Wondering how the future of cloud-based 3D CAD is developing? More and more services are coming online with cloud-based offerings and Autodesk is certainly leading the way in both offloading processing for simulation and having complete access to your software and data via a web connection–it’s the whole anytime, anywhere scenario and they just announced…

I know you’ve had all you can take of the magical background music and gentle voice-overs coming from that Disney fairy app. It’s time to delete the horror that is dressing baby Tinkerbell (don’t ask me how I know so much about this) and give your children a good dose of science, tech, engineering and…

Tapping your fingers on the edge of your desk in rapid, chaotic motions may typically annoy your cube mates, but if you’re all users of one of the two Autodesk Design Suites or Simulation tools, it may prompt a head-bobbing sing-along. Autodesk just announced the release of the 2014 Design Suites and with it, they…

It’s no longer a secret–modo 701 is going to kick butt in major ways. Luxology’s Brad Peebler gave an online presentation this morning where he showed off the best of what’s new for those of us eager to dive into the new release. From updated edge beveling enhancements to a new animation workflow, Luxology has…

Cracking your knuckles after a cup of Starbuck’s strongest may shoot vibes of professionalism across the coffee shop, but there’s one thing all 3D pros need more than a 6am caffeine fix… a decent portfolio. Options abound across the web and if you’re savvy, you can even create your own website or app. However, if…

If the site of a Gantt chart makes you run through the plate glass window it’s taped to, you’re not alone. Often the faux project management appearance of multiple tasks, color-coded by personnel and priority, fraught with the markings of yellow, pink and chartreuse highlighter to show the importance of one item over another, gives…

Are there not enough 3D creation, development and collaboration apps on the web? No sir, no there are not. Especially apps that take an approach that combines both the block-addicting fun of Minecraft and the web-modeling ease of Tinkercad. BrickItUp plans to take on the feat, they’re almost there and they have a Kickstarter campaign…

You’re sitting at the computer waiting for an analysis to run. Suddenly a three-armed garden gnome with a smug look and a Garfield “Compute this” t-shirt offers to take your analysis pains away. He directs you to Rescale.com, grabs your luke-warm coffee and half-eaten cookie, then disappears. Rescale is probably not a company you’ve heard…

Luxology announced earlier this week their new modo 701, and as expected there are a host of improvements including expanded animation features like audio playback and sound support. For those of you looking to upgrade, here’s a quick preview of what’s to come.

There’s an interesting infographic exploring the Depths of Cloud Storage put out by 3DVIA. It’s framed from “a 3D Designer’s perspective” or rather, from the argument in favor of cloud storage. It’s a great illustration and nothing that’s directly pushing 3DVIA products or services, but it brought up a question… What in the wide, wide…

Rockets. There just are not enough of them escaping the clutches of our atmosphere. Fortunately, we have people interested in making more rockets happen and open source websites–or rather movements–like DIY Rockets to give rocket development and learning a boost. Now, Sunglass and Shapeways are meeting at the launch pad with DIY Rockets for a…

Today, if you happen to be browsing apps whilst using the bathroom (we all know that’s where it happens), searching for CAD apps on iTunes, you’ll see an update to one you may have tried out in the past, the GrabCAD app. Version 1.7 is out now and available for both iPhone and iPad. It’s…

I know it’s bound to bring on the arm spasms, causing you to fall from your chair, spilling your coffee on your workstation tower and frying the Quadro GPU you already have, but that’s ok, because NVIDIA has gone and done the unthinkable, nay the unimaginable–they’ve released a new line of Quadro workstation graphics cards…

Modeling with both Sub-D and NURBS is all the rage with the kids these days (at least we’d like to think so) and Power Surfacing is one add-on that allows you to use such a novelly modern modelling methodology inside SolidWorks. Since its debut in January and our hands-on in with Paul McCrorey there have…

CadFaster, the makers of CadFaster|Collaborate, the BIM mobility app have retooled their marketing efforts, launching a new app for the MCAD market, MyCadbox. It’s a new product and a whole new website aimed at increasing your propensity to share models with others across the web and mobile devices. Is it ready for prime time?

While modo (and the modo community) offer a wealth of free material presets, there’s always going to be a time when you’ve made your own adjustments and want to save your secret recipe-material as a preset for later use. In this quick tip we’ll give you a rundown on saving out your custom material to…

Max and Pete are high-fiving a million angels right about now (in between all the responses and project updates they’re sending out) for what’s turning into one of the most breakaway successes in Kickstarter history. In only a few hours, the project hit the $30,000 goal and over the past day, they’ve passed $1.3 Million.…

Well, this is what we’ve been waiting to see. A SolidWorks iPad app? Puh-leeease… no longer needed. This is the full version of SolidWorks 2013 on a Fujitsu tablet sporting an AMD Z-60 APU Processor (with Radeon HD Graphics @1.00Ghz) running Windows 8 Pro. We knew we would start seeing this when chip makers started…

Just after Sandboxr was scheduled to launch their own creature creator app February 1st, Autodesk has sprouted another tentacle from its 123D app portfolio and introduced Autodesk 123D Creature. Yes, you can model your own creature in the discomfort of an office chair during a meeting, but guess what? You can also send it off…

One of the more exciting announcements to come out of SolidWorks World 2013 this year was the addition of an augmented reality-based update to SolidWorks’ popular eDrawings iOS app. What has been a go-to solution for many designers looking to present their models easily to clients and other designers in an easy-to-carry solution has now…

Slap your CPU and call your mama, KeyShot 4 is released. This version of the rendering and animation software reaches deep into the cauldron of physics-based visualization and pulls out some very nice features users have been longing for.

148 brains have been drained of their futuristic spacecraft-inventing potential over the last month. Who is to blame? Makerbot and GrabCAD. The Makerbot Replicator 2 Design Challenge just finished up at GrabCAD and the winners have been selected. The challenge was to create a 2040 vehicle design. Most of the entries are fabulous designs and…

Creating delectable looking food and drink items in solid modeling software like SolidWorks may not be your routine, but it is possible and if you ever need to drench either with dew or a generous amount of condensation, there’s a quick, painless, highly repetitive (click, click, click) method for applying water droplets to the surfaces…

It seems that, along with grabbing up 3D models, GrabCAD is in the business of grabbing up the top talent in the 3D modeling software industry. They just announced the hire of Blake Courter (LinkedIn), a founder of SpaceClaim (and dear friend) along with Rob Stevens (LinkedIn), a former VP with the likes of Kiva…

As if SolidWorks World 2013 couldn’t have been any more bangin’–it was. We got the chance to sit down with the guy who is controlling the future of your favorite CAD package like a gypsy with a crystal ball….Mr. Bertrand Sicot! In our video interview, we talk with Bertrand about what it’s been like as…

Released last week, the Caustic Series2 accelerator boards are a pair of ray tracing accelerator PC boards that use Imagination Technologies’ ray tracing technologies to bring us the world’s first chipset dedicated to high performance, fully interactive ray tracing in a workstation environment. I had the opportunity to sit down with VFX madman and Caustic…

If I told you that all your design in the future would be done in the cloud with all possible design iterations instantly calculated and all the best possibilities presented in a highly interactive visual format, you would probably look at me holding back a burst of laughter. However, this idea of a web-accessible, model-based…

As previously reported by SolidSmack, the Power Surfacing for SolidWorks plug-in was bound to be a game changer for anybody looking to add a little more fun to their modeling workflow. Paul McCrorey of McCrorey Digital gave a presentation at SolidWorks World 2013 last week on using this powerful new plugin–specifically through giving us two…

Well, the dust has finally settled from all the excitement in Orlando this year as thousands flocked to the fifteenth annual SolidWorks World at the Dolphin Hotel at Walt Disney World. Between the amazing guest speakers (Art Thompson, Technical Project Director for Red Bull Stratos for example) and exciting announcements (Mechanical Conceptual, Augmented Reality eDrawings),…

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……

Announcements, Announcements! Companies just love to unveil the bleeding edge new stuff at conferences. Along with the Dassault SolidWorks’ announcement (and your 9 month wait) for SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual, Luxion is announcing KeyShot 4 with possibly a slightly shorter wait time for the release of the new version and a new render-rific link between SolidWorks…

