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

http://jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html

Don Norman reaches the conclusion that design research does not really result in breakthrough products. Pretty good read and this jives with my own experience with product development. Product research seems to be working for incremental developments- Integrative/Design thinking though seems to be far more potent in coming up with something new.

I have been on a few research trips and they ground your ideas really fast. You quickly realize what ideas may or may not be crap. They give you fuel for more ideas. But I get a lot of fuel from simply keeping my eyes and mind open (well..trying to anyway) My own experience is that you need to stew for a little while. That means new ingredients need to be added to the mix all the time. You need to be trying multiple approaches to product development- and that unfortunately a bunch of cool ideas will pop up on completely unrelated projects and tick off designers and managers when you suggest something that might delay a project with those good ideas :)

Little warmup in Photoshop

Pretty satisfied with this render.

I refined the battery materials a little more as well as the lighting.

Finally figured out UV mapping, and layered material creation in Modo. Really confusing paradigm compared to programs like Maxwell. There is a wierd hierarchy that is somewhat like Photoshop, but a lot more confusing for texture creation. Rendering a turntable tonight. Will proceed to do an exploded animation after that- at least the top coming off to show the circuit board.

Headed to App State Nov 7th. Should be fun

Modo Test Render, and as you can see youtube is not really the place for a smooth repeating loop. I will need to add a few more cycles to this loop and then upload. Edit- Oddly watching in HD seems a little smoother.

A while back Citroen ran a competition where they uploaded CAD files of production vehicles and concepts for people to reconfigure and re-arrange. I started assembling some of these components together back into something pretty informative that gives you a nice feel for Class A surfaces and how they are put together. It would be interesting to hear some of the reasoning for these patch layouts, but you can learn a lot simply by untrimming some of these surfaces. Files here

I've finally had some breathing space and uploaded an obj file of the Splash bowl here