As many of you so kindly pointed out, we got hacked last week, and the bad guys dropped some badware in one of the site’s template files. This resulted in ugly warnings, problems accessing certain pages, and an all-around yuck-fest for junkies everywhere. Dang it. Black-hats suck.

Well, we’ve changed all our passwords, re-installed the CMS from scratch, upgraded all our security patches, cleaned out the bad stuff, and as of today it seems that Google has decided we’re not bad guys after all. Woot!

I know it’s been a while since the last tutorial. It’s been a busy time at the ohern design studios, but new stuff is REALLY on the way (we promise!):

• A second Rhino class will be available this fall, continuing the work we did on the first set. Feel free to comment with suggested subject matter.
• Adam will also be teaching a modo class at StudioArts.tv this semester. Should be a blast!
• We’ll definitely be posting a modo-for-beginners series, possibly for another well known CG video site. We can’t spill the beans on the details just yet, but lets just say that we’re pretty stoked!
• It may be a few months before we get around to it, but the next installment of our SolidWorks series is most-definitely in the works, and this one will focus on building quality class-a surfaces in SW. Tighten your socks, lest we rock ‘em right off.
• Unigraphics NX7 tutorials are looking really promising for the mid-term future. No promises, but we’re hoping to start posting a major NX7 series sometime this winter, preferably before the new year. Stay tuned!

That’s it, junk-lings. Keep in touch!

– CADJunkie

Never fret, CADJunklings: it’s been a while since my last post, but that’s just because I’ve been busy designing products!

I’ve attached a little cheat-sheet for my preferred file-saving structure for projects. I’m pretty rigid about this system, because it means I’m always able to “go back in time” whenever a client asks for a legacy file. I highly recommend adopting it! Important note: remember “letters, numbers, underscores.” If you use spaces, slashes, asterisks, or other funky characters, you’ll severely limit your ability to script your workflow.

In other news, Modo’s been saving the day lately in the studio. It’s been amazing to see just how much more productive I can be as compared with other industrial design rendering solutions.

I’m officially slated to teach Rhino at Otis again this fall, and will probably also be teaching a Modo class or two at a film production professional school called Studio Arts. It should be a fantastic opportunity for me to learn about the film industry from an insider’s perspective!

Okay, back to work. Time to make stuff!

Adam

This is a part of a beginning Processing tutorial series. If you’re new to Processing, start at the beginning!

As we continue our series on the basics of programming with Processing, we’ll look at extending the “Ball” class we created in the last set to include a user-controlled “Puck” object that can be used to turn this little app into a kind of air-hockey game. Fun stuff!

The beauty of working with object-oriented code is that we can extend the functionality of our code incredibly simply.

In this case, we’ll be creating a new type of Ball object called a “Puck”. All of the variables and methods that are defined in the Ball class will be available to our Puck class, but we’ll be able to add and tweak functionality as needed.

To download the full code on openProcessing.org!

Now that we’ve looked at the basics of the PVector object class, and even created some of our own objects, lets see if we can make the balls bounce off of one another! This will be the simplest 2D collision physics possible, with nothing extra whatsoever, and the math is surprisingly simple!

Grab the code from OpenProcessing!

I typically create PDF presentations using inDesign, but there are times when it’s more convenient to do it straight from Photoshop. Here’s a great little workflow for creating a PDF presentation from Photoshop, using a greatly under-used feature called ‘Layer Comps’.

The back of an iPad is a perfect example of the classic “crowned surface” frequently used in industrial design. We’ve seen it done in Rhino, so here I’ll demonstrate a method for creating a good-quality class-a surface in SolidWorks.

If you haven’t been watching the video presentations at the99percent.com, shame one you! Inspiration galore.

This is a part of a beginning Processing tutorial series. If you’re new to Processing, start at the beginning!

In the last set of tutorials, we looked at how to make a basic circle “bounce” around inside a processing window. In this set, we’ll introduce two new concepts that should help make this simple program more powerful and flexible: ‘PVector’, and ‘Objects’.

Vectors and Objects get a bad rap for being complicated. They get this reputation because they are often used to accomplish very complicated things, but at their root, both are extremely simple concepts, and every programmer should understand both.

