NOVEDGE blog

April 08 Newsletter is Out

As expected our monthly newsletter was sent out late at the end of the month. I'm happy that at least this month, after skipping a few issues, we managed to get the newsletter out! It's always a challenge to find the time to put together the newsletter, as much as it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to contact our customers and let them know of the many new products, documentation, and content we have on our website.

The content of the April 08 issue is:

Editorial Section

This month we have a great news. We just made public a new service for our visitors called Novedge Pulse. It's a system that collects and organizes news, tutorials, blog posts, and everything that's happening in the Graphics and Design community, and makes it available to you in a clear and effective way. The best part is the user interaction, where you vote for your favorite items with a thumbs-up and bury those that lack appeal with a thumbs-down.

Featured Product

This month we feature the new Moment of Inspiration modeling system. It's easy to to use, fun, powerful, and can read and write the Rhino file directly. MOI also comes with an affordable price. What else could you ask for?

Tutorial of the Month

Designing a car body is not an easy task. Designing a beautiful car such as a Nissan 350-Z can be challenging. This month we have a tutorial on how to create a 3D model of the Z3 using Maya.

Selected Case Study

There are no limits to the flexibility and power of Rhino. We continually discover new ways people use this powerful design tool to create all sorts of things. This month we introduce you to Luthier Michael Heiden, an artist who crafts mandolins and guitars for customers all around the world.  Read the Case Study to find out how he's using Rhino.

Featured Gallery

Extremely popular in its native Europe and only now being discovered in US, Artlantis Studio is an easy to use and yet powerful application to rapidly create high quality renderings. To understand the reasons for its popularity we recommend you take a look at this gallery of beautiful images.

Book of the Month

VectorWorks is a great product and comes with fantastic video tutorials, but if you are like me, there is nothing better than a good book to learn a new software. Finally people like you and me  have access to a great book we can browse, carry with us, earmark, and use to learn VectorWorks. Check out VectorWorks 2008 Fundamentals Training Workbook.

User Review

Richard Williams is well known in the SolidWorks community. He is a teacher and enjoys playing with SolidWorks and making 3D models. We had the pleasure to receive a product review from Richard about the SolidWorks 2008 Fundamentals DVD-Rom made by Inspirtech and we are happy to feature his review in this issue of the newsletter.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the April 08 newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini

March 07 Newsletter is Out

As usual our monthly newsletter was sent out late at the end of the month. Every month I make plans to be ready by the middle of the month and every month something gets in the way. Not that I'm complaining about it. Writing the newsletter is a very interesting activity. It gives me the opportunity to look back at the previous month, to go through the brands and products we added to our catalogue, search for new case studies, and to write or select a new tutorial. Overall, the newsletter is a rewarding endeavor for me, and this month is no exception.

The content of the March issue is:

Featured Product

This month we feature the new 4.0 release of Rhinoceros. After a few years of development Robert McNeel and Associates replaced the glorious and well known Rhino 3.0 with this new version. It includes over 800 user driven enhancements, the result of a tight collaboration between the development team and the Rhino 3D community. While McNeel is already working on a future version of Rhino, we strongly recommend upgrading your old copy of Rhino to the current version.

Tutorial of The Month

Designing a car body is not an easy task. When the car is a stylish Alfa Romeo 147, the task can be even more challenging. Tibor Toth was not intimidated by this challenge and created a complete tutorial. To accomplish this task he chose two powerful and complimentary tools: Maya Complete and T-Splines.

Selected Case Study

Many artists believe that art is the creative process of designing an artifact and the artist doesn't necessarily have to be directly involved in the process of manufacturing it. Today artists can benefit from available technologies and use powerful tools to invent new forms of art. Read this case study to learn how the Australian artist Michael Keighery creates art using Rhino and the Roland MDX-20 as a scanner and milling machine.

Featured Gallery

Rumors have been circulating for a while about the incredible power of Maxwell Render. Now this fantastic rendering engine is available. Next Limit Technologies believes that Maxwell Render is a perfect match with the new Rhino 4.0, and is promoting the two products bundled together. You don't have to believe my words, just look at this gallery of extremely realistic images created with Maxwell.

Free Download

Autodesk is trying hard to promote DWF as the preferred file format to exchange technical information. To better compete with similar products like the new Adobe Acrobat 3D they are proposing the full featured version of Design Review, formerly known as DWF Viewer, for free! Regardless of the reason for this Autodesk offer, this is great news for all CAD users. You can download your copy of Design Review from the Novedge website.

