3D Warehouse Grows up: Collaborative Design with SketchUp

Reading the latest announcement from the Google SketchUp Blog, I feel that 3D Warehouse has now ascended to a whole new level – namely the realm of collaborative 3D design. So far, 3D Warehouse has been a great addition to Google’s SketchUp software product. Designers can share 3D models, assembly plans and a whole lot […] Read more..

Another SketchUp Renderer Available for Free: IDX Renditioner

Joining the ranks of already available free rendering engines for SketchUp (like Kerkythea and Indigo) is the free version of IDX Renditioner Express. This is a full featured copy of the main product with the only limitations being a reduced image size (max. 600×480 versus 4096 x 4096 in the full version) and less lighting […] Read more..

And there is SketchUp #2: The Free TrueSpace by Caligari

Competition is great, isn’t it? This is especially the case when big companies are fighting over a market segment. As I speculated earlier, Microsoft is now following Google’s lead and is releasing Caligari’s TrueSpace 7.6 for free. I am installing TrueSpace right now and will post some examples soon, but for now the capabilities seem […] Read more..

Everything is Data

Even beyond the great music, Radiohead’s latest video “House of Cards” is simply amazing. And that for two reasons: 100% data-driven visuals. The entire music video was produced without the use of a camera. Instead, three kinds of (near- and far-range) laser scanners were used to capture the artists and several environments. That’s just great […] Read more..

Richmond Olympic Oval Design

FYI: There is a very interesting conversation on the DesignReForm forum about the Richmond Oval for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. Topics are its design and fabrication, differences between Revit and Inventor and why the designer/fabricator StructureCraft Builders of Vancouver settled on the latter. Read on…