Newsletter

• Featured Products: World Builder Pro
• Tutorial: Build your dream house in a few mouse clicks
• Case Study: Diabolical Puzzles designed with VectorWorks
• 3D Gallery: Pop Images from Maya Complete
• Book of the Month: Understanding 3D Animation Using Maya
• What's New on Novedge

WorldBuilder Pro, a stand-alone scene builder and renderer with unsurpassed compatibly with Max, Maya, LightWave, and SoftImage, is the premier tool for laying out and rendering 3D outdoor environments. Building on a decade of experience in 3D terrain generation, Digital Element’s WorldBuilder Pro offers a streamlined interface, and a full manual with improved support.

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Cadsoft Envisioneer is a very easy to use and very powerful software package for architectural and landscape design. Its intelligent modeling engine greatly simplifies the design process by providing a myriad of tools to quickly create the desired architectural features.
This interactive tutorial illustrates some of the features of Cadsoft Envisioneer that show its ease of use and power in creating architectural designs.

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When New Orleans artist Scott Fredrickson, principal of Diabolical Puzzles, devised an idea to create highly complex puzzles made of stainless steel and presented a wood prototype to a machine shop, he was told the only way he could produce designs of such high precision was using computer-aided design. The puzzles would then be manufactured to use computer-aided manufacturing with state-of-the-art laser cutting technology and fabrication.
But first, Fredrickson had to learn a CAD program. After doing some research and speaking with other CAD users, he decided to purchase VectorWorks.

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Maya Complete is the state of the art rendering and animation system from Alias. Maya Complete has been used to produce countless animations and still images for movies, advertising, product visualization and more. There is virtually no rendering and animation task that Maya Complete cannot undertake. This gallery of rendered images created with Maya Complete shows its advanced capabilities and stunning results.

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Many animators and designers would like to supplement their Maya learning with a less-technical, more helpful book. This new self-study manual is both a general guide for understanding 3-D computer graphics and a specific guide for learning the fundamentals of Maya: workspace, modeling, animation, shading, lighting, and rendering. This well-integrated and produced volume covers these fundamentals in each chapter so that readers gain increasingly detailed knowledge. After an initial 'concepts' section launches each chapter, hands-on tutorials are provided, as well as a chapter project that progressively adds newly learned material and culminates in the final animated short. This is the first book on Maya that teaches the subject using a sensible, proven methodology for both novices and intermediate users. The book, suitable for novices or intermediate users, presents all the basic 3-D animation concepts and Maya software background needed for learning animation techniques and creating sophisticated, state-of-the-art animations. It is an essential resource for animators, game developers, effects specialists, and computer graphic artists, as well as an ideal self-study guide for students or individuals pursuing interests in graphics or animation.

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DigitalElement Aurora 2 for Mac and Win is the only Photoshop plug-in that gives Photoshop users true digital nature effects within Photoshop. Faster and more versatile than clip art and much faster and easier than Photoshop, Aurora specializes in water, sky, and lighting.

solidThinking FORMA 6.5 is the newest release of this powerful and popular product. It builds on the strength of more than a decade of development of the solidThinking product family and remains a very affordable and powerful entry point to the digital 3D design world.

CATIA V5 to Solid Edge translator is is a highly efficient and reliable Solid Edge plug-in translator that reads native CATIA V5 files, parts and assemblies, directly into UGS/Solid Edge.

CATIA V5 to STEP translator a highly efficient host independent, translator that reads native CATIA V5 (.CATPart and .CATProduct) files of Version 5 (Release 6 through 14) as input and generates STEP files either AP203 or AP214 protocol as output.