DISQUS

Excellent post Josh! Huge kudos to Steelcase for sharing photos of their prototypes and to you for recognizing the importance of including them in your post. I am ecstatic to see a major manufacturer pointing out the obvious - that prototyping in 3D, in the real world is IMPORTANT. There is too much emphasis on substituting tube time for reality and the crappy products we live with are showing the results. Thanks for showing how it should be done.

Finally, a new show that doesn't involve getting killed in Alaska! They have a great web site for keeping the interest of anyone who's interested. I enjoyed exploring their setup and hope they do us all proud!!

Thanks for keeping us up to date Josh. Yes, I work for 3DVIA, but I appreciate that you always keep me up to date on so many different subjects that relate to 3D modeling. You bring a balanced view with a heap of attitude - excellent mix!
Don

Josh - You're right about Virtual Earth being a little slow at times (and flaky too), but sometimes it really is worth the wait. There are just so many amazing things being developed now by a lot of really great people. We should all be trying as many new things as we can, so that we know what works for us. Thanks for all the great things that you find and bring to our attention! Keep it up.

Full disclosure first: I work for 3DVIA on the development team after more than 30 years in the design and engineering real world. I've used SolidWorks for more than 11 years. 3DVIA has a stong working relationship with Microsoft, as does SolidWorks.

Darth Vader (i.e., Microsoft) is not my favorite, but they do have some really cool stuff that just never seems to get mentioned in regards to what is happening in the 3D world. Several times, for personal endeavors, I've done comparisons of Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Sometimes Casper the Friendly Ghost (i.e., Google)is better and sometimes Darth is better.

My point is that where we are going in the future of 3D has many strong players and like most new technologies there is no clear path nor any totally good guy/bad guy scenarios. We all need to be aware of all the possibilities, since we are the ones who will decide what works.

Check out Microsoft Virtual Earth (http://maps.live.com/) for the customer side and (http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/product/3...) for the developer side.

It is better to know than to guess.

Flame On!

Excellent tips Josh! They'll help reduce the panic that sets in when everything "goes red" just before you need to ship the file or print the drawings for a looming deadline. Keep it up!