Today, SolidWorks 2015 peels itself from the cocoon of the Dassault dev chamber and releases itself into the loving arms of users around the world. (Fly free, fresh software, fly free.) Adam, Simon and I were flown to Boston last week to snuggle up around a conference table at the SolidWorks Corp HQ in Waltham,…
Are 3D CAD companies adding the features that users really want? We asked you, SolidSmackers, to tell us what you find most face-bashingly frustrating about 3D CAD tools today, boy, did you deliver. As it turns out…
EvD Media’s very own Adam O’Hern has been busy concocting various new awesome sauce CAD tutorials over at cadjunkie. The industrial design video training site features hundreds of videos ranging from SolidWorks and MODO to Rhino and Adobe tutorials. In this new mini-series, Adam will be answering your burning CAD questions as well as presenting…
A tear falls on the molten plastic heap outside the confines of the 3d printer base. The print bed is too small. It’s sadness that creeps in at times, leaving us to scale down or chop up our designs. “But the model has already been created as a single, solid piece!” More tears. There’s a…
There are five things I want after designing a part–a damn part, damn fast. 3D printing was suppose to be the revolutionary technology that made all our manufacturing woes go away, speed the whole process up and leave machinists in a wake of plastic fumes and corporate laughter. DMLS still holds high hopes for production…
Since announcing support for 3D printing directly withinin Photoshop earlier this year, Adobe has been focusing on enhancing the popular photo-editing software to be an even more powerful 3D content creation tool. In a blog post from Adobe released late last week, the go-to software company for legions of designers announced that they will be…
Drones are quickly becoming commonplace and it’s not only military and law enforcement who have them. Even the kid a couple of houses over has a quadrocopter lit up with LEDs he flies at night a couple of times per week, prompting me to take video and uploading it to YouTube to see how many…
Siggraph 2014 is coming up this weekend in Vancouver and as expected, lots of exciting new computer graphics tech developments will be announced. Among them is this incredible new photo editing tool from researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of California Berkeley. Operating under the project title “3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph…
You’ve trained your body to withstand two hour meetings, chatty co-workers and guzzling a Slurpee in five seconds flat–THE BURN. Now you’re anxious to sharpen your SolidWorks Simulation knowledge. You could poke around the interface, use the wizard when nobody is looking or you could get some proper instruction on the ins, outs, ups, downs…
Imagine working on a project, modeling and simulating the design, in the very environment. A 100% dimensionally accurate environment that you shot with your mobile device. It’s an ability we’ve talked about here before, considered the effect on product development and honestly, thought would be here much sooner. We’ve scanned parts, reference geometry and rooms…
Let’s say you’ve pinched off the last sip of your 8th ginger brew, your bladder is full and you need to 3D print a part that looks like a part from your mother’s, 2nd cousin’s custom-made prosthetic. You’ll probably have to model that sucker up yourself, but maybe, just maybe, it has been modeled and uploaded somewhere else…
As the sweat beads drip across my sun-scorched face, my mouse hand quivers and cracks in the cruel dry heat. “This was a bad plan.” I think to myself. “Setting up an outdoor office in the middle of the Mojave looked good on paper, but the reality is rather different.” If only I’d been wearing my bracelet, this never would have happened.
If you have been with us, tracking the growth of Autodesk’s cloud-based CAD platform Fusion 360, we have some more good news for you. After the last update that brought KeyShot rendering, almost seven months ago, the new addition bring crispy CAM capabilities. Calling it an entrepreneurs’ single stop for all product design and manufacturing…
Look out Stratasys. Look out ‘lil ol’ 3D Systems. Mama Autodesk is coming to hardware town, and bringing a truckload of open-platform 3D printed fury with them. Today, it was confirmed in a blog post that Autodesk is entering the hardware market and will be releasing their first 3D printer. It’s not only a 3D…
If you’ve been fishing, you know the layer of slime that covers the fish, protecting it from your nasty hand bacteria. It’s also a defense mechanism that helps protect the fish from predators and, as it turns out, is much more than what it seems. Particularly in the case of the Hagfish. Researches at MIT’s…
SolidWorks World already seems like it was in the distant past, but in reality, it was just six weeks ago. However, now’s your chance to experience SolidWorks World all over again, or maybe even for the first time. Each and every break-out session and presentation that took place at SolidWorks World 2014 is now available to consume at your own rate, directly from their website.
