Creation Engine Blog

Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac is available at an education discount price of $39.99

VMware Fusion 3 is available at an education discount price of $39.

Link via Gizmodo

The Wacom Intuos4 was quite a leap from the Intuos3. It doubled the pressure sensitive levels, and it added multifunction Touch Ring trackpad, on-screen radial menus, and eight user-definable buttons with OLED tags—called ExpressKeys—in a thin, ultralight 2.2-pound package. The Wacom Intuos4 Wireless has all those characteristics, and they work equally as well over the Bluetooth connection.

With a sightly smaller working surface than the Medium model—8 x 5 inches versus the 8.8 x 5.5 inches of the cable-bound model—the wireless tablet is a pure joy to use. The 2048 levels of pressure sensitiveness, requiring only 1 gram of pressure to start painting vs the 10 grams of the previous version, offer the best real drawing simulation of any of the tablets I’ve ever tried. It feels like the real thing, with the slightest touch transferred to the screen as if it was real media. The brushstrokes are as smooth and precise as the real thing, and the tablet never misses a single beat, no matter how fast I try to move its very comfortable stylus—which comes with different tips for different surface feedback.

Intuos4 Wireless Tablet Medium is available from Creation Engine for $375.

Chart a whole new course for your data with the award-winning, easy-to-use database software for Windows, Mac and the Web. Create eye-catching charts and reports, boost your productivity, and build better databases with innovative new features in FileMaker Pro 11.

FileMaker Pro 11 is available at an educational discount price of $179.

Squeeze 6 On sale for $619!
$100 off normal academic price of $719.
Offer good through 3/31/2010.

Squeeze 6 for Flash On sale for $399!
$50 off normal academic price of $449.
Offer good through 3/31/2010.

MindManager 8 for Windows On sale for $119 (download version only)!
$30 off normal academic price of $149.
Offer good through 3/31/2010.

MindManager 8 for Mac On sale for $69 (download version only)!
$30 off normal academic price of $99.
Offer good through 3/31/2010.

Plug-In Suite 5 for Photoshop
$299.95 after $100 mail-in rebate! (List Price: $599.95)
Mail-in rebate offer good from 3/5/2010 through 3/31/2010!

Link via VizWorld.com

ASGVIS has now officially released the new VRay for Sketchup for both Mac & PC’s, including new support for ambient occlusion, IES lights, and improved parsing times.  This is also the first official version that runs natively in the Mac OSX environment.

Here’s what our beta testers are saying about the new V-Ray for SketchUp:

“Amazingly fast! Instead of rendering one image per night I’m cooking five in one day. Great work ASGVIS, rendering on Mac is smooth. I’m sure my interiors will benefit from the new features as IES!” – Johannes Roevens

“The addition of Ambient Occlusion in V-Ray for SketchUp adds a new level of realism for architectural visualizations, making the details and shadows in interiors “pop” and creating an instant convincing dirt effect to exterior surfaces.” – Jackson Barkess

V-Ray for SketchUp is available from Creation Engine at an educational discount price of $229.

Link via Techworld.com

Creating 3D models can be baffling for beginners. Like any family of applications, from word processors to image editors, 3D modelling tools have their own shared features, toolsets and formats that must be learned first.

That’s why Google Sketchup is such a superb introduction to 3D. It’s about as simple as 3D can be made, comes with a massive catalogue of ready-made models, and the documentation is comprehensive. Oh, and the standard version is free.

Google SketchUp 7 is free.

Google SketchUp Pro 7 is available at a student discount price of $49.

Google SketchUp Pro 7 is free for instructors.

Google SketchUp Pro 7 Lab licenses are available at a school discount price of $15.