2015
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Some serious updates to our reality computing tools have been released in the last few days… here's a quick round-up with links you can use to go and find out more. ReCap 2.2 Each member of the ReCap portfolio – ReCap, ReCap 360 and ReCap Ultimate – has significant new features in this release. Full details are available here. To summarize just a few, there are new features focused on noise clean-up of point clouds as well as optimizing them for editing performance and project size, and a number of improvements relating to creation of presentation assets such as walkthroughs,…
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This request from Thomas Longnecker languished in my inbox for several weeks before I finally found the time to work on it. It would be tremendously helpful to me if you could give an explanatory example of how to: Create a new layout, add a page-setup with plot-settings and then either delete the default viewport and create a new one or possible change the default viewport. […] Within the newly created layouts I needed to set some of the general Plot setting, mainly Paper size and Plot style table. Some of the main things for the viewport was to set…
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I just received this interesting (and quick to solve) question from Henrik Ericson, this morning: I'm looking for a new xref command (or perhaps overriding the internal xref command) that always insert the selected xref at 0,0,0 coordinates and in World coordinate system. I'm often inserting an xref and 'nothing happens' and then I realize that I'm in a UCS. I created a simple command called XAO – for XrefAttach[At]Origin – that does just this. As a helper function I implemented a simple extension method to both attach and insert an external reference in the current space of the active…
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As is typical, for this time of year, there were some strange sightings at Autodesk Neuchâtel, today. Here I am dressed as Jabba the Hutt, getting a latte in our new coffee area. The costume's a lot of fun, if a little hot. It has an integrated fan, powered by 4 AA batteries, so at least there's some air circulating. It's a little tricky to walk in (especially when going through doors – I've learned to do a little spin to make sure the tail doesn't get caught and I end up falling on my nose), but at least my…
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In the last post we saw how we could integrate an HTML and JavaScript palette hosting Cytoscape.js into AutoCAD to map progress made in a text adventure. In today's post we take the additional step of converting the graph data into AutoCAD geometry. To be clear, there's a bit more to this post than having fun mapping old-school interactive fiction inside AutoCAD: I can think of lots of scenarios where you might want to use a comparable tool to build a graph of data and lay it out manually before bringing the graph into AutoCAD as native geometry. But I'm…
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I mostly despise jetlag but once in a while manage to harness it for something positive. I remember some great trips to Asia, waking up at strange times to experience the dawn, walking the streets and seeing everyday life starting up around me. These days I typically find jetlag to be a bit of a curse, but this weekend I ended up using it to tackle a fun challenge: generating maps for Z-machine games such as Zork inside AutoCAD. Something I mentioned in a recent blog post but was reminded of last Thursday while catching up with Christer Janson in…
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Just to put the cherry on the cake that was my week in San Francisco, I went across to Pier 9, this afternoon, to catch up with David Thomasson and visit the robotics laboratory belonging to Autodesk's Office of the CTO. David and team are working on some really interesting projects. The first will be unveiled at AU 2015 and investigates the potential for humans and robots to build things together that neither group could on their own. Visitors to the exhibit at AU will have tasks to perform in conjunction with robots – with these tasks being coordinated centrally…
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Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I'm rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I'll describe my experiences of the evening's proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an interesting…
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I'm in San Francisco again for the Autodesk X Summit 2015. The event is targeted on User eXperience (UX), but is being attended by a very diverse set of Autodesk employees. It's the first such summit since Maria Giudice joined the company from Facebook, which many of us hope (believe!) will usher in a new era for our products. I'll be presenting a session on Wednesday regarding my experiments around UX for VR, particularly with respect to my View & Data API samples for Google Cardboard, culminating in a widescale demo of Vrok-It. Should be a lot of fun!
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The AutoCAD I/O team has deployed version 2 of their API. For specific information on what's new, check this page. As I'll be talking about AutoCAD I/O at AU 2015, I thought it important to get to grips with the new version and understand how it differs from v1. I went ahead and updated Jigsawify.com to make use of the new API, so I'll add my own commentary below on the changes that have been introduced. As a reminder, the full source code for Jigsawify.com is available on GitHub. To check out the specific migration changes, see this comparison…