Filed under: Design, Fun, Windows, Commercial
12 days of holiday downloads, Day 12: Windows
by Jay Savage Dec 19th 2006 at 2:10PM
HLD will take a series of pictures of a building and form a 3D model on which you can hang lights and decorations to plot out your holiday display. There are a number of preset lighting combinations including minibulbs and old-fashioned C9 and C37 bulbs, or you can add your own lighting configurations and decorations. When you're done decorating, you can view the model in different ambient lighting conditions and even through snow and fog. And when you have it just right you can use the scale tool to figure out exactly how many feet of which kinds of lights strings to put where. For the true Christmas addict, this is an ideal way to weather those long months of withdrawl until the lights go back up next Novemember.
The free five day trial is fun to play around with. If you think $49 is too much for the full version, though, you're probably right. It's not that the designers don't deserve it; there's actually been a lot of thought and effort put into the interface and functionality. It's a pretty slick little program. But we're talking about Christmas lights. If you design light displays for a living and need mock-ups to show clients, though, HLD might be money well spent.
Previous 12 Days of holiday downloads for Windows:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jaymoon said 8:32AM on 12-20-2006
Thanks much for the 12 days. Some real gems over the past few days. ;)
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