There’s only 3 days remaining to submit your rendering of the Mach 4 Racer to Rob Rodriguez’s November PhotoWorks Rendering Contest. The contest closes Friday October 21, 2008 and voting will end the following Friday, October 28, 2008.

I would love to see us break some records for the number of entries so fire up PhotoWorks or PhotoView 360 and submit your entry today!  I can’t wait to see your renderings!

You can download the model from my Downloads page or from Rob’s Page.

Stay tuned….more to come!

Hot off the presses today is the news that entrepreneur extraordinaire Richard Branson will be a Keynote Speaker at SolidWorks World 2009.  Richard is the man behind the Virgin Group which started as a record company but has since expanded to include airlines, mobile phones, broadband, and commercial space flight just to name a few.

When “the list” was published at Matthew West’s Blog a few weeks back Mr. Branson was one of the folks that quickly caught my eye.  (In fact…it turns out that I was the first to guess him!)  I’m really looking forward to hearing him speak.

Stay tuned….more to come!

I have finally solved the audio lag issue that you might have noticed in previous videos that include voice over.  The video is over 9 minutes long, so be patient, it might take a little longer to load.  Click on the image below to watch this Video Tip.

Stay tuned…..more to come!

From Left to Right: Jon Hirschtick, Rodney Hall, Ricky Jordan, & Jeff Bohanan

Tonight I had the privilege of attending the Knoxville SolidWorks User Group meeting which featured SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick.  I’ve been hearing LOTS of great things about this group and their new leader, Jeff Bohanan.  I was not in the least disappointed.  It was evident that Jeff had meticulously planned EVERYTHING in detail for the event which resulted in a smoothly run meeting.  Jeff even went to the trouble to setup the serving table with a spot for each type of pizza and the spot was labeled!  The crowd was well fed with 31 pizzas from Papa John’s plus a couple of boxes of wings!

The meeting was held at the Technology 2020 building which is a joint venture between many companies in the area to help promote start up businesses.  The presentation room was large enough to hold quite a few folks.  All total 75 people were in attendance there tonight!

Jeff kicked off the meeting with some prize giveaways from SolidWorks.  After that he reminded those in attendance that SolidWorks World will be coming up in February 2009 and that registration is now open.

Jeff then handed over the meeting to SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick.  Jon’s presentation outlined the History and Future of CAD.  The origins of today’s CAD systems had roots in the 1960s with Dr. Ivan Sutherland’s PhD thesis on “Sketchpad” which used a light pen to draw lines on a computer monitor.   The early 1980s saw the first breakthroughs in variational geometry (which led to parameter driven 3D models) by Dr. David Gossard in MIT’s CADlab.  Dr. Gossard was a mentor to Jon who was a student at MIT during this time.  It is amazing how much of Dr. Gossard’s visions of 3D modeling became reality as the 1980s progressed.

Jon also discussed his thoughts on the Future of CAD.  His thoughts included the advancement of more Hosted Applications.  He did say that he thinks that SolidWorks running as a hosted app is still pretty far down the road.  He did feel that in the near future you could see more 2D applications like DWGeditor running as hosted applications.  (An example of this is BluePrint Now which is available at SolidWorks Labs.) Open Source was also a major topic discussed.  Jon pointed out that Open Source Applications are gaining in popularity and use these days and that there could be inroads into the CAD Industry in the future.

At the end of the meeting Jon fielded questions from the users in attendance.  By far the most popular question brought up by multiple users was if backward compatibility would ever be built into SolidWorks.  Jon said that he has heard this request quite a bit lately and that he definitely can see the benefits of it from the user’s perspective.  Jon promised to pass the feedback along to the folks at SolidWorks.  If you are a user of SolidWorks and would like to see this functionality I HIGHLY encourage you to visit the Customer Portal and fill out an enhancement request.

I was happy to see fellow User Group leader Rodney Hall of the Catawba Valley SolidWorks User Group at the meeting tonight.  I’ve seen Rodney several times at SolidWorks World but we never have had much time to talk.  It was nice to have some time to get to know Rodney a little better and hear about the exciting things he is doing with his User Group.  Like me, Rodney took personal time off work and drove 4 hours to attend the meeting tonight.  Rodney had a much better camera than I did and will be e-mailing me some pictures from tonight.  I’ll make sure to post them later so you can check them out.

