Jason Amador-Locher

I rendered a scene in FormZ and wanted to add a title to it. Well, it turned out to be 1000 times easier to use PowerCADD than Illustrator, or anything that Adobe had to offer. The plan was drawn in PowerCADD in about 45 minutes, and the 3D modeling took around four hours — most of the time was used setting the view and lighting.

Once it was rendered to a tiff, I just pasted it into PowerCADD and did the same with the title.

I can guarantee you that this would take an exponential amount of time in AutoCAD. I'm not just spouting fanboy nonsense, as I use AutoCAD proficiently on a daily basis. I'm that guy in the office who just shakes his head and says, "we could have done this in 1/8th the time if we used PowerCADD". Troublemakers unite!

Power Palms

This project was an unexpected discovery. I was making 3D trees to use in a model in a program called Onyx Tree Pro. It lets you "grow" the trees and gives you control of a multitude of parameters, such as bark style, dead leaf density, leaf bend/twist, age of tree. You can also make them random so basically no two of the same genus will ever be the same. When I rendered the top view I saw that they may have a place in PowerCADD.

So I started exporting them and got into a rhythm in PowerCADD. They are quite detailed, and when a transparency of 75% is applied, they really start to look good. They are organized by their Latin Species and have really added some life to my site plans and presentation drawings — lipstick on an ugly girl at times.

Shadows and transparencies

How long ago was it that we were all using pencil on paper or pen plotters?

And Jason drives a truck. Just had to show you that.