Book of the Month

To design doesn't just mean to create shapes and combine them into an assembly. It also means to be sure the shapes have the correct size for performing the functions they are designed for, and that they can interact with each other in a predictable and adequate way. For all these tasks designers need powerful mathematical systems, like MathCAD, able to solve equations, to find solutions to complex numerical problems. This month we feature a recent book about MathCAD. If you are a designer, you should really take a look at the book.

User Review

The Novedge website offers an incredible number of user reviews. Almost every single product in our vast catalogue has at least one user review. The most popular products, like Rhino, feature dozens of reviews. Just a few days after adding the new Roland scanner and milling machines to our catalogue we received this positive review written by Jim Mitchel. Take a look at Jim's experience with the Roland MDX-20.

Selected Blog Post

The Novedge blog is running an exceptional series of interviews with the most prominent people in the CAD/CAM industry. I recently had the privilege of interviewing Robert McNeel, the CEO of Robert McNeel and Associates, the manufacturer of one of the most popular design products on the market.  Bob shared with us his unique and successful approach in developing such a complex software as Rhino. If you are a CAD user, I strongly recommend checking out this post.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the March newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini

January 07 Newsletter is Out

I know it's already February, but that's the way things go! We wrote the January issue of our newsletter in January, but always something comes in to delay the final steps. This month the newsletter looks richer than usual. The size of the e-mail message is about 27 Kb, excluding the pictures. The first copies were sent out January 31, while the last copies will leave only tomorrow February 3 in the afternoon. It takes about 4 days to send the newsletter to all our subscribers. The content of this issue is:

Featured Product

This month we feature Autodesk MotionBuilder. It's an incredible product for professional animators and people working in movie production. Thanks to the emerging FBX file format, now MotionBuilder can fits easily in any production pipeline, on both platforms: Windows and Mac. Because of the price and complexity, this is not for everybody, but if you are a serious professional, you should consider MotionBuilder.

Tutorial of The Month

After proposing some advanced tutorials in the last months, this time we went for a simple example on how to use 3ds Max to create a simple shape. This tutorial is intended to provide an easy approach to 3ds Max for users without any previous experience. It's a video created by Autodesk, short, simple and effective.

Selected Case Study

Every once in a while we find an interesting case study on products available from our catalog. This time we found this interesting case study: North Dakota State University, Fargo, used Maya to recreate some historical environments and published the results on the web. You can visit the NDSU web site to experience a virtual visit to Like-a-Fishhook, a Native American village and to explore the 3D model of Fort Berthold.

Featured Gallery

Shade 8 is a very affordable product, but don't get fooled by the low price: Shade 8 comes with a load of advanced features for modeling, rendering, and animation. Just to get an idea of what you can do with Shade 8 take a look at the new Novedge gallery. And don't forget that Shade 8 is available for the Windows platform, 32 and 64 bits, as well for the Mac, including the new Intel Mac.

Free Download

This month I would like to suggest free2Design, a new free software from think 3. This is a very interesting tool to create 2D drawings. And it's completely free. Think 3 is now a pure 3D brand with great 3D products, but has his roots in the 2D CAD world. I guess that very few of us can remember when the company was called Cad.Lab and selling a product called GBG DraftMaker. This 2D CAD system comes from a company that know everything not only about 3D, but also about 2D. And it's free!

Book of the Month

This month I recommend Engineering Design: A Practical Guide. It's a professional book mainly intended as textbook for college classes. But if you like to refresh you engineering design knowledge, this is a great option. Looking at Amazon pages, you will also be able to browse the book like if you had it in your hands.

User Review

If you work with 3D models, 3D connexion SpacePilot is a great addition to your mouse. And this product review written by Curtis Thompson will tell you the Pros and Cons of this product. Thank you Curtis for taking the time to review this product. I invite you to read Curtis review and to go online on our web site and write a review on one of our products.

Selected Blog Post

5 Things to Consider when Choosing Design Software is a very interesting post written on this blog by Cristiano Sacchi, Novedge CEO. If you monitor this blog I'm sure you already read it, but if you didn't I strongly recommend you to do it. And you still have time to leave a comment and share your opinion with other readers!

