Autodesk
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The last couple of weeks have been very interesting: partly for reasons that I'll go into in my next post, but also because I've had (or am having) the opportunity to visit three universities in Switzerland. My first visit, on Thursday of last week, was back to ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts – to have lunch with Max Rheiner (who you may remember from my post about Birdly, some months ago) and discuss the possibility of collaborating on some research into the use of VR for CAD. It was a great discussion, and I'm very much hoping it…
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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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Knowing how thoroughly I'd enjoyed my visit to JPF-DUCRET with them, our friends at hsbcad suggested I tag along to a visit they were making to the leading maker of ecological, pre-fabricated homes in Germany, Baufritz. So yesterday Peter Schlipf (from our ADN team) and I headed across to the Baufritz office in Erkheim, about an hour's drive west of Munich. On the way we met with colleague Krisztian Hegedus, who happens to live in a Baufritz home and was also keen to find out more about the company who'd built it. At Baufritz we were welcomed by Kris Riemslagh…
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The snow arrived, at last, and it's amazing. I spent the weekend on the slopes with my family before heading across to Zurich to hop on the last flight to Munich, last night. I had a sinking feeling, on arriving at the airport, as the information board said "More information at 20:15". This is generally not a good thing for a flight that's scheduled to leave at 20:15. In the end it was a mere 45 minute delay – which was quite the relief – which gave me some time to watch another episode of the excellent Mr. Robot (yes,…
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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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Autodesk is holding its first Autodesk Forge Accelerator from March 14-18, 2016 in San Francisco. I say it's the first, but it's really a rebranding of the Autodesk Cloud Accelerators that were held earlier this year to have the same moniker as the recently announced developer platform, fund and conference. The "call for proposals" started just before the holiday break, and will remain open until January 31, 2016. So there are just over 3 weeks left to submit your sub-2,000 word proposal on how you intend to use an Autodesk web-service API during the accelerator. These currently include View &…
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My favourite mesh generation and manipulation tool, Autodesk Memento, is now available (in Beta) for the Mac. I've been part of the Alpha programme for the OS X version for some time: admittedly not very actively, but I did install a number of builds and report an error or two. I'm very happy to see the Mac version is now joining its Windows sibling in Beta. Both versions can be downloaded and installed from this page. The model shown at the top of the page is of coral – I downloaded it from the bottom of the Memento download page…
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Autodesk Research has launched a new app via Autodesk Labs called Project Draco. Here's a description of this innovative tool: Draco is an iPad app from Autodesk Research that makes animation as easy as sketching, without the complications of timelines, scripting, and key-framing. The interface of Draco leverages users' intuitive sense of space and time. Compared to traditional 2D animation tools, it provides a simple interface allowing users to add a rich set of subtle, continuous animation effects quickly and without technical knowledge. By enabling the creation of dynamic (animated & interactive) media with sketch-based interfaces, our goal is to…
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One of the highlights of last week's Autodesk University was the chance to experience a prototype integration of Fusion 360 with Microsoft HoloLens. Here's a video showing something of the integration as well as a vision of future functionality: To give HoloLens a try at AU 2015, you had to register for a specific timeslot during the 3-day event: the one that suited me was on Wednesday afternoon, after my last solo speaking engagement but before my last panel session. It turned out they were over-subscribed and a little behind – and they were understandably prioritising Autodesk customers…
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As mentioned in the last post, although I'd visited the Exhibit Hall at Autodesk University a couple of times during the prior days, it was really on Thursday that I spent the most time there. One of the highlights, for me, was in the hall leading to the Exhibition Hall itself: the AU Hive. This is the project I'd been introduced to when visiting the Applied Research Lab on Pier 9. It was an interesting experiment in how humans and robots – coordinated by a "controlling intelligence" – could achieve more together than they could separately: to build a structure…