Accurender 3.1 is now shipping. It's free if you own 3.0 and $195 if you own 2.0
Also from McNeel is Rhino 1.1, which is now shipping as well. We have one guy in our office that helps me with the 3D models and swears by this product, especially when dealing with making things like furniture.
In other news, I got tired in 2000 of trying to figure out which layers are which in the pull down layer button in the toolbar. I found online a program that not only expands the layer pull down so that you can read all the layer names, but it also lets you see more than the couple of layers that 2000 does. It also locks the toolbars in place, lets you resize various dialog boxes, etc. I love having open and save dialog boxes where I can actually see all the files in a folder at one time. The program is called QuickPik and can be found at Manusoft. It runs now in A2k, and to change the settings it places a small blue Q in the info bar at the bottom left corner of your ACAD screen where it can't interfere with anything else, and therefore not mess with your LISP or menus - very nice touch.
Also, and probably the coolest of all uses of this tool is the right mouse button fix. For some reason someone at ACAD HQ got it into their head that allowing us to simply right click to repeat a command was too easy. Now you have to right click, move the mouse to the context menu to the top item and then left click to repeat the command. There's a time waster for you. With QuickPik you can tell the mouse to watch how long you click for. A short quick right click is now repeat last command, and a slightly longer click pulls up the silly context menu. It's very easy to get used to, especially if you're an old r14 user.
If you're not on A2k yet, check out the Freebies on this site and look about halfway down for Big Layer. This will let r14 have the same large layer pull down menu from the toolbar that QuickPik does in A2k. I've been using this for sometime now in r14 and find that it is truly a wonderful addition that I can't live without.
