Monday 4 August 2008

trueSpace available for free, tied to Virtual Earth content

An interesting development in urban modelling; Microsoft's Virtual Earth has been arguably lagging behind in terms of free tools for its community and content so its interesting that recently Microsoft announced, via Chris Pendleton's blog, that trueSpace, the previously $595 3D authoring package, is now free with the explicit aim of adding content into Virtual Earth.

Part of Chris's post mentions:

"As you'll recall, several months ago we acquired Caligari because of their advanced 3D toolset - trueSpace (among other assets). I've always felt sketchy about other 3D freeware, so starting today trueSpace 7.6 is now available for download.....FOR FREE! And, there is a direct connection into Live Search Maps so you can create SUPER high resolution 3D models using trueSpace, then right from the environment upload the model into Live Search Maps as a collection item. Once you've created your collection, you can import your collection into your Virtual Earth application and BAM you have your own custom 3D models in your Virtual Earth application. We'll host the models right in our 3D collections cloud..."

A Microsoft initiative to create a contender for Google SketchUp? Time can only tell...

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