I've been playing with the beta version of FormZ v7 for the last few months, and it is awesome. Gone are the days of 3 to 5 clicks to get something done, and the interface has been updated to match my other favorite modeler - Bonzai3d. It actually has a button to change the interface to match the Bonzai3d interface.

I started using FormZ back in 1994 at version 2, and quickly realized how powerful it was as a 3d modeler, specifically for architectural projects. It's great for other types of things too, but we make buildings here right? There are tons of high end modeling tools to add to what you probably already know in Bonzai3d and SketchUp that can help take the ideas you imagine and actually be able to build it in 3d.

It plays well with others too. You can import and export tons of different file formats so you can take files back and forth to Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, 3DStudio Max, Artlantis, and many many more. It also supports plugins including Maxwell Render.

I could go on and on because I'm so excited by this release, but you should really check it out for yourself. There is an upcoming webinar for you to see it in action first-hand.

In part 2 of this series we'll continue the exploration of our design study to highlight numerous visualization and presentation features in form•Z 7 that accelerate and simplify lighting, materials, rendering, fabrication, and multiple design concepts.

You will experience:

- Faster texture mapping of your scene with new automatic texturing and drag-n-drop materials.
- New "live" dynamic manipulation of materials directly on your objects.
- Efficient lighting of your scene with new drag-n-drop dynamic lights.
- Updated Sun position palette for quick and dynamic global sun positioning.
- The ease of setting up a Global Illumination rendering of your scene.
- How components are easily utilized to quickly visualize multiple design concepts.
- And numerous other new quick and easy techniques for visualizing and fabricating your design.

The webinar will be followed by a question and answer session.

Register for the Webinar on November 17th here. Disclaimer: As with any beta software, your mileage may vary. You'll want to save often and probably not use it for actual paying work. 

You can download the free public beta here. 

Hey everyone! It's been a while, I know. I've been working hard on a few projects over the last couple of months. I wanted to jump back into making more tutorials, so I'm super excited to show you my latest one on using Bonzai3d's Section tools and Clipping planes. In this tutorial, I'll show you the differences between these tools, and how to use them for modeling and for presentations.

You can download a free 30 day trial of Bonzai3d here.

Have you ever wondered if you can create a 3d topography model from the CAD survey data you have? Watch this video and you'll see that we can use just about anything as long as it has proper height parameters.

I cover most of the scenarios encountered when you get a survey file from a civil engineer, which could be just about anything! We start with three different survey files in AutoCAD and distill the data down to just what we need, and then take it into Revit to make our 3d model using it's Toposurface tools.

For related videos, click here.

Similar to Methodcast 9 where we were using SketchUp, in this QuickTip I show you how to flatten a CAD drawing that is all over the place into something you can draw on top of in Bonzai3d. This is a workaround for an export bug in Bonzai that should be corrected in the next release, but this may be useful for other things once that bug is fixed. 

If you haven't started using Bonzai3d yet, you should. It's got a lot of horsepower and is really fun to work with. You can get a free 30 day trial here.