Hello All,

I want to give you all a brief update on the 3D Modeling Software, known to many of you as Tesla, that we have in development.  We here at EITG, apologize for the delay in this communication, but we wanted to make sure our information was correct and confirmed before providing further details.

Nokia, the developer of the QT development framework has made significant changes in the licensing structure and levels of agreement. When EITG originally licensed the software from Trolltech, the previous owner of QT, we were structured under a fairly economical solution that would allow us several years of development. When our renewal occurred this program no longer existed within Nokia. However, rumor was stirring that Nokia would offer a free Open Source version under LGPL. This rumor was found to be true and Nokia announced this offering January 2009.  This change has considerably delayed the development cycle. However, the cost savings of moving to the LGPL were too significant to pass up.

Also, as many of you noticed a very large company has trademarked the Tesla name. This is also under consideration and is currently being investigated.  EITG wants to make sure any product release will not have to go through multiple branding changes that could delay product releases and cause any legal issues.

Thank you for patience and consideration and we will continue to provide you updates about the development of our 3D modeling program as they come available.

Best regards,

Brad Parscale

Thanks for the update Brad.

This some good information about the Nokia announcement. I have been sharing this with others:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/nokia-qt-lgpl-switch-huge-win-for-cross-platform-development.ars

Hi All

Thanks for this update.

Very interesting.

Could we have any indication of how long your development of EIM will now take? As I don’t know about anybody alse but I’m saving up for this software while getting up to speed with DVGarages version of EIM and would like to know what timeframe we are looking at.

Thanks

Nick
(Slave1)

I’m sympathetic about the trademark issues. Why don’t you just stick to what you own? ‘Electricimage Modeler’. It’s that simple, I think. I think you probably feel some need to have a different name from your earlier modeling app. I don’t see why. Electricimage is something positive to be associated with. Not adverse.

-Craig

Hi all
I was thinking in something like E•MO, like WALL•E for the name, but just find out in the web there is a hole cultural thing about emo, and seems to be very controversial.  It could be E•mod or E•MO3D.

I was wondering: it’s been discussed to base the future of EIAS on further developing Tesla into a fully featured animation app. If that would happen to be a too long term or impractical effort in some fashion, could porting Animator, Camera and such to the new framework you are building on top of Qt make sense? Would it give you more “breathing space” and make easier to further advance the suite, from a technical and economic standpoint?

This morning I was tweaking my latest project for a client of mine. After a series of changes I realize that the whole thing is now only made of objects made with UberShape plugin and one texture (1 bump + 1 clip + 1 diffuse).

http://rdm.rdm-web.com/pads.png

The client is enthusiastic about it… I’m too cause I know this is only an intermediate stage. The final renderings will blow them away.

You folks there should be proud of your software but hey… We really need the modeler back.

Every time I need to model something (I’m a programmer and 3D is not my core business), I get down from my office, cross the street to my parents house where my dad has an old G5 with the last working versione of the EIM on it. I told him to never delete it… never update the OS.
I can’t believe I’m doing this… YOU should be ashamed of all the stairs you are forcing me to climb That’s a lot of wasted calories.

To cut the long story short… please keep this thread updated. I’m refreshing every week or so hoping to get a beta release date and instead EIv8 has taken the stage. I love the features of v8 but I honestly miss the modeler more than the animator.

So is there any new information on a modeler. My Silo demo expired and I have to make a decision for this project.