First we’ll import the OpenGL library available within Processing. This will allow our sketch to run much more smoothly with graphics-heavy applications. In our case, we’ll be making a program with many–perhaps dozens–of bouncing balls. This may get too heavy to draw efficiently using processor power alone, so we’ll be relying on our graphics card to do the heavy lifting.

A ‘PVector’ (short for ‘Processing Vector’) is simply a way of accessing vector variables within processing. A vector is simply a way of storing multiple values in a single variable. For example, instead of using ‘xPosition’ and ‘yPosition’ in our program, we could just use a single vector object called ‘position’. To access the ‘x’ and ‘y’ components of the object, we simply call ‘position.x’ and ‘position.y’.

The beauty of a vector object is that there are various ‘methods’ that allow us to do math operations very quickly and efficiently. For example, instead of adding the x and y components of two vectors manually, we can simply use ‘position.add(velocity);’. This will help keep our code shorter, cleaner, and make life much easier when dealing with complex physics.

You can think of an “Object” like a little program within your larger processing sketch. In this case, we’ll be creating a ‘Ball’ class. Every ‘Ball’ object in our sketch will behave in exactly the same way, based on the same code we wrote in the last tutorial. The difference will be that we can create (or “instantiate”) as many Ball objects as we want, and they’ll each behave autonomously.

import processing.opengl.*;
ArrayList bouncyBalls;

void setup() {
size(720,400,OPENGL);
hint(ENABLE_OPENGL_4X_SMOOTH);

bouncyBalls = new ArrayList();

for(int i=0; i < 20; i++) {
bouncyBalls.add(new Ball(random(0,width),random(0,height),random(0,5),random(0,5)));
}
}

void draw() {
background(255);
for(int i=0; i < bouncyBalls.size(); i++) {
Ball theBall = (Ball) bouncyBalls.get(i);
theBall.update();
theBall.display();
}
}

class Ball {
PVector pos = new PVector();
PVector vel = new PVector();

Ball(float xPos, float yPos, float xVel, float yVel) {
pos.x = xPos;
pos.y = yPos;
vel.x = xVel;
vel.y = yVel;
}

void update() {
pos.add(vel);

if ( pos.y + 30 > height || pos.y – 30 < 0 ) {
vel.y *= -1;
}

if ( pos.x + 30 > width || pos.x – 30 < 0 ) {
vel.x *= -1;
}
}

void display() {
fill(0); noStroke();
ellipse(pos.x,pos.y,60,60);
}
}

But the theme update is only one small part of the progress. We’re mobilizin’, strategizin’, tutorializin’, and otherwise getting read to blow y’all cats away with new content. Have patience, Grasshopper. These things take time.

For what it’s worth, we’ve been getting crazy numbers of comments requesting Alias Studio tutorials. I’m gonna have to come out and say this publicly: we don’t have access to an Alias license, so we can’t do the tuts. If any of you Autodesk kids are reading this, go ahead and interpret this as a wink-and-a-nod to contact us about this little problem. We like to make training vids, and you like people to use Alias, right? Sounds like a win-win to us…

• CADjunkie.com is currently undergoing a ground-up rebuild. The new design will not only be easier on the eyes, it will [hopefully] do a better job of communicating our core mission: to make 3D-related news and information available to the industrial design community. That, and we were bored. Shake it up, baby!
• Things are (finally!) heating up in the design world this month, and everybody is calling all hands on deck for the summer product development push for 2010. This means that Adam’s up to his eyeballs with work. Don’t worry, CADjunkie’s still a priority. This just means we’ll be a little slower than usual.
• We’re currently looking for ways of improving the site to make it more useful for everybody. Please contact us if you have any ideas. We’re considering some pretty radical changes, so don’t be afraid to ask for the world! We make no guarantees, but we’d love to hear what you think.

Okay kids, we have to get back to work. Keep in touch!

This is a clever use of cheap, ubiquitous tools to create compelling images. It’s always refreshing to be reminded that visually appealing results can be obtained without thousands of dollars worth of complex software.