3D printing
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There's been a lot in the news about Spark – Autodesk's entry into the 3D printing market – of late. Earlier in the year we announced this open platform and a reference design for it, but in the last few weeks things have become even more interesting: specific examples of partnerships with companies who are building their own printers based on Spark have started to emerge. I thought it worth aggregating a few of the more interesting articles for those who might have missed them. I'm personally really interested in the approach Autodesk is taking here. It seems to me…
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Some of you are probably aware of this activity from Shaan's and Scott's blogs, but I thought it was overdue a mention here, too. Autodesk is sponsoring the mother of all road trips: over the course of 8 months, TJ McCue is travelling the length and breadth of the United States in a brightly decorated recreational vehicle (RV), spreading the word about 3D technology. TJ is talking to people around the country about reality computing – capture, processing and fabrication processes such as 3D printing – as well as the availability of low-cost design tools. TJ is documenting his travels…
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The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk's engineering staff. I've been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I've been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as an…
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My good friend and colleague, Christer Janson, was named 123D's Maker of the Day a couple of weeks ago. This post is to congratulate Christer but also to talk about Christer's background at Autodesk and the key role he plays in the AutoCAD team. I met Christer during the second round interview for my first job at Autodesk, back in 1995. I'd flown across to Switzerland for the interview, although the job itself was to be in the UK: it was a couple more years before I managed to move to Neuchatel for the first time. Back then Christer was…
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There's a lot happening in the Reality Computing team. Firstly, there's a new Reality Computing blog in town. Be sure to bookmark it or subscribe to it to keep up-to-date on the goings-on in this fast-moving field. Secondly, [thanks to the blog we know] there's a series of webinars – starting today, apologies for the short notice – on Reality Computing topics. They are being held on May 13th, 20th and 27th and the series kicks off today at 9am PST with a session on "The basics of terrestrial 3D laser scanning with ReCap". If you happen to read this in…
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This is without a doubt the coolest office Autodesk has anywhere in the world. Pier 9, on San Francisco's waterfront, houses the Autodesk Consumer Group, including the Tinkercad and Instructables teams, as well as members of Autodesk Research and visiting artists-in-residence. And it has the most phenomenal workshops, kitted out with cutting-edge technology. I'd been hoping to visit for some time but this was really my first real opportunity since its official opening back in September. I wandered across from our 1 Market office (which is also pretty cool, but relatively lacking in toys 😉 with Gaurav Sachdeva, a colleague…
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Well, today was the day I printed my first 3D object. The missing feeder tube from our site's MakerBot Replicator 2 hasn't yet been replaced, but Francesco Tonioni, friend, colleague and probably the most practical person I know, cobbled something together as a stop-gap. So the game was on. 🙂 This initial project stems back to May of last year – when I was in Boston for our internal Technical Summit – when my son talked to me about an idea of his. My children really like LEGO, and, at the time – the specific product tie-in tends to vary…
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I've pulled together a few miscellaneous updates that relate to Autodesk's Reality Computing efforts, which – as I mentioned earlier – is a term that's intended to include "Reality Capture" at the beginning, followed by "Reality Modeling and Analysis" and then "Reality Delivery". Firstly, looking at the capture side of things… Photo on ReCap 360 (the new name for ReCap Photo) now has free and paid versions available. Although at the time of writing it's still possible to make use of the soon-to-be-paid benefits for free, but do hurry! Preview mode – with up to 50 source images of 12…
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Last week was an exciting one for the organisation at Autodesk that works on "Reality Computing" (a broader term I've seen recently that includes "Reality Capture" at the beginning, followed by "Reality Modeling and Analysis" and then "Reality Delivery"). Their big announcement was a partnership with the Smithsonian – the venerable Washington DC-based institution that is the world's largest museum and research complex – to bring digital scans of many important exhibits online and accessible to all via the Smithsonian x3D Explorer. Shaan talks about the announcement in depth on his blog. I won't repeat what he's said over there,…
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I was chatting with a colleague in Tel Aviv, yesterday, and he gave me the heads-up on a project that was about to be launched on Autodesk Labs, developed by the Autodesk Research team based in his office (thanks, Benny! :-). I checked this morning and there it was… The project is called Project Shapeshifter – accessible via shapeshifter.io – and here's what it says in its About box: Project Shapeshifter is a free technology preview by Autodesk. It provides an easy way to create complex 3D Printable models in your web browser. With a simple tweak of sliders, you…