It’s that intense chill of power you feel when you run screaming through a gypsum-board wall right before you throw-up and pass out from a mild concussion. If only you had implements of destruction better suited to your surly demeanor. Christian Ristow has just what you’re looking for. A three-fingered claw. Made out of Aluminum.…

Suddenly you hear a *pop* and all the anticipation of creating imaginative 3D models you’ve stored up over the weekend leaks onto your timesheet.There’s no stuffing that gooey mess back in, but there are a few fresh bits of 3D perfection you’ll want to view to get you momentum back. They stretch from graphical to…

You’ll need 67 terabytes just to contain the excitement your storage-deprived mind is about to feel. How do you build huge cloud storage? This is how. Online backup company, Backblaze, now providers of one of the cheapest cloud storage solutions known to man, gives you the cloud storage step-by-step scoop. It’s storage on a budget…

Sometimes, even for the gifted such as yourself, it takes more than the power of the mind to form massive chunks of steel into structures that look cool and don’t crumple when hanging bits of mountain from it. For Corbett Griffith of Instinct Engineering, it’s completely natural. Since graduating Georgia Tech with a BSME and…

Forget for a moment that you could receive permanent ocular impairment with the absorption of too much color. The new issue of Develop3D is about to force sunglasses and a cold cup of icy tea to your face. I just got the paper copy in the mail. Yeah, so I write up an occasional piece…

I am beyond the point of training badgers to scale brick buildings and form random binomial equation patterns on the side. Today’s technology is just too advanced and one German company is showing how it’s really done. UrbanScreen, in the attempt to completely redefine what is possible with the outer surface of a building, does…

Time for trip down to the camping store, you have some matchsticks to buy, 4 million to be exact. That is, if you want to challenge David Reynolds in the bid to beat the matchstick model record… and spend a good 15 years at 10 hours a day doing so. David, a former oil rig…

How many times do you look at somethign and say, “yeah, that would be MUCH COOLER in 3D.” Ya know, stuff like a book, a movie, or set of schematics for a miniature fusion reactor. Yet, with all of the possibilities, there’s just something way to simple about the glyphs representing the English alphabet and…

Pull up your socks. It’s about to get ruckus up in the CAD Engineering Software world. The Conference is going down the next few days in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Palace Resort. COFES 2009 (Conference on the Future of Engineering Software). The topics focus on ‘Innovation’*, from how software affects design to predicting the future…

Yes, It’s that day, and you need some 3D geometric inspiration. Look no further. We’ll take that 3D geometry hunger and add the sci-fi appeal and architectural construct of a single Brooklyn-based artist. The intricate sculptures of John Powers captures a form that absolutely glorifies all the ideas of the mathematical properties of space. It…

Allright gang. (Yes, I just called you gang) I didn’t get a chance to post this incredible look into the future of 3D CAD and Social Media madness yesterday, so here a treat for ya today. It’s all come together and Blake Courter from SpaceClaim has done it single-handed with a single add-in to the…

“Ha! Did you see his face when he found out it wasn’t actually a donut!” Yes, it’s the day where we lay aside all of our inhibitions and totally fool the daylights out of people we care about. My thoughts? As long as your April Fool’s Day prank uses an aardvark and makes someone cry…

Look, I know you’ve seen your share of provocative ‘visual essays’ that just make your wits reel with multi-dimensional perceptions of life and the universe, but this one is really cool looking, and it smells of PhotoWorks rendering. This lil’ experiment in visual prose is from Darren Ng. You may remember his impressive apartment refurb…

A very kind reader and master of SolidWorks surfacing technology sent me a really fun link that plays on the idea of ‘unboxing the box’ – as in, removing the notion that surrounds cars of being boxy and inefficient. It’s from Audi and produced by 1st Ave Machine. They make shaping cardboard look way easy,…

What exactly do you get when you stick two highly talented SolidWorks users, a middle-age product manager and thick sarcasm into a small trailer? Only the most jaw-tightening 3D CAD video series hilarity to ever be broadcast across the vast reaches of limited wi-fi access. These videos wreak of everything your design universe is composed…

It was Sunday night. A day before the SolidWorks World Sessions started. Most likely this would have been another night at the Hotel Lounge trying to speak over the noise. Instead, it was a night spent learning how to win at BlackJack. The strategy, the running count and all the tricks in between. How? It’s…

Have you ever been working through a design – finding solutions, working with others, getting sick of IT problems when suddenly you realize you would like to give someone else the opportunity to experience all the wonderfully nurturing engineering you’ve done? You can. Alex Ruiz, The SW Geek, was given that opportunity and he wants…

