For nearly two years 3DTin has been under constant development, with frequent releases. It’s a good strategy for engineering problems, but it makes you ignore the aesthetic values of your product’s UI. For last month we have worked very hard to correct that shortcoming. 3DTin now comes with a well thought-out beautiful interface. Take a look.
There are more things too.
More Templates (Total 60 of them now)
We have added bunch of templates last week. They mainly provide variations of basic shapes based on angle of revolution. For e.g. two of the new templates are Cylindrical Pie and Cylindrical segment. They let you create specific shapes from a cylinder by entering different values of angle. We have then extended the same idea across all revolution based templates (Cone, Sphere, Pipe, etc) and added them as templates.
Alignment
I am a big fan of Inkscape. I love their grouping controls that let me align many elements quickly. I wanted same functionality in 3DTin too. Therefore we have added similar controls to align objects in 3D space.
Youtube Tutorials
From new users, there has always been a complaint about lack of proper documentation and tutorials. Since we were constantly experimenting with new features, it didn’t make sense to document something only to change/remove it later. But now that has changed. We have added 5 very informative video tutorials, that will demo various functions of 3DTin. They are accessible right through the interface, by clicking on the Guide icon in the top toolbar.
Here is a playlist of all those videos.
We have also made some changes to the workflow of recently added features too. Mainly to fix some annoying behavior they had. That involved making the context dialog modal. It’s the dialog (actually only a toolbar) that appears when you click on the geometry. It now doesn’t disappear after you move the mouse away, it stays there. Its accidental disappearance was a major source of annoyance.
In the life of a Web site there is hardly any meaning for a 1.0 release, because it evolves continously. But if it matters to anyone, this would be the 1.0 release of 3DTin.
Enjoy!
3DTin 