Get that stretch out of your system with this week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist. It’s fashioned up, ready to make you pull your shoulder blades back and knock out another week of meaningful work while you bob your head to the beat. Whether you’re in the shop milling aluminum, sketching the latest product prototypes or modeling up a 3D storm, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week on SolidSmack Radio we’re kicking things off with “Flow” from Toro y Moi and Madeline Kenney before diving into a variety mind-bending tracks from Jerkcurb, Jim James, Surfer Blood, Big Thief, and others before wrapping up with the classic…

After the Curiosity rover proved itself for 15 long years on the job, its successor, the Mars 2020 Rover, is on the way. According to Associate Administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA has already begun fueling the new rover in preparation for its launch window between July 17 and August 5, next year. Much like Curiosity, the 2020 rover (which needs a better name, stat) will run on a nuclear-powered device. By converting the heat from the decaying Plutionium-238 core into electricity, the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) can provide a total of 110 watts to the machine and its various tools through thermocouples connected to the rover’s engine. This nuclear core…

I know what you’re thinking – I could organize my desk all sorts of ways wit ma 12 gauge shotgun ♫ ♪ But hold your reload and save those shells for dove season. What we’ve got for you is a desk organize made from a beautifully laser cut, single-piece of 12 gauge STAINLESS STEEL. Bryan Lagrange is a CAD Manager with Mezco Fabrication out of Lafayette, Louisiana and just opened up the possibility for you to have a completely organized desktop with a clever, multi-functional design for a desktop organizer. And it’s beefy. The 7/64″ (2.8mm) thick stainless steel sheet adds an elegant, yet solid block of beauty to your…

After 10 years of designing sports products, industrial designer Eelco Siebring has opted for quite the career change. No longer designing sporting equipment, he now works as the lead designer and 2D layout artist for Undone, the upcoming, and quite unique, animated series on Amazon Prime centering around a girl named Alma as she interacts with time to solve the mystery behind her father’s death. Here’s the trailer for some context: So, how does an industrial designer fit into the world of cutting-edge ‘2D’ animation? According to a feature he did with Autodesk, designing products and sketching concept art are more similar than you might think. Using his own product…

As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: Inside America’s Dysfunctional Trillion-Dollar Fighter-Jet Program The F-35 was once the…

If you are in search of a workflow that will enable you to efficiently prepare 3D scanned data for use in Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) software environments, then you’ll want to know about R3DS Wrap 3 (Wp3). In short, Wp3 is a software application that non-rigidly fits a lightweight optimized basemesh to your imported scan data precisely matching it in all its glory! As if this were not enough, Wp3 basemeshes are formatted using four-sided or quad shaped polygons instead of triangles which is truly golden when it comes to preparing for use in MCAD! More on this in a moment. Digital Human Model MCAD Integration You might ask “Why…