For all of those getting antsy to click a button and start a live session to share your confidential CAD data whilst in your jammies, the ability to do so in now here. SpaceClaim has released SpaceClaim 2014 Service Pack 1, and what a Service Pack it is. With it you get LiveReview, formerly codenamed…
Having been President and CEO of Dassault Systèmes (parent company of SolidWorks) since September of 1995, Bernard Charlès has seen better than most how much the 3D software—and software in general—landscape has changed in the last twenty years. From the transition of industrial designers increasingly adopting CAD engineering tools into their workflows to the concept…
On the first day of SolidWorks World, you can always expect a big announcement. The big one this year is the announcement of SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual (SWMC). Last year they announced it as well, but this time it comes with a release date and pricing. $249/user/mth, available April 2nd. The price is already being discussed…
Hike up your pantlegs and show off that multilingual ‘I collaborate’ tattoo you mistakenly got on your calf last summer, SpaceClaim is providing good reason to get behind the possibilities of collaboration in the CAD space. SpaceClaim piqued our interest with wisps of whiteboarding in October. Now, they’re showing just how Collaboration inside SpaceClaim works,…
Autodesk is blowing off the metal shavings of static shop-side subtractive manufacturing, delivering the first of its kind collaborative CAM solution. Today, the software product/service company kicked off Autodesk University 2013 in a chilly Las Vegas announcing Autodesk CAM 360, pushing the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) process to the cloud and milling out a sweet little oily…
Last month we reported on the opening weekend of the new Hatch Live tournament—a sort of Cut+Paste-like competition with the end goal of having a unique, manufacturable design. Well, after a month’s worth of tournament weekends, this past weekend saw the championship round between talented designers Wil Rodriguez-Joglar and Nelson Ayala as they battled out…
Autodesk has been making headway with various announcements leading up to next week’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. A little over a month ago we saw the release of their Project Miller preview, which is aimed at optimizing and validating designs before hitting that heavy ‘Print’ button to send a file off to a 3D…
Why, just the other day, 3D Systems announce the Geomagic Sense scanner aimed at the home user and hobbyist with a few millimeters of accuracy and handheld coolness for $400 bones. Just think though, professional scanning with 60-118 micron accuracy and a desktop scanner/tripod/software/power cable could be yours for just “$14,900 to $24,900.” (Yes, power…
Looks like Autodesk is celebrating their 2012 acquisition of a CAM software company… with the acquisition of another CAM software company. Out of the press, fresh this morning, comes the news that Autodesk intends to acquire Delcam, maker of PowerSHAPE, PowerMILL, PartMaker, ShoeMaker and many other CAD/CAM Solutions.
Yesterday, 3D systems quietly unveiled a new member to their small family of modeling apps including Cubify Invent and Cubify Sculpt with their latest, Cubify Design. While Cubify Invent is their most intuitive tool that is aimed at teaching the basics of 3D modeling and Cubify Sculpt offers organic modeling and digital sculpting, Cubify Design…
Lookout. SpaceClaim is doin’ it, doin’ the thing. I think we could have called this one. In fact, I think we did at some point. We knew SpaceClaim was pushing (and pulling) geometry-filled envelopes when they had the first truly multi-touch 3D modeling, 3 YEARS AGO. Granted it wasn’t a production ready feature, but it…
For those who have had the time to get their feet wet in Autodesk’s Cloud-based CAD platform Fusion 360, you might have been missing a few ingredients from your previous workflow in another CAD package…particularly in the rendering department. On Wednesday October 9th, that problem will be solved after the announcement this morning that Luxion…
Lo and behold, a wee update popped up on the Autodesk CAM page today. An update with a shiny ‘NEW’ badge to share that Autodesk has actually finished development of their very own native CAM app for Inventor. And like its companion app and predecessor HSMXpress for SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor HSM Express is completely free.
It wasn’t too long ago that Flatter Files was putting SolidWorks and AutoCAD files in your pocket. Ouch! Pardon your reach! Now they’ve churned out an update aimed at access to a wider array of content and have pushed their platform to the far reaches of the Android universe with a new app available for…
As we all know, getting from 2D to 3D in various CAD packages has typically involved importing multiple sketches, centering at the origin of the XYZ, and building out from there. At the recent SIGGRAPH Asia however, a new software by the name of 3-Sweep was previewed that allows a user to extract 3D data…
Perhaps you were enjoying some light budgeting of software expenses over the weekend, following thoughts of monthly pricing with icy swigs of Portland’s best pale ale. Would paying monthly work better? How can we get the software we need for this three month project? Autodesk thinks they have the answer. They’ve been moving toward a…
In last week’s Cool Tools of Doom n’ Stuff, we mentioned Elon’s upcoming reveal for a gestured-controlled rocket design. Sure enough he shared the video yesterday via Twitter. This is Elon riding the ‘Future of Design’ like the broken colt of an Altai mountain stallion. Giddyup.
