Just as I was pointing out that Linden Lab had yet to introduce some long-promised additions to Second Life’s modeling toolset, word comes via C|Net (Link) that so-called “Sculpted Prims” (aka “sculpties”) may be on the horizon. So what’s a “sculpted prim”? According to a FAQ on the Second Life Wiki (Link):

A “sculpted prim” is a prim whose shape is determined by a texture – its “sculpt texture”. Sculpted prims can create organic shapes that are not currently possible with Second Life’s prim system.

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I’m an old school small-gauge film fan. I own a few old 8mm, S8, and off-size cameras and happen to have a small stash of Super 8 film in the fridge (for the day I have a good reason to use it). Little surprise then that some guy tinkering around with printing S8 film (Link) gets my attention (via Boing Boing). The test videos on his site are better than I expected; and he even shows different printing methods (inkjet and laser) alongside the original video footage for the sake of comparison. Nice. Hope we see this taken further.
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With all the discussion about “design thinking” and “innovation”, I found some quotes in an article on Appliance Magazine’s website that are probably more mainstream than the “hype” crowd would care to admit. In a piece about conceptual appliances, “Conceptual Transformation” (Link), this quote from Matthew Kueny, the head of new product development at Miele USA, had me do a double-take: Continue reading →

Here’s an interesting bit of information I discovered on the 3D CAD NEWS blog (Link): Alibre’s very recently announced support for Google Earth (not even sure where I read about it but think I stumbled across it on DigitalMediaWorld – Link – where I didn’t bother reading past the first sentence) also happens to provide a path for other CAD applications.

I was one of the original sign-ups for Alibre back when it was first launching, but I’d not had much need for it (since I run Pro/E and Maya). Now I’m interested in giving this a try because as most of you know (based on a number of posts, including this one regarding Whirlpool – reLink), file portability is a big deal to me.

Last night I surfed through Chris Kelley’s blog (Link) and learned that UGS, the PLM/CAD company for whom he works and a company I sometimes mention in my posts, had decided to rez into Second Life and was opening a virtual outpost. It’s not the first CAD vendor to do so; Autodesk entered some months back. However, Autodesk doesn’t appear to be pursuing PLM (product lifecycle management) applications which, for me, are closely related to something like Second Life. So I logged into SL to see what UGS was doing and wound up chatting with both Chris and another UGS representative.
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