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. [...]

This morning, Autodesk announced its Autodesk Assistance Program. This program is meant to help people that have recently been laid off to get back on their feet by providing free CAD software (AutoCAD®, Revit® Architecture, Autodesk® Inventor® Professional, and/or AutoCAD® Civil 3D®) for 13 months and offering discounted training and certification classes. Overall this sounds [...]

Some CAD news that landed in my inbox recently: SketchUp: This year’s SketchUp modeling competition for students has nothing to do with campuses. Google wants you to model a bridge over your favourite crossing instead. Deadline is June 15, 2009. Another competition has been announced by Dwell Magazine together with Volkswagen. For this one, you [...]

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 [...]

Just saw a post on the next Revit release and things look promising! Revit will apparently look more like Rhino (background gradients etc.) and will also get better 3D modeling capabilities. Even a paneling tool will be included (see image above). For the rest, read the post at Revit ArchCenter. You can find some more [...]

When you are working with any CAD software, then you’ll quickly appreciate the benefits of pre-made reusable objects. Be they called blocks, components or families – as is the case in Autodesk Revit, they are immensely useful. For your Revit modeling pleasure, here are a few manufacturer websites that are now offering “configurators” and provide [...]

Oh, yes… you can buy some, too. Autodesk and Turbosquid have partnered to start a market for Revit content (i.e. families). This joins websites with free content like RevitCity and Autodesk’s own Seek service. There is also a contest for “early-vendors”. From their press-release: To encourage users to publish Revit families for sale, TurboSquid is [...]

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 [...]

When it comes to architectural or structural design of wood buildings, there are only a few software packages available in North America (compared to what is out there for steel or concrete design). While these (e.g. cadwork, Dietrich’s, IES VisualDesign and more here and here) have great tools to design and size anything from a [...]