2014 Mazda 3 Rh-lh Sun Visor on 2040-parts.com

Webinars: 3D sketching technology with CATIA for Creative Designers

Adding to our successful series, Car Design News today hosted a new webinar in collaboration with Dassault Systèmes. Today's webinar presented the latest workflows available in CATIA V6 for Creative Designers - a unified industrial design workflow solution to imagine, create, share and experience virtual product design - and introduced the program's new 3D sketching technology, CATIA Natural Sketch. Presented by Xavier Melkonian, Director of CATIA Shape at Dassault Systèmes, and Pierre Maheut, Creative Designer and Product Expert, the complimentary webinar showcased the wealth of possibilities available to creative designers and outlined innovative workflows based on 3D sketching, virtual clay modeling and visualization with interactive raytracing. The software aims to appeal to those looking to boost their design innovation, creativity and expression of 3D sketching and sculpting.

First Sight: Skoda Octavia

The new Skoda Octavia was unveiled earlier this week in the Czech brand's museum at its home in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic. Car Design News was in attendance to check out the third generation of what the company calls ‘the heart of Skoda'. The new Octavia is the fourth model in the Volkswagen Group to be built on the new MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten) platform.

Smart Fortwo Lightshine launches

Yet another Smart Limited Edition - the Smart Fortwo Lightshine You have to hand it to Mercedes – they don’t give up on Smart (or Maybach – another expensive departure). They keep churning out new cars (well, endless new limited editions, anyway) despite sales that seem to keep falling. Last year (2010) saw Smart sales in the UK fall by 8.5% and their sales last month (December 2010) were a woeful 57% down on December 2009.