Bob's got a Blog

Why didn't I know this before? Bob McNeel has a blog. Its updated regularly by himself and Carlos - Bob's the founder of McNeel, developer of amongst other things, Rhino, Brazil, Accurender and all manner of other stuff that sells by the bucket load at a very reasonable cost and Carlos runs the European operation from their Barcelona office.

And as anyone who's been to a Rhino event will know, this company has a following which other CAD vendors can only dream of. I don't know if anyone has a Rhino tattoo, but its only a matter of time.

I was lucky enough to get to go to their DIMe event in Mexico last year and I was blown away - here, hundreds of Mexican design students gathered together, largely at their own cost, to learn about the process of design from some really big names in the game - and I don't mean the 25 minute pitch of "how to innovate" nonsense you get at other user events, but hour long, in-depth details - and they listened.

Link

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New Tools for Rhino - Brazil Beta & Photogrammetry

Word is coming out of McNeel & Associates that there are two new add-ons coming on stream for surface modelling master, Rhino. Firstly, there's a brand new beta for Brazil, the photo realistic rendering add-on for Rhino. Updates include a new 'Graph' section to most textures which displays a graph of the texture's red, green, blue, alpha or luminosity along one axis. There are also a range tools for precisely defining sun direction and position which will be mostly useful for those working with Architectural visualisation. Other updates include a context menu to the color button, implementation of Brazil's Advanced Global Fog Environment implemented..

There's also Rhinophoto, Photogrammetry plugin for Rhino and provides automatic 3D digitizing from a set of photographs. having had a quick look at the web-site, this tool looks pretty impressive for those wanted to reconstruct 3D models (for whatever purposes), using some standard digital cameras and a bit of time. There are some good tutorials which give you a solid idea of what's involved in the systems use.

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