So much for inspiring kids to grow up becoming managers of salty, high fat, carb ridden fast food chains. Let’s inspire them to become engineers with the ability to bend biological matter (i.e. paperboard cutouts) to THEIR WILL. Chick-fil-a is featuring ‘3-D Insect Models’ as toys in the Kid’s Meal. Cool – introducing small, hungry…

Don’t take it from us, just listen to Al Dean who confirms that he is 99% sure that the new RED Digital Cinema cameras Scarlet and EPIC are modeled in SolidWorks and likely rendered in the blistery goodness of HyperShot. The RED SCARLET and EPIC are the first of their kind build-it-from-scratch-with-endless-amounts-of-possibilities Digital Still Motion…

There’s nothing better that staying up all night playing video games with your favorite robot friend, unless your robot friend is actually made of Legos and gets you cold beverages from the fridge. If you browse Flickr for SolidWorks Photos, you’ll occasionally come across some outstanding models and renderings. These Lego renderings by Bob Van…

I warned you. Tonight, October 15th, four uniquely qualified engineers will begin a series to entertain your analytical mind with mind controlled cars, space-age sleeping pods, giant robots and anything else that borders on cool and impossible. Discovery Channel’s Prototype This! premiers TONIGHT. Not only will they be creating concepts that shock your senses, they’ll…

Did you know that 3DVia has a free 3D modeling creator of it’s own? 3DVia Shape 2.0 has been released and just got revamped with some new features that take on the ever-so popular Google SketchUp. The similarities in commands and concept of each are obvious, but what’s even more incredible are the differences. Free…

So what would you tell SolidWorks if you had their ears for a few minutes? Would you complain, praise, or tell them to add something? A new website is up, taking that whole idea, and serving it up hot for your enjoyment and entertainment. DearSolidWorks.com is providing a quick and easy way for you to…

So, yesterday in Switzerland, a bunch of subatomic particles busted out a lap around the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever conceived by us tiny humans. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running, but it’s not the only project testing the vast limits of scientific discovery. Japan’s Large Helical Device has some fancy…

It’s both parametrically intense and oddly invigorating to look at. It’s like jumping in the air through a small hole and coming out on the other side with all the knowledge of perspective while marching rhythmically outside the confines of an inverted parallelogram. What is it? Surrealism. An artistic expression of the early 1900’s that…

I’m lovin’ me some algorithms. I’ve actually become so interested in them it’s affected my posting frequency and I’m starting to see domino-like creatures forming beautiful patterns in my numerically challenged nightmares. An algorithmic approach to design. Boring huh? Well, the results these patterns of numerical data create are the most amazingly fluid and kinetically…

Why, it ws only a few weeks ago we did a comparison of the Twitter talk about SolidWorks and AutoCAD. Jeff Clark at Neoformix is at it again with their stream of consciousness version that shows the density of words used in for a term over time. What do you think the most used word…

3D online maps are so yesterday, and so is the news of Google’s new web-based 3D Virtual World, but after looking into it more, I had to let all of you interested in 3D and CAD know what the possibilities could be. You may know about the popular Virtual World SecondLife. It’s a full-featured World…

Lena Gieseke has taken Picasso Guernica and transformed it into a version of the painting that will leave you deeply immersed in the canvas of the Cubist master, Picasso. Guernica has got to be incredible to see up close (it’s currently at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain), But when you look at it…

I’ve been playing with the Spore 3D Creature Creator for the past couple days and I gotta say it is one of the funnest, most addictive ways to create creatures that I’ve ever seen. Not only that, the 3D controls and manipulation are just amazing. It’s drag-n-drop-n-modify creature makin’ hilarity at it’s best… and it’s…

If you look over the edge of your coffee cup you’ll notice everything is going 3D. There’s more news about 3D maps, 3D TV’s and 3D games than ever before. Then I see this article from the January 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix about a 17,000 sq. ft. model of what modern day (1980) New…

The Google I/O conference is in full swing with all sorts of goodies coming out. But, what’s really cool and going to affect how you view the world and map-based web apps in the future is the announcement of the Google Earth browser plugin. No longer will you be isolated to two dimensions of movement…

There’s not enough explodin’ stuff in CAD these days. It’s all sketch this, extrude that. So, when I saw this, I just had to show it to you. Some of the 3D visualization out there just amaze me. But this video, blows my mind. “TSNStudio’s Extreme Loading® is an engineered simulation technology originally designed for…

