3D Design Simulator Freeware

Do you mean simulating the motion of an assembly? If so, there are many good ones. Some are built into 3D design software, like Pro Mechanica in ProE and Cosmos Motion in Solidworks. i have used Visual Nastran 4D, which is excellent, but is now defunct. The big daddy of such software is ADAMS, expensive.

If you mean some other thing, please ask.

I searched for simple 3d to model solar cooker reflectors as the sun moves and the only one I could figure out is called art of illusion.

It is free. You have elevation plan and endview. Just like technical drawing. And most of the rest, I did not try to learn. You can make short movies with it.

Brian

I made a Google search and found this free software Free Cad http://www.ar-cad.com/ .

Check if can help you Fun!

Free 3D CAD modeling software- BrlCAD (originally developed for modeling battlefield survivability of military equipment). Pretty extensive capabilities, with some sophisticated ray tracing capabilities. I understand it has been used as a front end for simulation, but I have no first-hand knowledge of that. I have toyed with exporting from BrlCAD to an FEA analysis program with some success (but no really sophisticated builds)- but FEA is a static analysis, not a dynamic simulation...

Phun is Phun- I wish it came in a 3D version. The biggest Phun demo I did was a simulation of an earthquake I used to illustrate what causes them (subsidance quakes, not slip-fault quakes. I don't know how to simulate a slip fault in Phun...)

Here is a site with lists of 3D simulator software:

http://www.societyofrobots.com/robot_parts_list_software.shtml#robot_sim

Another site listing 3D simulation software...

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Robotics/Software/Simulation/

Very cool and thank you for replying. I also discovered a plugin for Google Sketchup called Sketchyphysics that is able to do what I need. Free is always good but trials are good too.

Vic

I just discovered Paraview, another visualization software package (free) has some animation capabilities- not something I have tried out yet, although I have been using Paraview for other applications for a while now...