I don't travel in the mechanical CAD circles as much as I used to, but I still use CAD data in my animation workflows on almost a daily basis, so I do like to keep a pinky finger on the pulse of the MCAD industry. So when I heard about Alibre Inc.'s (http://www.alibre.com/) rather unique offer of their full featured Design Standard CAD software for the very sexy price of $99 USD, I took a step back. My first thought was, "Wow, they must be really desperate!". After that, I quickly grabbed my trusty AMEX card and bought a license! Am I crazy? More...

Like many people, I am quick to complain when a product or service doesn't live up to expectations. Today I am going to buck that trend and write about a company with a product and customer support that continuously exceeds my expectations, nPower Software.

A Superbly Crafted Plug-In

I have been a customer of nPower Software for years, using their products for CAD-based product animation projects. Current 3ds max users are likely to be using nPower's ProBoolean tools, which are now included as a standard part of 3ds max. I want to specifically address Power Translators, which allows me to import and manipulate NURBS data in 3ds max. More...