I’d like to thank Jeff Bohanan and the entire Knoxville Group for a great meeting tonight.  One of my favorite things to do is visit other SolidWorks User Groups and I hope to do it more in the future.

That’s all for now….stay tuned….more to come!

UPDATE 1: 10-29-08

I have corrected the attendance count and posted a picture sent to me by Rodney Hall.

UPDATE 2: 10-29-08

I was so wrapped up in the presentation last night, I didn’t take notes very well and did leave out a few other things that Jon discussed in regards to the Future of CAD.  Thanks to Rodney Hall, who sent me some PICTURES of the event (along with some snapshots of the slides), I remembered a few other points that Jon made that I feel are very noteworthy and should be added to the notes from the meeting.

In addition to the Future Trends of Hosted Applications & Open Source which were mentioned above, Jon discussed three other trends which he thinks will impact CAD in the future.  Those items were, Video Games, Touch Interfaces, & 3D Printing.

Jon made a very good point with Video Games.  In the past if you wanted to see the “best” high end graphics, you would look to models and renderings produced on CAD workstations.  Today if you want to see the best graphics, you look to video games.  If you own an XBox 360 or PS3 you know what I’m talking about.  If you don’t, just take a look at some of the screen shots on the web of the games being released for these consoles.  The images are beyond amazing.  Video games have already had a direct effect on SolidWorks.  The enhancements to RealView and addition of the PhysX engine to SolidWorks 2008.  Another feature that had direct roots from Video Games is the Ambient Occlusion option.  Since the DISPLAY of 3D models in SolidWorks in the graphics area is actually a tessellated mesh, one could wonder if more technology could be leveraged from the gaming industry to enhance the performance of 3D model display in the future.

As Neil pointed out in his comments to this post earlier today, Direct3D rules the gaming world and there are more and more users that are calling for this graphics technology to be implemented in SolidWorks vs. the current OpenGL setup.  One of the key advantages of Direct3D is that you can successfully use less expense “gaming video cards” in place of the high priced workstation grade graphics cards.  Other CAD companies are already making the switch.  Perhaps the influence of Video Games will lead SolidWorks down this path as well.  Time will tell.

Jon also talked about Touch Interfaces.  This is an area that is of keen interest to me.  If you ever have played with an iPhone, you can get a taste of what perhaps we will see in the future.  There are many companies working on this technology and I can see many applications that could be implemented in 3D CAD software.

The last Trend that Jon discussed was 3D Printing.  Jon believes that we will one day treat 3D prints in a similar manner to paper coming off a printer.  If you are not satisfied with it, throw it away and print another one.  In the present day you hopefully wouldn’t dream of throwing away the 3D print you just paid $1,000 for, so it will definitely take some time to get to that point.  With the advances in the 3D printing industry over the last several years, perhaps we will get to that point sooner than most think.

The Story

Most if not ALL of the items I design on a daily basis are proprietary which means I cannot share the models with the public.  One of the goals I set this year was to create a complex model in SolidWorks that I COULD share with the SolidWorks/CAD Community.  Over the years I have picked up countless tips and tricks by downloading models and presentations from Paul Salvador, Ed Eaton, Mike Wilson, & Matt Lombard just to name a few.  In my mind it was definitely time to give back to the community and share one myself.