In a not too distant future, you’ll absorb your coffee through the air, control your home thermostat with third eyelash from your left eye and sculpt crazy alien faces in your browser. Actually, that last one is already here. It has been for some time as a open source port of a school project by…
Believe it folks. SolidWorks eDrawings for Android is real, living in a small bungalow at the corner of Google Play and awesome. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’m not sure I would have believed it. We’ve heard it’s ‘Coming soon’ for the past six months. SolidWorks user Jack Owen was the…
That’s right. Loads of simulation. Loads and loads of it. Pun totally intended. Engineering simulation is a beast. It can chew up your time and computing power like it’s binging on a massive mix of laminar and turbulent flow scenarios. NOM NOM NOM. So, a few software development companies are building apps that allow you…
Looks as if 32-bit computing has one pudgy, incompatible leg in the ground. It’s been on it’s way out for years, but if you look in your computer’s Local Disk drive, you’ll still see a majority of applications reside in the Program Files (x86) folder. Still, support is waning. As SolidBox reported, SolidWorks 2014 will…
Both Autodesk and GrabCAD have made some exciting announcements this week with Autodesk’s Fusion 360 launch on Tuesday and GrabCAD’s new Workbench which will allow even more powerful sharing features the CAD community. We had a chance to sit down with GrabCAD CEO Hardi Maybaum and Autodesk’s Director of Mechanical Design Products Prabakar Murugappan. So…
After months of hype and speculation, the first Cloud-based CAD platform is here from Autodesk in the form of Fusion 360. At $25/month per license, a user can purchase their seat in the Cloud for less than a week’s worth of Starbucks lattes. But despite the low cost-of-entry, how does Fusion 360 stand out as…
Well folks, this week we’ve been in Anaheim, California for this year’s 2013 PTC Live Global event. We had a chance to sit down with Brian Thompson, VP Product Management, CAD Segment and talked with him about the Creo roadmap, 3.0 features, and why apps are getting into the 3D printing scene.
There’s a crowd gathered in Anaheim, California. A crowd of engineers, designers, data administrators and others involved in the product development process who are interested in what’s to come in 3D software and how others are using it. Some are wearing ties, others are wearing flip-flops and some are wearing both. We’re out at the…
Ya know, I was just looking at the letter ‘M’ this morning, thinking, you need an iPad app named after you, a 3D iPad app. There’s just something that goes together with M’s and apps… or, at least, there should be. M+3D. It could stand for so many things and Autodesk is announcing an app…
Low and behold, the newest version of SketchUp has arrived. Come hither you geometry shaping device of delight. Since being acquired from Google by Trimble Navigation last April, the only update has been a stylish new logo. That all changed last week with the launch of SketchUp 2013. The name changes from version number to…
Here’s a quandry. How many supplier-certified parts and assemblies do you need to make your 3D viewing experience via the web worth it? What if you could not only view those models, but integrate them into your design, right in the browser? That’s the next step Sunglass.io has taken, teaming up with CADENAS parts management…
Shouts of hooray and songs of delight are going out among fans of Tinkercad this morning. My kids are ecstatic and honestly, I am too. Tinkercad is back. Over the weekend, Tinkercad announced a deal has been inked that will put Tinkercad site and technologies into the deep development pipeline of Autodesk. On top of…
Toys. What crotchety old man is the only person in the world who doesn’t like’em? That guy? Well, he can gum his pudding in shame, because GrabCAD is putting on a challenge to 3D print a toy and they’re teaming up with Ultimaker to make it happen. The Ultimaker 3D printed toy design challenge is…
Some would rather drive down Route 1 in a Porsche Carrera listening to Tiesto instead of modeling the exotic convertible in SolidWorks. If, however, you desire the later, you’ll want to pause your SolidWorks surfacing infusion and jab this into the base of your neck. In a previous post, Mark Biasotti detailed the desire to…
Your choices for web-based collaboration are ever-growing towers of storage, sharing and data-viewing options that are turning into quite the trend in the 3D software space. Sunglass was one of the first on the scene with viewing CAD files in the browser and the widest support for 3D file formats, 3d software plugins, cloud-based apps…
Two weeks ago, GrabCAD launched Workbench. It’s not the worn countertop in your Grandpa’s garage. Rather, it lives on the internet surrounded by the warmth of Amazon’s S3 secure server architecture. More specifically, Workbench is the revamped version of GrabCAD’s project collaboration platform that adds a new interface, viewing of all major CAD file formats,…
Remember Alibre? That’s what people will be saying after today (or may have already been saying.) Alibre is the company and makers of Alibre Design 3D modeling software that was acquired by 3D Systems in July of 2011. As of today, Alibre is combined with Geomagic, the makers of Geomagic Studio 3D scanning software (and…