Free 3D Software and 3D Model Providers
"The DAZ FREE 3D Software promotion is three award-winning 3D software products now available for the first time ever for free."
(DAZ Productions, Inc.)
Fig. 2&3 IT'S ART Magazine
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The top 10 major benefits of high-fidelity prototyping
"1) First and foremost, a high-fidelity prototype gives you something realistic enough to try out your ideas with target users and customers before making a significant investment. This lets you discover which ideas are good and which are not, and if the product has real value, and also discover if users can figure out how to use the product.
2) Doing a high-fidelity prototype helps you - even forces you - to think through your product to a much greater degree than paper specs.
3) A high-fidelity prototype enables and encourages the type of collaboration between product manager, interaction designer, and architect/engineer that is necessary to discover a valuable, useful and feasible product.
4) A high-fidelity prototype provides the level of information necessary for accurate engineering cost estimates, early in the process when these estimates are most useful.
5) A high-fidelity prototype provides the engineers and QA organization with a rich, interactive description of the product's intended functionality and design to be used as a reference basis for implementation and test.
6) A high-fidelity prototype provides the rest of the organization - marketing, sales, customer service, business development, company execs - with a useful understanding of the product to come early enough in the process that they have time to do their jobs properly.
7) A high-fidelity prototype prevents the classic waterfall problem of doing design after the requirements, rather than realizing that functionality and user experience are inherently intertwined.
8) If you do a high-fidelity prototype and you test your ideas with users and you find significant problems, you will have saved your company the cost in terms of time and money of building something that would have failed. Not to mention the opportunity cost of what the team could have been building.
9) If you do a high-fidelity prototype and validate this with target users, you will significantly reduce the time it takes for your developers to build the product both because the product is better defined, and also because you will have been forced to resolve many of the questions early that otherwise throw a wrench into development.
10) A high-fidelity prototype helps keep the focus of the team on the user experience."
(Marty Cagan, 29 April 2008)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Digital Prototyping: 3D product design and simulation
"The Autodesk solution for Digital Prototyping enables manufacturing workgroups to create a single digital model in Inventor for use at every stage of production - bridging the gaps that typically exist among conceptual design, engineering, and manufacturing teams. With Digital Prototyping, you can get more innovative products to market faster and increase your competitive advantage."
(Autodesk, Inc.)
3). Raymond Kurland (August 2010). 'Comparing the Capabilities of Autodesk Inventor Professional 2011 and SolidWorks Premium 2010 Using TechniCom's Delphi Expert Technique', A TechniCom Group LLC whitepaper.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Portfolio for Video Game Environment Artist Philip Howlett
"The Second City is a 1930's Chicago inspired street scene. This was created for a client who was looking for a proof of concept, with a view to presenting it to games publishers. All assets were modelled and textured by myself, from an extensive catalogue of reference photography. ...
This is a fly-through video recorded in Fraps straight from the UDK viewpoint. Breakdowns of meshes and lighting can be seen. Thanks to Robert Antill for the work he did in After Effects on this."
(Philip Howlett)
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MultimediaSHARE
iSphere: Context-Aware Computing
"Making 3D models should be an easy and intuitive task like Free-hand sketching. This paper presents iSphere, a 24 degree of freedom 3D input device. iSphere is a dodecahedron embedded with 12 capacitive sensors for pulling-out and pressing-in manipulation on 12 control points of 3D geometries. iSphere exhibits the top-down 3D modeling approach for saving mental loads of low-level machineries. Using analog inputs of 3D manipulation, designers are able to have high-level modeling concepts like push or pull the 3D surfaces. Our experiment shows that iSphere saved steps of selecting control points and going through menus and make subjects more focus on what they want to build instead of how they can build. Novices saved significant time for learning 3D manipulation and making conceptual models, but lacking of fidelity is an issue of analog input device."
(Jackie Lee, Yuchang Hu, Ted Selker, 2006, MIT Media Lab)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