Sometimes inspirations come from the strangest places.  When the Speed Racer Movie came out early this summer, my son got this really cool looking “Matchbox” size car in one of his Happy Meals.  It was the Mach 4 Racer that Speed Racer’s brother Rex drove at the beginning of the movie.  As he was showing it to me I started looking at it thinking to myself, “That would be a cool car to model in SolidWorks.”  I took a few pictures of the car (I was at home and didn’t have access to my NextEngine Scanner) to give myself a bit of a head start by using the Sketch Picture command.  When I started modeling it I wasn’t really sure where I was going to go with it.  The toy was a bit crude in a few places, so I made up my mind early on that I was going to detail the model a bit more vs. the toy car.  I was able to grab a few screen shots of the car in the movie preview and quickly saw there were seemingly endless boundaries for the amount of detail I could put into the model if I had the desire and TIME to do it.  With my hectic schedule, the Blog, the SolidWorks User Group, and doing the Technical Editing for the SolidWorks 2009 Bible, I quickly realized I was probably not going to be able to detail the model just like the car in the movie or to the level that Mike Wilson did on his “original” Speed Racer Mach 5.  If you haven’t checked out Mike’s model, I HIGHLY encourage you to do so.

I had the model about 75% complete when SolidWorks 2009 Beta rolled around but I had to put it on the shelf for a while.  I did sneak in some time to get it complete enough to include in my new Blog header.  Over the last two weeks I finally found the time to finish it out to a level I was satisfied with.  My hope is that those of you out there who want to learn more about surface/complex modeling will find it useful.  With that I am proud to announce that the models have now been posted for download (the links are down further).

Rob Rodriguez - PhotoWorks Rendering Contest

Rob Rodriguez will be featuring the Mach 4 Racer in his November PhotoWorks Rendering contest. In case you are not familiar with his contest, users download the contest model and submit images rendered with either PhotoWorks or PhotoView 360.  Rob posts all the entries on his site, and then everyone votes for their favorite!  The winner receives a prize.  I challenge you - my readers to SUBMIT YOUR ENTRY!  Remember it doesn’t take as long to render models as it used to now that PhotoView 360 is on the scene.  I’d love to see a record number of entries in Rob’s contest.  Make sure you visit Rob’s site for all the details on the contest.

Downloads and Details

OK…let’s get this out of the way first.  This model is available for education and learning purposes only.  The models contained in the zip files below are NOT to be used in any consumer paid training course or pay to access online media without expressed written consent from rickyjordan.com.  I reserve the right to deny use of this model for any purpose deemed by me to be inappropriate.  Copyright 2008 - Ricky Jordan

I have made the model available in two formats.  The first is a native SolidWorks 2009 model.  The main part model contains 339 features and on my laptop takes about 62 seconds for a total rebuild.  The second format is a Parasolid model so users in previous versions of SolidWorks (or other CAD systems) can download the model and view it.  Please note that the model, like the toy, is small scale.  The total length front to back of the car is right around 3.5″.  Below are the links to the downloads:

Mach 4 Racer - SolidWorks 2009 Files

Mach 4 Racer - Parasolid Files

I hope you enjoy the model.  It was alot of fun to create and also presented some good challenges along the way.  Stay tuned…..more to come!

SolidWorks 2009 introduces some time saving enhancements that will help users better understand missing references.  Check out the Video below for more.

Stay tuned….more to come!

7:39pm - Into the second episode of Time Warp now - Watching the “Will it Blend guy”

7:40pm - They just blended an iPhone….that was painful to watch….but the marbles are cool!

7:41pm - About to blend lighters! ….Oh yea….BIG Flame!!!  But the Blender didn’t melt!!

7:45pm - Talk about hazardous occupations - Juggling Chainsaws??  What??????

7:46pm - Juggling looks sooooo easy in slow motion!

7:47pm - The guy NEVER moves his eyes while juggling….interesting!

7:48pm - The DVR has caught up…and I’m finally live now!

7:49pm - Juggling 10 pound chainsaws….they “Say don’t try this at home”.  Umm….YEA

7:53pm - I’m not really being persuaded by all the Max Payne commercials.  Not sure why…just don’t really want to see the movie…at least not at the theatre.

7:56pm - Exploding beer bottles….I’m getting thristy!

7:59pm - REALLY like Time Warp.  Great series!  Mental note:  Start checking e-bay for high speed cameras!

8:00pm - MythBusters has begun!!!

8:01pm - More Ninja myths….could be interesting!

8:04pm - Jaimie missed!! (Bow & Arrow practice)

8:05pm - Arrow traveling at 179 mph!  That’s all for arrows!  The fans claimed the speed of the arrow was different further away.  The speed difference was minimal.

