January 07 Newsletter is Out

I know it's already February, but that's the way things go! We wrote the January issue of our newsletter in January, but always something comes in to delay the final steps. This month the newsletter looks richer than usual. The size of the e-mail message is about 27 Kb, excluding the pictures. The first copies were sent out January 31, while the last copies will leave only tomorrow February 3 in the afternoon. It takes about 4 days to send the newsletter to all our subscribers. The content of this issue is:

Featured Product

This month we feature Autodesk MotionBuilder. It's an incredible product for professional animators and people working in movie production. Thanks to the emerging FBX file format, now MotionBuilder can fits easily in any production pipeline, on both platforms: Windows and Mac. Because of the price and complexity, this is not for everybody, but if you are a serious professional, you should consider MotionBuilder.

Tutorial of The Month

After proposing some advanced tutorials in the last months, this time we went for a simple example on how to use 3ds Max to create a simple shape. This tutorial is intended to provide an easy approach to 3ds Max for users without any previous experience. It's a video created by Autodesk, short, simple and effective.

Selected Case Study

Every once in a while we find an interesting case study on products available from our catalog. This time we found this interesting case study: North Dakota State University, Fargo, used Maya to recreate some historical environments and published the results on the web. You can visit the NDSU web site to experience a virtual visit to Like-a-Fishhook, a Native American village and to explore the 3D model of Fort Berthold.

Featured Gallery

Shade 8 is a very affordable product, but don't get fooled by the low price: Shade 8 comes with a load of advanced features for modeling, rendering, and animation. Just to get an idea of what you can do with Shade 8 take a look at the new Novedge gallery. And don't forget that Shade 8 is available for the Windows platform, 32 and 64 bits, as well for the Mac, including the new Intel Mac.

Free Download

This month I would like to suggest free2Design, a new free software from think 3. This is a very interesting tool to create 2D drawings. And it's completely free. Think 3 is now a pure 3D brand with great 3D products, but has his roots in the 2D CAD world. I guess that very few of us can remember when the company was called Cad.Lab and selling a product called GBG DraftMaker. This 2D CAD system comes from a company that know everything not only about 3D, but also about 2D. And it's free!

Book of the Month

This month I recommend Engineering Design: A Practical Guide. It's a professional book mainly intended as textbook for college classes. But if you like to refresh you engineering design knowledge, this is a great option. Looking at Amazon pages, you will also be able to browse the book like if you had it in your hands.

User Review

If you work with 3D models, 3D connexion SpacePilot is a great addition to your mouse. And this product review written by Curtis Thompson will tell you the Pros and Cons of this product. Thank you Curtis for taking the time to review this product. I invite you to read Curtis review and to go online on our web site and write a review on one of our products.

Selected Blog Post

5 Things to Consider when Choosing Design Software is a very interesting post written on this blog by Cristiano Sacchi, Novedge CEO. If you monitor this blog I'm sure you already read it, but if you didn't I strongly recommend you to do it. And you still have time to leave a comment and share your opinion with other readers!

What's New

Another month with a lot of new products on our web site. There is no point to list all of them here. Just take a look at the "What's New" section of the newsletter.

Look in your e-mail inbox for the January newsletter and if you have any feedback or suggestions on how to improve it, feel free to share it with us by leaving a comment to this post.

Franco Folini