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Hello all. I am not a professional product designer as such but I have always enjoyed designing and building new or unusual items. Over the years I have built up a fair collection of completed or partly completed projects. Rather than leave these to gather dust in a corner, I have decided to put them on a simple website so that anyone interested can have a look at sort of things I do. If anyone here is interested, my site can be found at http://www.koolkatz.biz . Unfortunately, I have only come accross this site recently but I am now looking forward to looking at other peoples design work on here. Cheers.

Hello, im new to this forum and was wondering if any one had information to share on what software toy companys are using to develop new products, specifically more organic designs like ,action figures or the types of toy characters you would find at Mcdonalds(suitable for injection molding) I'm using Rhino at the moment and have used Zbrush for a few years making props for theme parks but the two programs don't work as seamless as you would think are needed for a toy production work flow. ive seen an example from solidworks that fisher price was using their software but most of there designs are blocky and colud be done in almost any cad software. does Mcfarlane toys use injection molding? if so how would they get hard molds made from there sculpts? most factorys seem to be using cad engineering software to make their molds and require stp files not stl. if your working in Rhino, solidworks or inventor/alias this is fine, but they are not capable of making expressive characters suitable for plastic injection molding. is there any software that allows you to work on a mesh and convert it to a polysurface that can be exported in STP format. any info on inventor and mudbox? any information would be greatly appreciated or links to any other forums? Thank you