Out of NOWHERE, your overwhelming hunger to stack colorful blocks, creating cities and worlds unknown… has been satiated. CubeScape puts the ability in the tip of your mouse-clickin’ finger to build isometric creations, watch replays, and then save it to share your mad creation with others. Cameron Adams of The man in Blue came up…

Maybe it’s not fair, but I thought it would be a little fun to compare the conversation of SolidWorks vs. AutoCAD happening on Twitter. I used an amazing tool that data visualization ar-teest, Jeff Clark, has come up with called Twitter Spectrum. It’s a visualization of the words used in two topics you enter into…

You’ll want to read Wiring Up an Event if you’re interested in the least, what is starting to come about in the the CAD world as it relates to the Web and the realm of social media. You’ve seen my post about Why I like Twitter and while Blogs and RSS are still a mystery…

It’s new and shiny and doesn’t hurt, plus… The conversation is happening there You find out stuff before anyone else You have access to people you normally wouldn’t I’ve meet a lot of people and a lot of SolidWorks users I’ve found new CAD related and SolidWorks Blogs (see below) It’s pretty amazing when you…

I’m seriously about to crawl out of my skin waiting to see the IronMan movie. It comes out in alot of theaters today although it’s slated for May 2nd. Ever since I saw the first trailer months ago, I geeked out to do a SolidWorks model of it, but just haven’t had the chance to…

What would you do if you were off in Ethiopia waiting in a guest house to adopt your third child? If I thought long and hard I probably wouldn’t have come up with what Caleb Stolls did. I don’t want to tell his whole story but basically he created an model and animation of the…

Allright, I’ve found something that will keep you up all night or keep the kiddos entertained for 8 minutes longer than usual. It’s called LineRider and you create a world of ramps, hills, valleys and obstacles to send a tiny sledder down until he flies of falls to his demise. Amazing simple and fun. Here’s…

Yesterday was sort of a blow off day on the Blog/News scene. You gotta pretty much figure that half the stuff you read on April 1st is gonna be bunk. While a lot of people think it’s complete idiocy, it’s also a chance to lighten up and see different aspects of how people think or…

OK, completely non-relevant and completely having nothing to do with 3D CAD, but hen also having everything to do with cool. C’mon! Ed Norton and Tim Roth turning into two huge beasties battling it out?! There’s probably some 3D mechanical laser scanning something or other so… relevancy achieved. It’s in HD, so let it load.…

Just about everybody wishes SolidWorks could do this or that or complains that it doesn’t do something really cool. I could throw down a list of things I don’t like, but that’s just makes the selection of fresh organic produce seem even worse than it actually is. Which is actually better than the selection of…

I came across what is probably the most interesting job title I’ve seen associated with SolidWorks. A SolidWorks Visualiser. It’s on a job posting out of Northern England and is listed in the Creative Media Industry. The pay for this is 25k-30k pounds (50k-60k USD) full-time. The job description reads like a typical engineering position.…

If you do a lot of searching for photos or just like better ways to search for things I think you’ll like these two plugins from Cooliris. PicLens PicLens is an incredibly slick and easy way to search and view images. You can search Google, Yahoo, Flickr, PhotoBucket, DiviantArt and some others. What would be…

That crazy orange SolidWorks Real logo is at it again and I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep till I find some answers. If you get the SolidWorks Express Newsletter, it probably popped up in your inbox yesterday around 9:58 a.m. when your at the peak of efficiency. They have a nice photo of…

I’m really enjoying the Nikon D40 I purchase a little while back. I was going to check out the new D60 and saw Nikon had a really slick new interface for the Nikon USA site. The photos kinda hover ethereally in space until you move the pointer over them. When you click one, the photo…

I can’t help it. It’s rare you take a day off and come home with a baby girl. Isabella Grace – 8lbs 3oz – 20.5″ – No tattoos You can see more photos on our personal site or flickr site I’m stoked. I think she’ll be in charge of graphics and letting me know when…

Some of you might know my wife Maggie is about to have a baby. Looks like it’s about that time. Forgive the absence of enlightening posts for, ya know, at least a few hours. UPDATE: Woo! a Baby girl! Name: Isabella Grace Born: Thursday, February 21st, 9:31 am Weight: 8 lbs 3.5 oz Length: 20.5…

Who makes a commercial with creepy little monochromatic people anyway? The SolidWorks parent company Dassault Systemes does. And while it has the feel of that movie where the guy brings that little clay man to life, it’s very cool. Dassault Systemes Future of 3D Commercial from Solidsmack on Vimeo. They showed this at SolidWorks World…