8:06pm - Whoa…  A British Ninja?  Anthony Kelly

8:07pm - WOW!  The dude just caught 22 consecutive tennis balls travelling at 85 mph!  I new world record!

8:11pm - Just saw a commercial for the new season of Stormchasers.  The premiere is this Sunday!!  You don’t want to miss it!

8:12pm - LOL! Adam is going to try and catch the 85mph tennis ball..  LOL!!!!  Props to him for trying it!

8:13pm - Tory, Grant, and Kari are up now…going to test underwater blow darts!

8:15pm - LOL!  Tory rubbing animal fat on…then putting on wetsuit…then into a tank of cold water.  The animal fat is supposed to protect against hypothermia…tank is 66 degrees

8:16pm - Tory has been in for 45 minutes…..now he is out!  Props to him for staying in that long!

8:21pm - The British Ninja is going to try to catch and arrow fired 26 feet away traveling 120mph

8:22pm - He missed the first several - then caught one!  WOW!

8:24pm - Tory, Grant, and Kari - building bamboo blow guns!  Except Kari who slipped in a metal sleeve inside hers without the guys knowing! 

8:27pm - I wonder if Adam got his Segway for FREE in exchange for riding it all the time on the show?

8:32pm - Still thirsty…will have to wait till next commercial break! 

8:37pm - Now the Ninja is trying to catch and arrow in full battle situation.  Missed several…only caught one!

8:46pm - Jaimie is punching Adam (in protective gear) 300 plus pounds of force from Jaimie at full swing…the ninja from 3 inches away reached 210 pounds of force!  WOW!

8:55pm - Blow darts from under water had some success…myth is plausible!

8:57pm - Ninja’s revenge - Ninja runs at Adam…can he fire and reload before Ninja gets there…. (20 paces away)

8:58pm - Nope…Ninja got there before Adam can reload…he’s done! LOL!

9:00pm - Prototype This! is ON!

9:01pm - Road Rage…That never happens does it?

9:02pm - Car that will slow down when you get mad??  Coooool!

9:04pm - Mind controlling a video game…is it for real??

9:07pm - Interesting….destroying a car to find a weak spot.  Will use a demolition derby to test driver emotions to help detect road rage.  Car to be remote controlled and drivers will be in virtual cockpit driving them….how are they gonna pull this off in 10 days?

9:11pm - Testing car control software/hardware using and R/C car.  Driving the R/C car using a video game steering wheel set.  Interesting….as a former professional R/C racer it seems to me it would be harder to drive an R/C car that way…

9:19pm - Measuring heart rate, breath rate, and the amount you sweat to get bio feedback to determine road rage.

9:21pm - Having a “Chill Zone” on the side of the road for road rage drivers to get mandantorily parked sounds good to me!

9:24pm - Servos on the steering, brakes, accelerator, and a kill switch integrated into the demolition derby cars!  It worked!  That’s a mighty big R/C car!

9:33pm - Hooked into the mind control software so that when an object moved in the software….power is applied to an actuator that bent a spoon!  It worked….Zoz had to concentrate though!

9:38pm - They are having to write some serious software for this to work.  Did they really do all this in 10 days?

9:43pm - Wow!  They just used mind control to put the car in drive!  Once the driver gets aggravated the sensors in the the mind control headset trigger and the car is put back into neutral!

9:55pm - Let the demolition derby begin.  3 out of the 4 cars are working.

9:59pm - The roadrage car worked!  When the drivers got aggrivated…their cars stopped!  They had to hold concentration or they were dead in the water.  The interesting thing about the mind control software is that it is tough to actually prove that it is working as advertised.  This isn’t the first time I have heard of this technology so I’ll buy in!  Pretty cool.  I’m not sure if we will see something like this or not….but it sure was an interesting prototype!  Looking forwrd to next week!

10:00pm….I’m out!  Have a great night folks!

Ben Eadie of SolidMentor recently filmed an episode with Patrick Norton at Revision3.com showing off his home built laser scanner.  Click the image above to check out the episode!

Congrats to Ben for making his first appearance on Revision3!