Autodesk
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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…
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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…