Autodesk Polishes its Green Thumb

It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges […] Read more..

There’s a new Kerkythea in Town

After a year of amazing development work, the team behind the freeware rendering engine Kerkythea finally released the 2008 version. It is called “Echo” and features some major improvements. While the most noticeable one will be the redesigned sleek user interface (it now has scrollable material list menus!!!), some under-the-hood improvements are worth mentioning, too. […] Read more..

It’s history repeating…

Now this one ought to be quite interesting. Microsoft just bought out Caligari, maker of the 3D modeling, animating and rendering software TrueSpace. Is this a new, free SketchUp in the making? Microsoft wants to use the software for their Virtual Earth platform – similar to Google using SketchUp for their Google Earth platform. This […] Read more..

Nice match: Carbon neutral design with Revit and GBS!

Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = “Building Information Modeling”), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and […] Read more..

Green Design Using SketchUp

Apparently today is blog action day. I didn’t know that myself… Oh, well… The official SketchUp blog just published an environmental design feature with examples of green building design using SketchUp. It is always good to learn from how others are using a design tool like SketchUp – particularly in a commercial environment.