What's New

Another month with a lot of new products on our web site. There is no point to list all of them here. Just take a look at the "What's New" section of the newsletter.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the January newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini

December Newsletter is Out

It was Christmas when the December issue of Novedge monthly newsletter began to leave the Novedge mail servers heading to the inboxes of over 70,000 subscribers. In order to keep the flow of the rest of the e-mail traffic, the newsletter is sent gradually over a span of 3 or 4 days. This way we can still receive and send e-mails from our servers. This month the newsletter has another improvement, the start of a new section dedicated to a selected post from this blog. The content of this issue is:

Featured Product

It's a short presentation of a recent addition to our catalog: the famous Russian CAD system KOMPAS-3D. This is the most popular CAD system in Russia where it is used every day to design almost everything: from chemical plants to airplanes. We believe it's a good product and absolutely worth the price. Check it out!

Tutorial of the Month

This month we promote a free tutorial from Robert McNeel web site created by the Italian jewelry designer Giuseppe Massoni. Giuseppe will guide you through the modeling of a sophisticated ring using the powerful Rhino 3D. Don't show it to your girlfriend or wife.

Selected Case Study

The December Case Study tells the story of Eden FX Studios in Hollywood. Eden FX is a great user of Lightwave modeling and animation software. You should read this interesting article to learn how they used the software to create scenes of many famous movies and shows.

Featured Gallery

We finally completed the 3ds Max gallery of pictures. It's an incredible collection of beautiful pictures created by the best graphic artists. If you believe artists are only the ones with a brush and a palette in their hands, check out this gallery! You will be amazed.

Free Download

SketchUp is becoming extremely popular. After the acquisition by Google in March 2006, this 3D program is now enjoying the level of popularity that it deserves. This month the newsletter offers a Free plug-in to import and reuse your SketchUp 3D models inside VectorWorks. A great and powerful combination, and it's free!

Book of the Month

Just few weeks after the recent release of Cinema 4D version 10 a new book is available to help you to squeeze every bit of power out of this great 3D modeling, rendering, and animation software. January 2, 2007 the new book by Arndt von Koenigsmarck will be available from Amazon. Pre-order it. Recommended.

User Review

Nenad Stjepanovic knows how to choose a software system. And his review of Lightwave can be really helpful to appreciate the differences between this popular software and similar packages available on the market. Lightwave received 4 out of 5 stars.

Selected Blog Post

This month we highlight a popular post that appeared on this blog on December 12: Why the Transition from 2D to 3D is Taking Forever. I'm sure the topic will generate a lot of comments among our readers. I personally invite you to add your own opinion and comments to the post. Don't be shy, we love to hear from you.

What's New

This month the new products section is very crowded. December was a frenetic month with so many new products added to the Novedge catalog that we where able to fit only a small subset in this section of the newsletter. Take a look and see if there is anything that can be helpful for you.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the December Newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini

The Newsletter is Ready to Go!

Since Novedge started its website a few years ago, we have been publishing our newsletter almost every month. It's our tradition and a way to stay in touch with our customers and friends. Every month we write and put together a group of short articles about the products in our catalog, combining news and technical information.

As we are approaching the end of the month we are getting ready to send out the November issue. Here is the content list:

• A short presentation of a new CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) product by ESI, called CADalyzer, recently added to our catalog.
• A very interesting video tutorial from Nemetschek on how to create a house's roof with VectorWorks ARCHITECT.
• A case study describing the experience of the architect Ed Staelens using Envisioneer.
• A presentation of a new gallery of 3D images created with auto.des.sys formZ. The gallery includes more than 800 images.
• A link to the Ashlar free CAD viewer able to open all Ashlar file formats.
• A review of the book "Building a Digital Human" by Ken Brilliant.
• One of the many enthusiastic user reviews of Rhino we receive every day.
• A list of all the most recent new products added to our online catalog.

Novedge Newsletter Facts:

• The November 2006 issue will be the 38^th. The first issue was published in May 2003.
• This month the newsletter will go out to more than 70,000 subscribers. Each subscription originated on our website. We care about our subscribers, in fact we don't share our mailing list with anybody else and we make it easy for you to unsubscribe if you change your mind.
• Each newsletter presents eight separate sections or short articles. The first issue included only three articles; gradually, over time, the number grew up to the current level of eight per issue.
• Starting October 2006, the newsletter can be subscribed also as RSS feed and can be read using any RSS reader. We believe this is a new and very convenient way to stay in touch with us, in some ways even more effective than the traditional e-mail.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the November Newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini