3dWorld is hosting an “advent calendar” this year, giving away something special every day from now til Christmas. Today’s offering is a good one, a free HDRI set from the folks behind the popular Dutch Skies package.
The set includes an 8K spherical background, a 4K spherical HDR for reflections, a spherical lightmap and a reference document to link everything together using the popular sIBL system. You also get a sequence of 11K exposures for post-production work.
The set works with any 3D package capable of reading HDR files, including 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave 3D and modo.
Computerworld takes a look at some of the tools presented at last month’s Computer-Assisted Reporting conference and picks their top 22 free tools for visualization & analysis. Many of them we’ve reported on before (like DataWrangler, Google Fusion, and Many Eyes).
There are many tools around to help turn data into graphics, but they can carry hefty price tags. The cost can make sense for professionals whose primary job is to find meaning in mountains of information, but you might not be able to justify such an expense if you or your users only need a graphics application from time to time, or if your budget for new tools is somewhat limited. If one of the higher-priced options is out of your reach, there are a surprising number of highly robust tools for data visualization and analysis that are available at no charge.
It’s a good list, but missing some rather important additions like ParaView & VisIt IMO.
Next time you need a map for your project, check out the d-maps.com website. With over 95,000 maps available, you can choose from thousands of unique locations and then download it in WMF, SVG, PDF, or other formats for your use. Completely free of charge, they’re even available for commercial use (provided you give them a link, it’s all in their T&C’s).
I went down to an individual US state and found over 40 different maps to choose from, each one available in 5 or 6 different formats. Including ocean and land, countries and states, historical and current, and even different map projections, it’s a pretty amazing collection.
Over at the BlenderArtists forums, ‘ndee’ offered up a nice free model for anyone working with Blender and Pirates.
Hey everybody,
I want to introduce Flick. This is my latest work in Blender. I want to publish her under creative commons 3.0.(Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported) Special thanks goes to DennyLindberg for his wonderfull rig Biff. I learned alot from this rig! I hope you will get some use for her.
Fully posable, and even with an articulated FaceRig, it’s worth checking out. Get it here.
NASA has released a large library of models for everything (realistically) space-oriented. It contains astronauts, spacesuits, satellites, shuttles, and various bits of technology surrounding them.
These models are for anybody that uses a 3D software package. Most of the models are in the common .3ds format, which can be read by most 3D programs. Some models, however, are in their original .lwo, .fbx, or .obj formats to preserve details that would be lost in conversion.
I wonder how long before someone recreates the JSC Mission Control room in Second Life using this.
CGDigest has a nice compilation of 45 free models gathered around the internet.
Bellow is a list of 45 3d models gathered from various sites. I have only included models that are useful for architectural visualization purposes (3d cars, bathroom items, furniture, electronics, urban elements, etc.).
Some good ones in here if you’re into architectural work, like the (Shown) Escalator model. Those things are a pain to do yourself (so I’m told).
You don’t have to work long in graphics, be it 2D or 3D, to realize you need a large library of simple textures to accomplish just about any task. Slodive has a list of 50 sites you can visit to flesh out your own library with freely available textures of all types.
Those of you looking for a free data visualization and analysis tool and found Google Fusion Tables lacking have a new tool to check out : Tableau Public.
“Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “We created this product because we want to make data a first class citizen on the web. We want to change the way people interact with data online by letting them tell stories with flexibility and beauty.”
3dWorld is hosting an “advent calendar” this year, giving away something special every day from now til Christmas. Today’s offering is a good one, a free HDRI set from the folks behind the popular Dutch Skies package.
Computerworld takes a look at some of the tools presented at last month’s Computer-Assisted Reporting conference and picks their top 22 free tools for visualization & analysis. Many of them we’ve reported on before (like DataWrangler, Google Fusion, and Many Eyes).
Next time you need a map for your project, check out the d-maps.com website. With over 95,000 maps available, you can choose from thousands of unique locations and then download it in WMF, SVG, PDF, or other formats for your use. Completely free of charge, they’re even available for commercial use (provided you give them a link, it’s all in 
Over at the BlenderArtists forums, ‘ndee’ offered up a nice free model for anyone working with Blender and Pirates.
NASA has released a large library of models for everything (realistically) space-oriented. It contains astronauts, spacesuits, satellites, shuttles, and various bits of technology surrounding them.
CGDigest has a nice compilation of 45 free models gathered around the internet.
You don’t have to work long in graphics, be it 2D or 3D, to realize you need a large library of simple textures to accomplish just about any task. Slodive has a list of 50 sites you can visit to flesh out your own library with freely available textures of all types.
The folks at “MapTogether.org” have created a 46-page PDF on the “Illustrated Guide to Nonprofit GIS and Online Mapping”. Contained inside is:
Those of you looking for a free data visualization and analysis tool and 
Here’s today’s Pixels:
VizWorld.com 
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