All items about modeling

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It’s one of the great philosophical debates of all time. Given enough computing horsepower, would we know the difference between the real world and a simulated one? With the cost of bandwidth, computing, and storage dropping precipitously, it’s harder and harder to tell the real from the simulated.

Check out the Lagoa Multiphysics plugin for Softimage. It’s pretty impressive. Tools like this do for interactive visualization what still-image tools like Photofuse do for traditional photographs.

You might argue that to really trick us into believing the world around us was a simulation, each particle the software represented could only consume one particle of computing infrastructure. But isn’t that what the universe looks like? And did I just blow your mind?

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AR meets 3D modeling

Techi has a piece on Leonar3Do, a new take on 3D modeling. It looks as far from traditional modeling tools as they were from pen and paper.

Years ago, I played around with 3D modeling (and narrowly avoided a career at Matrox and Softimage in the process.) Building models was tedious: manipulating 3D space with two-dimensional tools like a mouse and a screen is tough. Software relies on all sorts of controllers, UI conceits, and tricks: rotating the onscreen image; holding down shift to move along the third dimension, and so on.

Google acquired Sketchup to help crowdsource 3D content for Google Earth largely because it was comparatively easy to use. But so far, we can’t work with 3D content in three dimensions.

That’s about to change: using modeling tools and AR visualization, designers can actually manipulate in three dimensions. Which will go a long way to making 3D models mainstream, unlocking all kinds of use cases.

Who knows, maybe soon, we’ll have opt-in vandalism, where taggers add 3D objects to the real world for those who want to see them.

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