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Fast 3D modelling
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Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 19, 2012 at 12:05 AM
Thank you for all the suggestions. I can see now that 3D is interpreted and utilised quite differently by the various suggestions mentioned. Some seem to be focusing on modelling a single 3D object, others turn a tree hierarchy into a 3D representation, while others focus on representing massive networks with a huge amount of data points. To be more specific about my needs, the relationships I need to map are not hierarchical, and there are not too many entities involved (somewhere between 10 to 100, depending on how I aggregate them). The relationships are mostly between business and government organisations laid out in time and geographical space. It would be nice if I could represent the different players with different icons (or their own logos), situate them in a 3D space, connect them with arrows or tubes or lines and annotate them and the typesof relationships with short notes. So this is not a mind map, there is no hierarchy. It’s more like a 3D concept map.
Posted by Zman
Feb 19, 2012 at 04:19 AM
can you be a little more specific on time and geographical space? What is your goal in visualizing in a third dimension?
Posted by Dr Andus
Feb 19, 2012 at 02:22 PM
Zman wrote:
>can you be a little more specific on time and geographical space? What is your goal in
>visualizing in a third dimension?
The “geographical” character of the space is not that important. It just meant to suggest that the objects I want to model are not in the same geographical location, but that fact can be represented by just placing the various objects at various distances from each other. “Time” means that some of the objects had changed over time (years), evolving into new objects. So I could represent them side-by-side (e.g. a small business turning into a larger business or a government organisation turning into a private organisation).
The purpose of 3D modelling would be to create an interconnected structure that shows the relationships between all the objects. I would like to get a sense of what such structure (or overall object) would look like as a whole, but also from the vantage point of some of the individual objects. If I could annotate the objects and their relationships that would be great. So it would be a hybrid textual-visual object.
I suppose I could try to draw this on a really large piece of paper. The problem with that is that it would only have one (top down God-like) perspective, and also that no paper ever seems to be big enough. Play dough might be better but I would need to buy bucketfulls of it…
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 19, 2012 at 04:45 PM
I would agree with Alexander that you should look at PersonalBrain. You can use the CAPTURE THOUGHT ICON tool to grad a screen clip of each company’s logo to use as the icon. You can label the LINKS, change there colors, to denote the relationships. You can use JUMP LINKS to note non-hierarchical relationships. You can switch from the NORMAL view to an EXPANDED VIEW, which will allow you to freely expand your network outward and relocate the entities at will on your BRAIN.
You can add TAGS and THOUGHT TYPES to further categorize the entities. For example, you can use tags to add a chronologic aspect to the brain. Or you can make types to signify non-government organizations from government agencies. Thought types can standardize the colors of each type to add that visual reference. You can also link each entity to its web site, if that is helpful. You can add reference material as attachments or separate items in the brain.
I don’t know if it will do all you want, but PersonalBrain is much more versatile that it might first appear.
Steve Z.
Posted by Zman
Feb 20, 2012 at 01:55 AM
I agree that you can probably get where you want to go with theBrain, The next obvious question has to do with budget and your intended end user. The link annotations in theBrain will probably require at least the core version - ~$150? If you are doing it for personal consumption (or at low budget, you can do almost as much with VUE, and there are some other options with academic software things similar to ORA and some tools that you can piece together with things like Network Workbench, spreadsheets, etc. - but if you are providing the product to a customer then academic software may not be an option (from license perspective).