What is it with backyard bugs and software? First there was Grasshopper and now there is Dragonfly. Add to those the big animals used by McNeel and the cover designer of the O’Reilly books and we have ourselves a veritable zoo! But I digress… Autodesk Labs has several web-based applications that look very interesting and [...]

A recent post by Smashing Magazine on free fonts made me look again at the list of fonts installed on my (Windows) machine. In particular, I was looking for fonts that would work well for CAD annotation. After all, AutoCAD’s TXT-font, Revit’s Arial and SketchUp’s Verdana can appear a bit “default” for good-looking plans. And [...]

There are now so many free 2D CAD drafting programs available out there that it is almost amazing why Autodesk’s AutoCAD LT is still selling (let alone their recently updated software AutoSketch). Some examples are: DraftIt, Solidedge 2D, D-CAD-L and there are more, I just can’t remember all the links. Here’s the new contender for [...]

Ahh… there it is: Casework with family name Countertop Sink Assembly Line Based. Autodesk just updated its large and well presented component library called “Seek” at seek.autodek.com. You can either go there directly and download Revit and DWG CAD files or a PDF 3-part spec or you can access it from within Revit 2009 using [...]

A comment on one of my SketchUp posts prompted me to provide clarification in the form of a new post rather than just a quick reply. The issue was that exported images from CAD files (SU in this case) can be quite grainy. To export an image of the current view in SketchUp, go to [...]

Just a few more days until the updated roster of Autodesk products arrives. In the meantime, I came across this screenshot from our good ol’ CAD application, which apparently now has been renamed "Raptor". While the name should give it more bite, the user interface comes across featuring a sleek and stylish dashboard. Source: It’s [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

(Or: Customizing AutoCAD in a computer lab with restrictive user permissions) I am teaching several CAD classes and our computer labs are all set up with very restrictive (currently Windows XP) user rights. And that makes sense. After all, I don’t want to find out at the beginning of class that half of the computers [...]