Artrage 3 is a really good sketch tool. Was trying out the demo today
www.artrage.com

Fun project illustrating a story for a friend.

Background model in Solidworks, and quads exported from moi3d.
Blender 3d, for character modeling, fluid sim and rigging. Maxwell Render for image above.
Needs further work in Photoshop to fix artifacts here and there.

Thanks to Andrew Price from Blenderguru.com for invaluable tuts as well providing .blend files that I could dissect and use for the image above.

Always nice to get a best overall design
-excerpt from Pop Mech review.
Congrats to Hans and Benson-the design referred to as "straight out of an industrial design textbook"
Sweet!

Popular Mechanics had a great review of the Job Max system here
I did work on cleaning up overmold colorways, vent patterns and boot designs.
Also did a lot of work on how the heads engage with the tool base.

The Tek4 line in general was cool to work on. This camera though was a bear. We had to come up with a construction method that was tough and waterproof,a UI that was intuitive, while ensuring that the product made sense for the worksite. This meant stripping out complication from existing UIs while creating functionlity like a time-lapse feature that allows the user to set the camera going and then document a build. It also has the capability of attaching a memo audio recording to an image.

The large battery compartment provides a good grip area. The product has a distinct old-school feel to it. Its built like a power-tool after all.

Oddly enough- this small flashlight has been one of my favorite projects. We were able to convince the team to go with quality metal components and castings. Also it is really packed pretty tight. When you pick it up it feels heavier than it looks-and all of it is functional.
The engineer on this project gave us a nice little surprise. Usually there is a thin reflector that is faced with a sheet of glass or plastic at the front. The glass and the reflector were consolidated into one acrylic component, making for a super tough bezel. The best part is the light itself which provides a clean beam for quite a long distance. All parts are sealed with o-rings-brings a smile to my face..

Little Entertainment design on the side for Dr Grordbort's Raygun Shootout-a design competition from Weta.

PS: If you like it please do me a favor and vote for it at http://www.raygunshootout.com/submission/340

Fighting Phoenix from Thomas Parel on Vimeo.

It would be awesome if someone did a Centurions movie

This could be pretty cool. Looks like matchmoved footage assuming that the camera is a viewer with a video feed. Combined head tracking and augmented reality could be very cool for 3D CAID.

Little known fact: Domesticated cats are better hunters than feral cats
They have a food source at home ,so you would expect that they would be fat and lazy. Turns out they hunt for the fun of it, while their hungry feral friends dont catch as many mice because they are... desperate and hungry. I find that this applies to companies too. The ones that are making a killing in the market still love the products that they create. Telltale signs for me are when the product development process revolves around cost factors and market analysis. These feral companies no longer enjoy the hunt.

Google for instance couldnt care less about operating systems, yet is in the process of developing Chrome as a competitor to Windows. They make their money in search and advertising , but in the process of improving search, are undercutting GPS, voice recognition, word processing, medical record keeping and multiple other industries in the process. These guys dont connect the dots, they throw a crap load of dots out into the world and find a line or ten that connect. Shoot then aim. Aim then shoot. Both happening concurrently.
They wouldnt be doing this if they were desperate

So if you are in a position of desperation- maybe your cat might be able to give you a tip or two ;)

Octane Render - EcoRobot Rendering Tutorial from evermotion on Vimeo.

This is a pretty interesting new software called Octane Render that looks very promising indeed. It provides Maxwell Render quality at Hypershot speeds. Octane works using your video card, and is optimized for the Cuda feature set of Nvidia cards. This is the second program I have used that specifically leverages Cuda, and this apparently produces speed increases of 1000 to 1500% over traditional renders. Wow. So if you are putting together a design PC, you might do well to bet on Nvidia video cards.

Both NextLimit and Bunkspeed are purportedly working on GPU based render programs, while the folks behind fryrender already seem to have a product in pre-release.

I am kicking myself a little because I purchased the minimum level of graphics card that would run Solidworks 2009, because traditionally you get your performance from a killer CPU chip and buckets of RAM.

Currently Octane Render only works with obj files, so that is well and good for most CG software like 3DS Max, Maya etc, but you have to go through extra translation for CAD programs like Solidworks.

Get the demo here

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=112

Their January render competition

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=162&start=30

Test of jewelry design technique with 3dcoat