You know it, I know it, everybody knows it: The democratization of technology is changing everything from the way we design to how we design it. The self-manufacturing mindset is driving innovation while redefining DIY in ways we’ve never seen before. It seems as though the Maker subculture is growing exponentially and everybody is calling…

Have you waited long enough? In 2009, Mcneel announced Beta for Rhino 5. I’ve lost count how many years ago that is. Low and behold, last week, Mcneel announces the release of Rhino 5 in a 34-word blog post and with it, the reveal of a brand new website. Both have been a long, long,…

When you look in the mirror, fresh out of bed, and wonder what you’ll be scanning at 6 am, the face peering back may suddenly turn pale as the brain absorbs the blood and sends thoughts of patching and converting mesh data for days. The horror. Geomagic wants to end that scene and have you…

Today, Autodesk continued the sizzle following their FormIt release at Autodesk University, announcing the “first and primary” application of T-Splines tech in the Autodesk product line, Autodesk Fusion 360. As you may gather, this new product is part of the cloud-based Autodesk 360 product line that includes Simluation, PLM and BIM. Design was the major…

For far too long, Architectural apps have been kept to 2D floorplan stabbing and inventive ways of measuring. You should have known Autodesk would have something to say about that. In the first day of activities at Autodesk University 2012, Autodesk FormIt for iPad was launched. FormIt is a building app sure to make the…

When your fingers are slammed in a trunk or car door, you’ll experience a great, yet painful, appreciation for the tolerances that are built into the gaps. When your double mocha latte goes flying into the dash and you spend the weekend cleaning the crevices with Q-tips and your favorite soundtrack, even more so. There’s…

Some people say coffee and CAD don’t go together. I don’t know any of those people, but if you do, look upon them with scorn and derision as you sip your scalding hot coffee through a mechanical pencil casing. Coffee is as essential a tool for creating 3D geometry as being able to move 3D…

GrabCAD is just not stopping. They’ve hired two high level product people from SolidWorks and completed another round of funding. This time closing $8.15 Million to bring their total influx of funds north of $13 Million. We caught up with Hardi Meybaum and Jon Stevenson to find out more.

More web-based model viewers?! Say it isn’t so. Yes, yes it is so. Sketchfab has actually been around for a bit, but there’s more to upload-n-go site than meets the eye. While many of the 3D web viewers are focused on building in a high level of collaboration, battling back and forth with each other…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

Rapid Manufacturing of bio-compatible materials is taking off in a big way. If researchers aren’t developing new ways to use a Reprap to create veins or printing prothetics beaks for Bald Eagles, they’re exploring avenues to perfect the art of making organs. Is this a harbinger for things to come? We hope so. Hey Solidworks,…

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…

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…

Solidsmack was kindly invited down to Waltham, MA to meet, greet and speak with the SW team, hang out at their fancy new campus and witness demos for Solidwork 2013. Josh nor Adam couldn’t make it, so I was freeze-dryed and packed into the luggage compartment and flown out. It was a brilliant experience. Once…

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…

“You have Zeppelin on vinyl? Pfft I have it on FisherPrice Toy Records. Thus, I am so much better than you – and more pretentious.” Seriously, there is now a way for you to take all of your favourite Extreme Swedish Death Metal Bands (Meshuggah on plastic – the irony would rock). Fred27 posted this…

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…

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?…

Getting your CAD file to the physical world is often the longest mile in 3D Printed Design. Printing resolution is getting higher and the materials are getting stronger, but most models have to be manually checked to see if they’re printable. Even after careful fine-toothed inspection, things get missed and valuable time is wasted. 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…

Ever so recently, a number of awesome infographics on 3D printing, and fabrication in general, have appeared on the Interwebs. You probably haven’t seen or heard enough about 3D Printing, so we’d like to share them with you so it’s firmly ingrained into your brain tissues. What’s 3D printing? – Still have no clue about…

Do you lie awake at night wondering about the possibilities of accessing your data from anywhere via the cloud? Me neither, but perhaps you trudge off to work, boot your computer and start working in a system that is completly dependent on the 10 year old, onsite PDM server… that also serves as the print…

Believe me, I was so tempted to headline this story with “Geomagic and Creaform Ass-Scan Gets Australian Kayak Team Fitted” Damage done, but to be honest, the scan is of much more than the posterior. The process of how Ami Drory, biomechanist at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), is forming the kayak cockpit, seat…

Cubify Invent is CAD software aimed at the uninitiated consumer with a 3D printer like the 3D System’s Cube. Unlike the free to use AutoDesk 123D, TinkerCAD or SketchUp, it cost $49, but has all the functions you would need to make almost any part fairly quickly. Extrude 2D into 3D? Yup! Fillets and other such…

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…

Ok, another turning point for CAD collaboration via the web and it’s not the big software companies making it happen. TeamPlatform (that we’ve covered here and here) is turning into the best collaboration platform for CAD related files. They’re consistently bringing out new features aimed at helping you, not only collaborate on a product, but…

Son, go get your ma, looks like SpaceCliam done got into the PDM’in, gone Sharepoint, and is gettin’ the IT folks all excited. It’s true, the young-ish 3D software company has sprouted some data management hairs on the bare chest of its direct modeling software, bringing you both an addon for managing SpaceClaim files and…

So, you have an idea for a helmet. Not just any helmet though. A helmet that makes all existing helmets look totally lame by comparison. You want to bring a design team together–collaborate on it, create different versions, share files, renderings and thoughts about how to pummel any other would-be helmet maker. GrabCAD has revamped…

I’m sure you remember the days of storing large prints in flat-files or the binders full of B-size sheets gaurded ever so preciously by the office admistrator’s glaring eye. Those days are (almost?) gone, but now we’re left to stacks of file folders on a network drive, available to be accessed only when we’re in…

Oleg is right. PLM should—and will—be like more like Google. Not in its color scheme, but in its openness, its neutrality, its acceptance of bits and bytes as data-for-data’s sake.

The Internet has given us access to resources unparalleled in the history of humankind. The volume of exchange for ideas, pictures, written text and now 3D models have been building to a climatic boom in creativity. To an extent, that depends on how you define ‘Creativity’. I see creativity as the synthesis of two previously…

If you really, I mean truly, desire the best Rhino training and tutorials, you’ve got no better choice than cadjunkie. (And I actually thought that before SolidSmack teamed up with them.) The new Tip o’ the Horn series by Scott Schneider (who we interview on EngineerVsDesigner) is live and half-way through the series bringing you…

The Internets is about to become much more active with 3D viewing of your exported 3D data. Sunglass.io has just announced the release of plugins to import your models into the web-based collaboration and CAD-app platform. There are a set of plugins available for SolidWorks, Rhino, Processing and SketchUp along with direct integration of both…

Nervous System is a design firm that churns out mathematically generated CAD files which are then printed and sold online. They make beautiful earrings, necklaces, bracelets and home decor, the perfect gift for your nerdy girlfriend, math teacher or CAD-lover. Really anyone with a pair of eyes and a beating heart in my opinion (except…

It’s a big week for Solid Edge users and the SiemensPLM Solid Edge crew this week. They’re holding their first second, purely Solid Edge event and it’s going down in the annals of CAD Industry event history. Solid Edge University came about as a bit of a revolt by the Solid Edge users (and staff)…

It happened. Oh yes. The five-fold intensity of CAD, PLM, SSLM, RM and every other type of lifecycle management need/want/desire happened this week at PlanetPTC Live. Adam O’Hern, my cohort in design crime at EngineerVsDesigner.com, and I were there being brain gorged and slightly traumatized with interviews, customer spotlights, hamburgers with onion sauce, vodka and…

So iPhones. Good for 2D imagery. How about 3D imagery? That’s a difficult one. Yet somehow, we can say with some confidence, there’s an app for that! Trimensional is completing the digital to physical process with a new iPhone app that takes scans produced by the app via your camera to 3D printed part on…

The graphics in video games just look better than the 3D objects in design software. No surprise there. That games have better(-looking) physics simulation than 3D CAD software though… that amazes me. It just shouldn’t be, but it is. CryEngine3 is a Game Development Engine available for free with non-commercial use. Developers are pushing the…

Wow, when I said Web 3D was heating up, I wasn’t kidding. You know GrabCAD is always cooking up new features, but this is a delightful surprise. Today, they launch their own web-based 3D Viewer available right inside the GrabCAD interface to view 3D files and collaborate with others. Here’s the sneak peak.

Right as we were posting the news about TeamPlatform’s 3DFile.io site, the Sunglass.io team was stepping onto the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The company founded by Nitin Rao and Kaustuv DeBiswas recently landed 1.7 million funding and is bringing new features to the online collaboration platform, including 45 3D file formats, VoIP support and cloud…

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…

The modo software is a fabulously, multi-faceted modeling, sculpting, animating and rendering beast. The lovely modo 601 is out and the EvD Media training site cadjunkie.com has just what you need to get up to speed. Tips and tricks on lighting and matcaps, rendering and more. Here’s a taste of what’s in store.

Go ahead, say it. No, scream it. SUBD to NURBS! Better if it’s done two inches from the secretary’s face immediately after you’ve chugged a bottle of milk. SubD to NURBS indeed. You may wonder what these strange words are. Or, you may know all about the surface mesh to solid modeling possibilities recently launched…