While I have no idea whether they still publish calendars or not, I would like to take a bit of credit for coming-up with the idea of a Unigraphics calendar in the first place. It was right after we introduced our first photo-realistic rendering capabilities to UG and since I was the product manager for that project, I was looking for ways to promote both the new module as well as its capabilities. The idea was to have a way of showing-off the work of some of the early adopters and several of us involved in the project was discussing how we might accomplish this when I mentioned the idea of a calendar where each year we could show-off contributions from our customers. Granted, the first couple of years, most of the 'art' was produced in-house by our own people, but we tried to use as many examples from actual customers as possible, even if we had to borrow the models from them and do all the rendering ourselves, at least until there were enough customers using the new rendering capabilities so that we would have a steady supply of images. In fact, a few years into this, we started to hold image contests, soliciting images from our customers with the idea that they would be recognized for their efforts by publishing their submissions in next-years calendar,
Here are a few examples of our early efforts. Note that the first calendar was published in 1995:
!996:
1997:
1998:
1999:
2000:
2001:
2002:
For a while there, we even had separate European calendars:
As you can tell, over time the image got to be a lot more interesting and certainly more sophisticated.
I was the 'official' submitter of the 1999 Ingersoll-Rand forklift. Another engineer spent almost a week on rendering different images before we got one that management liked enough to submit. We were on Windows NT at that time, but we still had some HP Unix workstations, which was used to get the images created. If I remember it was almost an overnight run to get the image with the size and quality required for the submittal.
"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."
Since Ben mentioned it(also)...I was the designer of the RayBan glasses 1998 May. I worked for a small mold shop in Rochester NY. Bausch and Lomb came to us to design the produce and the tools to make the eye rims and the temple pieces.
They at the time were new UG customers.
Cool parts, the temple pieces had an injected flexible/rigid piece inserted during the molding process so the temple tip could be formed around ones ears.
John if you happen to have a better picture of that I would love to get a hold of it.
The glasses were made on a limited edition basis and I was unable to get a pair.
I had some RayBan images but I can't find them at the moment. BTW, I was the person who did the first demo for the Bausch and Lomb people in Rochester, after driving all night from Boston because my flight got cancelled. I had just enough time to check-in to the hotel, take a shower, get dressed and meet our salesman at their office. Basically, the demo consisted of them giving me a 2D IGES file from their AUTOCAD system. I took the 2D views, and extracted the front, side and top profiles, oriented them in their proper places in 3D space, extruded them into a set of solid models, and then created a single solid representing the intersection of those separate solid bodies. I did this for the main eye-frame and one temple arm (which I mirrored to the get the second one). I then assembled them, assigned some basic materials and rendered it. Took me maybe an hour or so. It must have impressed them because they became a customer shortly thereafter. A couple of years later, I was sent a couple pairs of RayBan sunglasses with 'Unigraphics' stenciled on the temple arms. One them sat for years in a display case in our development office in Cypress, CA (which BTW, is now moving to Costa Mesa). I think the other pair might be in one of the boxes from my office from when I retired nearly seven years ago.