Autodesk
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The Autodesk office in Montreal is the home of 3ds Max and various other video effects and game-related technologies. It also has fun spinny chairs in their open area. Ideal for making silly animated GIFs. Because Friday. Next week I'll be making a big push to make sure all things VR-related are ready for the Forge DevCon. We're in the home stretch: there's still time to sign up, if you're able to be in San Francisco in mid-June!
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So far it's been a great few days in Montreal at this year's Autodesk Tech Summit. The event just keeps getting bigger: we're now up to 750 attendees over a 3-day conference with around 150 speakers. I spoke on the first day about using the View & Data API to enable VR – something I'll be talking about again at the Forge DevCon, for external attendees. I'm happy with how the session went – it was a fun crowd. Here's a selfie posted by a couple of people who came along… The rest of the day was spent in other…
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As mentioned, last week, I'm going to be hanging out in the AutoCAD .NET forum for the next few hours. I'll try to do a little live blogging here… so check back often. And remember to join me in the Google Hangout! 15:10 CEST / 6:10 PDT Sitting here with at Autodesk Neuchatel with Celine and Camilo (aka ^CEL and ^CAM from AutodeskHelp), waiting for the questions to come in. 16:50 CEST / 7:50 PDT Well, the Hangout was interesting. On the one hand, I didn't realise you had to enable Q&A before launching the "Hangout On Air", but…
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We have our annual, internal Technical Summit coming up in a couple of weeks. I'll be heading across to Montreal with 700+ other Autodesk employees to learn more about the cool stuff going on within the company. As I've done in previous years, I'll do my best to report information that I think will be interesting to this blog's readers (and that is ready to be discussed publicly, of course). One of the event's activities is being hosted by my team: the IoT Hackday. We'll have 30+ participants spread across 8 different teams. Each team will get provided some sensors,…
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One year ago Autodesk held our first ever Answer Day for people to get answers regarding the use of AutoCAD (and its APIs). While I didn't participate in the original event, myself, I was pleased to see a new approach being tried for connecting users of our products with the people who create them. You can think of these Answer Days as a kind of AMA for Autodesk software. The original event paved the way for several others and all have proven to be worthwhile: not just for Autodesk customers struggling with frustrating probems but for the Autodesk employees who…
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Last Thursday I received possibly the most interesting job description I've ever seen. A colleague in the Office of the CTO, Maurice Conti, has a team of robotics researchers working in the Applied Research Lab on Pier 9 in San Francisco and is looking to bring Machine Learning expertise into the team. I've talked about the Lab before, and you may also have seen this Guardian coverage of my friend David Thomasson, who works there. I think this might actually be my dream job. There are a few reasons I won't be applying: there's a skills gap (I only have…
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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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As mentioned in the last post, we're now going to take a closer look at writing extensions for the Autodesk View & Data API. To start with, we're going to create an extension which displays a vertical toolbar docked to the left of the Autodesk viewer. This toolbar will be centred on the viewer area and only contain three buttons: two will be toggles – with events assigned to when they're both clicked and unclicked – while the third will simply launch an action. Here's the JavaScript for this extension: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar // /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AutodeskNamespace('Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension'); Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar = function…
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I've been working on a prototype implementation of a research project that makes use of the View & Data API for its visualization. It's interesting to get back into using this API, especially as it's a fundamental piece of the Forge platform. As we expect this particular application to grow, over time, we're using extensions to house logically separate parts of the UI implementation. Extensions are a great mechanism for encapsulating functionality: they're basically JavaScript objects that have load() and unload() methods that are called when the viewer loads/unloads them. A number of samples in the Autodesk samples repository make…
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Some quick updates to round off the week… Firstly, a couple of "calls for proposals" have just gone out. Autodesk University 2016 is once again being held in Las Vegas, but this year it'll be earlier than usual: rather than being held right after Thanksgiving, it's now the week before, from November 15-17, 2016. This is going to be a welcome change for all US-based presenters, in that they can deliver their classes at AU and then take a well-deserved Thanksgiving break rather than spending it making last-minute changes to their slide decks and demos. If you're interested in presenting…