for their favorite real-time rendering program to bring the simplicity and ease of photo-rendering to their world of… animation. Well, prepare for the shock-wave that’s about to peel your keyframin’ fingers right off… Luxion…

This morning, the Local Motors website got a little bit of an update. As speculated yesterday, the automotive-centric design community is getting some software lovin’ from Siemens PLM in the form of a new software release. Solid Edge Design1. This new iteration of Solid Edge is a scaled down version of the full-blown synchronous modeling…

I awoke Tuesday morning to a disturbance in my inbox. Seven press releases from reverse-engineering software developer, Geomagic. Apparently they had released something… or a few somethings. Indeed they had. Their entire product line received a fresh, new update in the form of Geomagic Studio 2012, Geomagic Wrap 2012 and Geomagic Qualify 2012. Geomagic creates…