Core77

Founded by VP of SIGGRAPH, FreeDesign Inc has just launched the initial release of its 'breakthrough' 3D N-Sided Surfacing (NSS) technology--based application, FreeDimension. The deal is that the system has been concieved to take away a lot of the problems assocaited with the creation of surface models, particularly at those formative, less structured stages of the product development process.

At first looks, the interface is pretty sparse, but once you start to add functions and toolbars, things busy up pretty quick. That said, the system appears to be pretty easy to learn and the surface modelling and manipulation tools are very quick to pick up.

Rev 1.0 can read and write SketchUp 5 files and also outputs data into commonly used .OBJ, .POV and .STL formats. for those looking to integrate such process with their workhorse modelling systems, news is that FreeDesign is currently developing tools to output FreeDimension surfaces as NURBS surfaces and expects these to be available in the next few months.

The system is current available online for commercial use at $495, while student and academic pricing at $99 per student, $695 for a classroom multi-seat license. There's a time limited demo available at www.freedesign-inc.com.