Jon Foote has been playing with Blender and made this…

He writes: I had a few minutes to play with Solidworks, which is pretty awesome, from my experience with the first tutorial.

I took the opportunity to export the shell model into VRML, which can be read by Blender. Blender is an open-source 3d modeling/rendering program, which is free and pretty powerful, and runs on all OSs. Get it here: http://www.blender.org/ (The learning curve is pretty gnarly, so I can’t recommend it totally without reservation.)

Blender lets you add light sources and render things (which may be possible in SW but I don’t think so). So I did a little experiment with internal lights (attached jpg). It’s wrong in several ways (no internal chassis) but it’s enough to get the idea. I may try some different light positions if I get some time (ha ha).

I will check all this into SVN so others can play. You can do animations and move things around if you know what you are doing. Look in the media/blender subdir
-J