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Choosing a 3D Package

So you’ve decided you want to create digital 3D models.

You might be an aspiring movie special effects guru, industrial designer, architect, or mechanical engineer. Maybe you’re wanting to create photo-realistic images of product design ideas, or maybe you want to use 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) to control a Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) milling machine to bring your ideas into physical reality. You might be hoping to play with rapid prototyping, mechanical simulation, or 3D animation for art, illustration, or demonstration.

Knowing the right 3D software package(s) will not make you a good designer, a competent engineer, or a film effects creative genius. It will simply be a tool in your belt, there when you need it, making it possible for you to communicate three-dimensional ideas quickly and accurately for virtually any purpose you can imagine.

But when you look for a specific program into which you’ll invest lots of time and money, the number of options can be daunting. How do you decide which 3D program is right for you?

There is no magic bullet in the 3D software world; every piece of software that exists on the market has a niche for a specific type of user with a specific combination of needs. In this set of posts, I’ll try to make the pros and cons of all sorts of common 3D applications easily understandable for the newbie, and hopefully even clear up a few things for the seasoned professional.

In this, the first post in our series, we’ll be looking at the broader landscape of 3D applications, and discussing the basic categories of 3D applications. more »

New Dropdown Menus

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve added a new dropdown menu system at the top of the site. Under it you will find the highlights from a few of my main video tutorial series, as well as any other tutorial-related info I might like to add. This should help make it much easier to find the specific content you’re looking for.

On a related note, I’ll also be going through and adding tags to most of the posts as well. Hopefully this will also help to make the content easier to find.

These changes were made based on feedback from users like you! If you have any suggestions, do tell!

Keep in touch,
Adam

Public Service Announcement: Save

Everybody knows that if you don’t save your work, you’ll lose it. Save early, save often, save iteratively.

But there’s another detail I’d like to throw out there as well: if you’re using the demo version of Rhino, please be warned that after 12 hours of continuous running, the demo version of Rhino shuts down. If you have un-saved work, it will ask if you want to use one of your 25 saves to save it. If you click no, YOUR WORK IS LOST.

The moral of the story is this: just use your 25 saves like normal saves. Don’t try to pinch and squeeze every last save out of the Rhino evaluation copy: if you like the program, just buy it. Then you won’t have any saving restrictions, and the world will be a happier place.

3DWorld, Issue 127!

3DWorld Magazine issue #127 is now available in stores, and the modeling of the Bugatti Veyron is written and recorded by yours truly. Over six hours of video!

*NOTE: The large rendering of the Veyron on the cover is not my model. The model I built is the smaller red car at the bottom left of the cover.

Simple Speedometer, V5

I’m working with a dead-simple bicycle computer mod and Arduino to send pulses to a Processing application. The result is a powerful and flexible bicycle speedometer. Eventually I’m hoping to turn it into a video game of sorts; something to vary my workouts and make them more entertaining. Longer term it could be cool to port it for iTouch… but lets not get ahead of ourselves ;)

What can YOU do with it? Just install the Arduino code on your Arduino board (duh), plug your reed switch into pins 0 and GND (doesn’t matter which is which, just plug ‘em in), and run the processing application. Let me know how it goes!

ReedTachometerV001_Arduino.zip
ReedTachometerV005_Processing.zip