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Introducing the Latest 3DVIA Shape with Advanced Texture Skewing

We recently released an updated version of 3DVIA Shape that has already hit the blogoshpere. The key feature of this release is designed to speed up and simplify your modeling workflow - Advanced Texture Skewing. This enhancement provides the ability to automatically correct the perspective of an image to fit the shape of your model in a few easy steps.

How will this speed up and simplify your workflow? Typically, we have found that users will take their textures into an external application like Photoshop to manually adjust the perspective to fit a surface on their model. This new feature eliminates this time-consuming step (and you know how long it can take Photoshop to load) and automates part of the effort. You simply apply the texture to your model, identify the corners that make up the portion of the image that you need and 3DVIA Shape will automatically transform the image to fit correctly!

This is a feature that is best demonstrated visually. Take a look at the following video (very short - just over a minute).

Here’s is a link to the model in the video on 3dvia.com. Click the “PLAY 3D” button to render view and examine the model in the browser.

Other Key Updates?

In addition to the Advanced Texture Skewing tool, there are many other improvements in 3DVIA Shape including better tutorials, help and better geometry manipulation. The following video demonstrates one of the abilities of the geometry manipulation set of enhancements. The video shows how to change the anchor point of a piece of geometry while performing a simple cut/paste action.

Interested? Try 3DVIA Shape now…it’s free!

Tutorial: Back to Basics with 3DVIA Shape

For my first 3DVIA Shape tutorial, I thought I would go back to basics and pull out one of the starter tutorials from the 3DVIA Shape documentation files.

We have tried very hard to ensure that 3DVIA Shape is a product that is simple enough for the average consumer to express their ideas in 3D. However, as an experienced Solidworks modeler, I have to remind myself that even the longest journey sometimes starts with a single step. In this case…it’s creating your first shape (no pun intended). These simple steps will also show you how easy it is to get started in 3D.

Creating the Main (or Your First) Shape

First open 3DVIA Shape on your desktop. In this tutorial, we are going to draw the very simple shape of a house.

Let’s get started by using the application’s navigation features. To rotate your point of view to look down at the ground, press and hold down the left mouse button over the Rotate area then drag the mouse around in the desired direction. (For more information, see Change Viewpoints using the Pan, Rotate and Zoom Tool).