Autodesk
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Now that the dust has finally settled on Autodesk University 2015, I thought I'd write a couple of posts about some fun I had on Wednesday and Thursday. At this year's event I had classes to deliver on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings (at 8am and 10am, respectively). This is probably due to the fact I'd requested 90-minute timeslots and they quite sensibly schedule the longer sessions before noon and shorter sessions after it. Which all makes perfect sense. But it also meant that I didn't "let my hair down" properly until Wednesday night, by which point I'd finished my…
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I'm finally on my way home from AU 2015. As usual, the three days of AU were a completely whirlwind: I feel like someone pressed the fast-forward button and I entered into some kind of hyperlapse state. So not much chance to blog and tweet, sadly: too much time spent interacting IRL. Which is very welcome, of course: these interactions are so very valuable, and help drive activities through the rest of the year. Anyway, as alluded to in the last post, I wanted to make sure people were aware about one of the big announcements from this year's AU:…
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A few weeks ago a colleague – and keen mountain biker – from the Neuchatel office, Nicolas Barras, pointed me at a video created by one of his favourite local brands, SCOTT Sports, showing their goggle manufacturing process. Nicolas – a huge SCOTT fan – was curious about their use of design software. Watching the video with Nicolas, I could see Autodesk Inventor being used for their tooling design at around the 43s mark. This made me curious, too: I wondered whether it was also used to design the goggles, themselves. SCOTT is located at Givisiez, near Fribourg…
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It's been a couple of years since I last reported on an Autodesk web property getting cosmetic surgery. The AKN team has just unveiled a revamped portal enabling people to create, share and remix knowledge, whether of their industry or their usage of a particular product. Here's my AKN profile, showing that I've contributed some screencasts but (so far) no articles. We'll have to see what we can do about that. 🙂 Here's some information I received from the Screencast team that describes the change: Your profile is an opportunity to showcase who you are and promote your contributions. Share…
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A link to a video was posted to Autodesk's intranet, a few days ago. It's about Mark Webb, a friend and colleague based in our Manchester (New Hampshire) office. Mark and I started out at more or less the same time at Autodesk in the UK, in the charming town of Guildford. At least it's charming when you compare it with Farnborough, where the office is located now. Back then Mark was working on one of our early AEC products – some UK-centric extensions to AutoCAD that pre-dated the Softdesk acquisition and the launch of Architecture Desktop – while I…
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I've been heads-down wrapping up my AU content, so I thought I'd publish at least some of it here. Here's the handout for my "AU kick-off" class which is at 8am on the first day of the conference – the morning after the ADN party – so despite the fact the class is currently full, we'll see if that turns out to be the case. 😉 VR comes of age Presenting 2D images that allow the brain to reconstruct 3D has its roots in the early stereoscopes invented in the late 1830s. These were eventually democratized by Sawyers and their…
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The Autodesk Knowledge Network team has created a new, web-based tool for diagramming Autodesk product workflows called Project PRAXIS. This free tool is currently in pre-release and allows you to document and share product workflows within your organisation or with your customers. I took it for a spin and quickly documented the Eat, Sleep, Code, Repeat cycle (inspired by Fatboy Slim's Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat). The tool has been used extensively by our Global Services division, and I'm sure that many external consultants and channel partners will find it useful for mapping various activities. Give it a try and let us know…
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There's a lot of developer-oriented fun coming up over the coming weeks/months. The ADN team's DevDays tour kicks off in Beijing in a few days, with the largest single event taking place – as usual – the day before AU 2015 in Las Vegas. I'll be there for that, of course, but I've also booked my travel to be in Munich for the main European DevDay + Accelerator during the week of January 18-22, 2016. I'm very much looking forward to spending some more "quality time" with developers from across Europe – it should be a lot of fun (aside…
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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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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…