Revit design whitepaper and new 3D Warehouse rules

Two interesting news items: CASE architects have developed an interesting whitepaper for Autodesk that illustrates nicely the conceptual design process in Revit 2010. In this paper, a highrise development is taken from the conceptual stage through some Ecotect solar analysis all the way to facade panelization using the new Revit tools. You can download the […] Read more..

FYI: Save some cash on SketchUp Pro

Get some money from the SketchUp folks. The method is a bit longwinded but it’s well worth the effort. Instead of producing a late-night infomercial for SketchUp Pro (Buy two copies, get a free pocket protector), we decided to go a simpler route: Helen put together a promo code that knocks $100 US off the […] Read more..

Ambient Occlusion Rendering in Revit

Here’s a method that I found recently on the buildz blog: Although it is not clear from the rendering dialog, it is easily possible to do a soft-shadowed ambient-occlusion rendering in Revit’s implementation of MentalRay. This is done by setting the time of the rendering to sometime during the night. After the rendering, just open […] Read more..

Newsy SketchUp

The Daily CatchUp The first news about SketchUp is news itself. To be more to the point, the folks at SketchUcation.com have just launched an interesting news portal. It is called The Daily CatchUp and it was created to bring frequently updated news to us SU users. So far, posts seem to follow the major topics […] Read more..

Kerkythea and Indigo become commercial renderers

After years of us using high-quality rendering software for free, it just makes sense for their developers to eventually turn their endeavors into profit. This happened recently with Indigo and today, Ioannis Pantazopoulos, the creator of Kerkythea announced a similar move. Both have been freely available renderers for SketchUp and other 3D modeling applications. Here […] Read more..

Getting ready for 2010 in the Autodesk world

Now that the Autodesk 2010 versions are finally available, it is time to get familiar with them. I am particularly looking forward to the new Revit functionality (3D modeling and paneling tools), but there’s far more than that in the Autodesk software roster. Maybe the main change to grapple with is the ribbon menu UI. […] Read more..

Shells and tension structures

Shells and tension structures (cable nets or fabrics) are beautiful structural elements that provide a very lightweight organic shape with a visually clear structural language. When it comes to creating these, however, specialized tools are required since the underlying math is anything but trivial. If you want to work with shells or tension structures, try […] Read more..