Hasta La Ideas

Every once in a blue moon, some piece of 3D software comes along and just makes one wonder “How’d I ever survive without it?” The Foundry’s new plug in for MODO, MeshFusion, is what I’d consider to be the most amazing piece of software written in a decade. I know it’s a bold statement to make, but for the designer in me, it’s brought something to the table that no one else has quite put together so eloquently.

When it comes to 3D software, MODO is an amazing rendering, sculpting and animation design suite, featuring materials systems for renderings that work very much like Photoshop. It also runs native on Mac, PC, and Linux and, if nothing else, fits nicely anywhere into the design pipeline that’s asked of it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin when it comes to the list of features in Modo but let’s start with just a few:

Tool Pipeline: Gives the ability to create your own tools based upon existing ones. No scripting needed, just pick and choose the features need and go. This offers an almost unlimited amount of combinations of functionality. This quick video showcases the capabilities.

Particles and Dynamics: Just scratching the surface on these opens up the possibility to help set up shots for renderings in a whole new way. Think of creating a table; add a flat surface above it and some curves above that. Now add the option for the table to be a Passive Rigid Body, the flat surface to be a Softbody and the curves to be an emitter… now let gravity take over. The flat surface falls and wraps around the table and the particles add rain all calculated in a matter of minutes. Now add textures and you’re well on your way to rendering out an outdoor picnic scene.

Fall-offs and Action Centers: Think of the 2D gradient tool in Photoshop… now think of the possibilities of this in 3D. Throw in the ability to add in the Move/Scale/Rotation based upon what’s selected and it’s a field day for 3D design.

Rendering Booleans and Volumetrics: Creating that “Just in Time” photorealistic shot always requires some extra finessing that usually requires a work around. If nothing else this aspect of Modo just makes the creation of a product shot that much easier. The Render Boolean works by using geometry to cut away from geometry (think about a block of swiss cheese), that can be used in both renderings and animations. Volumetric can be used to add smoke, fog, clouds, in ways that use to take a ton of postproduction work in Photoshop, After Effects…etc.

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It’s a milestone year for Marcel Wanders. The Dutch designer’s work is the subject of the first major design exhibition to be presented at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum since its 2012 reopening. The survey, “Marcel Wanders: Pinned Up at the Stedelijk,” opens Saturday–a date that will surely live in infamy on Wanders’s iPhone, as he has just launched his first app.

“Milestone,” free to download through iTunes, is something of an anti-calendar: it allows users to look back fondly by marking and sharing the number of seconds since a major personal event (a first date, when one stopped smoking, the day a museum first acquired a “Snotty Vase”) took place. It’s also possible to countdown to anticipated events, but in a more festive way that the watch that just reminds you how close you are to death. “Measuring special moments in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, or days gives a new perception of time,” says Wanders. “Marking significant occasions becomes a personal experience which you can share with others, and with groups of people through your social networks.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Whether you’re an ID student working wood or an architecture student making foamcore models, you need a pencil to mark dimensions on the material prior to cutting it. And you quickly learn that on high-tolerance projects, a regular and unsharpened pencil can have you off by as much as 1/16th, or worse if you’re a sloppy cutter; the things need to be kept sharp.

So next you figure mechanical pencils are the way to go for accuracy. But mechanical pencil leads always seem to break off when they’re jostling around in your ArtBin or toolbox, and those little plastic tubes that hold the replacement leads like to disappear when you’re pulling an all-nighter. Plus a mechanical pencil lead has the same problem as conventional pencils—they’re worthless for marking on black foamcore or darker woods like walnut.

One potential solution is the Accutrax Pencil Blade, a piece of graphite shaped like a utility knife blade.

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We human beings enjoy making things rectilinear, which is why you’re reading this on a glass rectangle while sitting at a wooden rectangle in a rectangle-shaped room that you entered by passing through a rectangle. So as soon as we could figure out how to turn trees into neat wooden rectangles, we did, by eventually coming up with the circular saw blade and the sawmill.

But before the circular saw blade became the preferred method for turning logs into boards, we tried some pretty kooky things, like this:

That ten-bladed monstrosity is a steam-powered vertical frame saw, and some American yahoo invented it in 1801. Depending on how the blades were spaced, it could provide boards of different thicknesses.

By 1809 the invention had spread to England, and by 1821, the Netherlands. In Dutch the machine was called a “raamzaag,” literally, “window saw,” as the manual one-bladed version it was based on looked like a window frame bisected by a saw. Several years ago the Dutch Steam Engine Museum actually restored one and got it working. The video they shot of it isn’t terribly thrilling, but does give you an idea of what an ordeal it was to operate the thing:

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Moving sheet goods is a huge pain in the neck, particularly for shorter guys like me with a wingspan that leaves something to be desired. But even for you bigger folk, there’s nothing ergonomic about toting a 4×8 sheet around your shop or the jobsite.

The Gorilla Gripper is a cleverly-designed handle that allows you to lift and carry sheet goods using your back and legs, while preserving your fingers and toes. There are tons of YouTube videos showing the thing, but I like the following low-res one the best because it shows the actual applications in the field:

I don’t think I’d have the balls to try hoisting it up a ladder, like the guy did in the video, but I’d try everything else they showed.

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