New for AC3D! This plug-in adds quick reload to the tools menu, allowing you to reload all your textures in just one click. It also includes a tiny disk monitor client that automatically notifies AC3D when your texture maps are saved to disk by your paint program. With this plug-in, you can see your changes made in Photoshop, Corel or your favorite paint program show up in AC3D right away–without any additional clicks.

* UPDATED 5/14/2008: New version with faster reload! This version tracks textures more intelligently to prevent the same texture from being reloaded more than once per cycle, even if it’s used multiple times.

* UPDATED 11/27/2008: The texture monitor is now obsolete. As of 6.4, AC3D now includes its own, much better texture monitor.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above. Disk monitor feature requires TCP\IP loopback support for communicating with AC3D.)

If you want to excel as a 3D artist, one of the best things you can do is to learn how to draw.

Most experts recommend gesture drawing and life drawing as the most important exercises. I’d agree, and I don’t think you can ever get enough practice at either. Even if you don’t think you are any good at it, you should still do it. Drawing is an important exercise in “visually dissecting” an object. It’s not about what goes on the paper; it is about learning to be observant.

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I know this link went around a while ago, but in case some of you haven’t seen it yet I thought I’d share. With all this talk of Turing machines here’s one of my absolute favorites: the Lego Turing Machine!

Last time we built a Turing machine as a rainy-day project. Today, I’ll show you how to use it to do something useful, like add two numbers together. Read the rest of this entry »

This AC3D plug-in exports the uv map (texture coordinates) of the currently highlighted faces in DXF format, suitable for import into vector drawing packages such as Corel Draw. Very handy if you like to do your textures as vector art!

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows\AC3D 6.2 or above)