3D printing
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I first heard about Project Escher a few months ago and found the idea really interesting: coordinating multiple print heads to introduce parallelism into additive manufacturing. Then, last week, there was a really interesting Q&A about the project in an Autodesk-internal newsletter. I'm reprinting it here, below, as I know it will be of interest to this blog's readers. When it came to looking for an image for this post, I decided to look for something by M. C. Escher that was in some way descriptive or representative. An obvious choice was his "Drawing Hands" lithograph, although it's probably better…
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Yesterday I had the honour of presenting a Swiss Tech Talk in Autodesk's Neuchatel office. I've attended a number of these events over the last year or so – on such diverse topics as Bluetooth, IP issues related to the cloud and IoT, and the changing face of management consulting – so it was a great pleasure to be invited by the Swiss Tech Association to deliver a session on behalf of Autodesk. I figured the audience wouldn't be interested in hearing about AutoCAD APIs – sure, I find this fascinating, but different strokes and all that – so I…
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One of the coolest news items to break during AU 2015 was the collaboration between Autodesk and Airbus to design and 3D print a groundbreaking new partition for the A320. Partitions are certainly not the sexiest part of a plane (not that I have a particular opinion on what that might be… the undercarriage, perhaps? 🙂 but even they can have a significant impact on its performance and therefore the environment. Each A320 currently sports a 65kg partition at the back – separating the passenger compartment from the galley – that supports two crew seats and can be opened in…
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My friend and colleague, Fernando Oliveira, had the honour of printing the first object from the Ember printer we have in the Autodesk Neuchâtel office. To capture the moment, I decided to take a few snaps that I'll share here. The design work was all done in Fusion 360. The design is a logo comprising of Fernando's daughter's initials. The printing process was managed by Print Studio, part of the Spark platform. I included the below shot – despite it being out of focus and not especially flattering – because it gives a view from our corner lab across the…
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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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My best attempt to describe this technical, industrial museum is as a Mecca for Makers. It's not a funky new space with a bunch of hipsters manning 3D printers – not that I have a problem with such spaces… I love those spaces 🙂 – rather it's a shrine to all manner of human invention and creation since before the industrial revolution. The first thing I had to see on entering the museum, this morning, was Foucault's Pendulum – with the museum playing a key part in Umberto Eco's incredible novel of the same name, this was a "must see"…
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One of the announcements at the recent REAL 2015 conference – and if you missed the event, as I did, you can see a great summary here – was the fact that the much-appreciated mesh manipulation tool from our Reality Solutions division, Autodesk Memento, has now entered public beta. It has graduated from Autodesk Labs and is now available for download without you having to log into the beta portal. It also has a brand new web-site describing why you might want to use it. For those of you who have been tracking its progress, release on release, here are…
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There's a really interesting conference in San Francisco, later this month (groan). It's being held in Fort Mason on February 25-27, and covers all aspects of reality computing, whether relating to capture, compute or create: Autodesk is the main organizer of the event, but there are lots of other companies and institutions involved, too. Check out the list of speakers: there are executives and specialists from Autodesk lined up as well as several eminent names from the industry. Here's a quick video giving a sense of what the conference is all about: And in case you're still interested in registering,…
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Autodesk University 2014 ended really well on Thursday. Despite me nearly showing up late for my final speaking engagement (I somehow had it in my head that it started at 1:30pm rather than 1:00pm – thankfully I chose to show up 32 minutes early!), the session itself went very well. It was the only one of my sessions that ended up being recorded (it wasn't about AutoCAD, at all – it was all about the Geneva Motor Show project which was implemented using Autodesk VRED), and it was a fun one. The final keynote was, once again, very inspiring. Amar…
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It's suddenly Thursday morning. I feel like I've been in one of those hyperlapse videos since my last blog post. Here's a quick update on what I've been up to. When I wrote my last post I was actually sitting in on Albert Szilvasy's AutoCAD I/O session. This very interesting class was recorded so be sure to watch it when it comes online. From there I headed to the Exhibit Hall. This year the Exhibit Hall at AU is just incredible. I don't know what's changed, exactly, but I just love the way it's been laid out. And I've really…