At approximately 9:15am EST, Fielder Hiss took the main stage at SolidWorks World 2013 and announced the forthcoming SolidWorks/Dassault 3D Experience platform transitional product, SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. It mixes together two modeling methods to make the modeling more fluid and at first sight looks fairly minimal, but on the backend builds on Dassault’s database-driven technology…

SolidWorks World 2013 is firing on all cylinders with Dassualt Systems launching a new site to kick off the user event, My.SolidWorks. It integrates the Netvibes (content curation) and Exalead (search functionality) that Dassault systems acquired over the years. This is the first we’re seeing it pushed out on a more community level, especially on…

EvD Media’s Adam O’Hern has been keeping our cadjunkie members busy with his latest SolidWorks tutorial series centered around developing a product from scratch with consideration to working within teams of engineers, graphic designers, and of course, industrial designers. What better way to start the first month of the new year than with some fresh…

Oh, the undulating waves of SolidWorks surfacing bliss! Yeeeeah… ‘bliss’ is hardly the word one would use when creating advanced surfaces in SolidWorks. We thought that would all change with the T-Splines plugin, but a new plugin on the SolidWorks block is about to make a big splash. Next week at SolidWorks World, Integrityware will…

Low and behold! The free modeling app from Autodesk that makes many quake with 3D modeling delight has received a point release and upgrade to a lot of the basic fucntionality. The new features are indeed a delight, but the deeper significance of the activity revolving around Autodesk and 123D is the evolution of the…

3D Systems isn’t messing around in 2013. Despite some new products having lackluster performance, they have managed to prove that an arsenal of ‘whipped cream pies in your face’ is the best strategy for developing hype and getting your attention. Somehow amongst promoting their new product releases at CES 2013, they managed to earn the…

This is a story from Mark Biasotti on his journey of advanced surface modeling in SolidWorks, from a Senior Industrial Designer at IDEO to a Senior Product Manager at Dassault SolidWorks. SolidWorks Doesn’t Do Trains, Planes and Automobiles originally appeared on the SolidWorks forum. Republished with permission. Back in the fall of 2002, while working…

At CES 2013, 3D Systems announced the release of Cubify Capture, which allows users to take a video or photo and turn it into an actual 3D-printable model. Over the past 9 months, 3D Systems has been trying to turn Cubify into a powerful cloud-based environment for not just downloading of files (for purchase), but…

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.

Makerbot announced today at CES 2013 the release of their Replicator 2x Experimental 3D Printer, an upgraded version of their successful line of Replicator 2. I’m reading the feeds as the info comes in and it’s looking good. You get the impression Makerbot is trying very hard to hit the Living  Room and the Office,…

As you may recall, last week 3D Systems announced the plans to acquire Geomagic, whose product list includes haptic devices, along with scanning, inspection and design software, the latest of which being Geomagic Spark, a collaboration between Spaceclaim and Geomagic that integrates Geomagics’s point and mesh processing tools into SpaceClaim’s 3D direct modeling environment. Rapidform,…

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.…

Hark! 2013 is upon us! In many ways, the previous year seemed a turning point for where we’re going while simultaneously lacking any sort of drastic, earth-shattering changes. However, there’s plenty of fat, tech-laden fodder on which to speculate for 2013 and that’s exactly what we’re going to dish out for you folks. In recent…

In what sounds like a scene out of a Star Trek movie, medical professionals will soon be working in an interface similar to Inventor, Revit, and Maya to design and produce tissue and organs. According to Organovo CEO Keith Murphy, “This could give us the power to recreate human tissues and organs outside of the…

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…

As new iPhones and gadgets roll out, it’s easy to forget that there is a market out there that needs design in ways beyond what most people can fathom. From war zones to areas devastated by natural disasters among others, how can we as designers, engineers, and makers apply ourselves to look beyond our own…

As a designer, engineer, or maker, how will you be able to keep pace in an industry that is consistently being disrupted by “New Faces” and creating entire businesses literally overnight? As products come to market faster than ever before, what is the best strategy towards placing yourself in an ever-increasingly competitive creative global economy?…

It seems as though even less than a year ago, ‘The Cloud’ was still a buzzword for most people–particularly mainstream consumers. With the addition of services such as Netflix, Spotify, Box, and others, we have began to use the cloud without even thinking about it. As innovators, how do we harness the power of the…