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Top Honors - Saluting Outstanding CAD Products (Cadalyst Labs Review)
1 Dec, 2007 By: Ron LaFonCadalyst All-Star awards honor the best of the best — the most outstanding among all software and hardware products that earned Highly Recommended ratings from Cadalyst Labs in the past six months.
Cadalyst All-Star awards honor the best of the best — the most outstanding among all software and hardware products that earned Highly Recommended ratings from Cadalyst Labs in the past six months. Not all Cadalyst reviews are published in the print issue, and some of the product reviews in this article appeared in the Cadalyst Daily e-mail newsletter. Beginning in 2008, Cadalyst will bestow its All-Star awards annually rather than every six months.
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Software
Adobe Systems • Acrobat 3D v8 • www.adobe.com
September 2007. Adobe released the second major version of Acrobat 3D, and I noted in my review that this major design and collaboration application has a lot of tools that are both powerful and easy to use. And they're all based on the ubiquitous, user-friendly PDF file format.
To the feature set found in Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 3D adds the ability to convert 3D designs from major CAD applications to PDF, as well as create rich documents that can include exploded views, animations, lighting, materials, textures, and color. It also can export precise geometry from PDF to STEP, IGES, and Parasolid to enable downstream use in CAD, CAM, and CAE applications.
Adobe has continued to forge alliances with major players in the CAD and engineering software community, and new announcements appear regularly. As a result of these alliances and technology acquisitions, Adobe Acrobat 3D works with a wide array of industry-standard software.
Adobe Systems • Photoshop CS3 Extended • www.adobe.com
September 2007. Considered by many to be one of the premiere applications of our time, Adobe's new version of Photoshop has features geared toward technical users.
 An Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended screen showing a U3D 3D file open inside the application. |
Photoshop has long been an extremely useful application for design professionals in the visualization and digital content creation (DCC) pursuits, but the addition of support for 3D and the ability to obtain quantitative as well as qualitative data from images adds great depth to the product. With its additional integration with Adobe Lightroom and superb facility with digital images, Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended is an exceptional application that can be very useful tool for design professionals.
Photoshop CS3 Extended now directly supports several 3D file formats: U3D (no surprise there), 3DS, OBJ, Collada, and Google KMZ. Native support is provided for files with 1–1.5 million polygons. Users can import, view, and interact with most 3D models, and they can easily render and incorporate 3D content into their 2D composites and edit existing textures on 3D models directly within the application to see immediate results.
Autodesk • Maya 8.5 Unlimited • www.autodesk.com
July 2007. Maya is an extraordinarily capable design and animation application that has been used for a wide range of professional-level still images, renderings, and animations and to produce some of the remarkable effects in many popular movies. In my review, I noted that Maya Unlimited is a powerful tool and that Maya 8.5 offers artists enhanced creative control, which enables faster completion of complex animations and simulations.
 With Maya nCloth, the first module based on the Maya Nucleus solver, artists can quickly direct and control a range of simulations, including cloth and inflatable materials, in entirely new ways. |
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AutoCAD Tips!
Autodesk Technical Evangelist Lynn Allen guides you through a different AutoCAD feature in every edition of her popular "Circles and Lines" tutorial series. For even more AutoCAD how-to, check out Lynn's quick tips in the Cadalyst Video Gallery. Subscribe to Cadalyst's Tips & Tricks Tuesdays free e-newsletter and we'll notify you every time a new video tip is available. All exclusively from Cadalyst! |
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