Autodesk

  • Here's a little bit of fun. There's a new dashboard in the San Rafael office, but what does it show? Post your guess as a comment: the closest – or most humorous, depending on my mood – will win a free "I♥3D" Autodesk T-shirt (I'll contact the winner to get their size). And when I say humorous that doesn't mean rude or insulting. Please keep it clean & polite, people. 🙂

  • It's been a busy few days. After being in full-day meetings on Thursday and Friday, I headed down with Jim Quanci to the VR Hackathon's kick-off event on Friday night. It was held at the newly refurbished Gray Area Theater in San Francisco's Mission district. The Friday night "mega meetup" was a great way to kick the event off, with presentations from NASA's JPL on how they teamed up with Sony to develop a prototype VR system to control robots for asteroid mining. There was also an interesting presentation on the evolution of VR tech from Leap Motion's founder and…

  • After introducing the topic, showing a basic stereoscopic viewer using the Autodesk 360 viewer and then adding full-screen and device-tilt navigation, today we're going to extend our UI to allow viewing of multiple models. Firstly it's worth pointing out that for models to be accessible by the viewer that makes use of my client credentials, I also need to upload that content with the same credentials. You can follow the procedure in this previous post to see how you do that, although I believe the ADN team has created some samples that help simplify the process, too. Once you have…

  • I'm heading out the door in a few minutes to take the train to Zurich and a (thankfully direct) flight from there to San Francisco. I'll have time on the flight to write up the next part in the series, so all will be in place for this weekend's VR Hackathon. In today's post we're going to extend the implementation we saw yesterday (and introduced on Monday) by adding full-screen viewing and device-tilt navigation. Full-screen mode is easy: I borrowed some code from here that works well, the only thing to keep in mind is that the API can only…

  • After yesterday's introduction to this series of posts, today we're going to dive into some specifics, implementing a basic, web-based, stereoscopic viewer. While this series of posts is really about using Google Cardboard to view Autodesk 360 models in 3D (an interesting topic, I hope you'll agree ;-), it's also about how easily you can use the Autodesk 360 viewer to power Google Cardboard: we'll see it's a straightforward way to get 3D content into a visualization system that's really all about 3D. Let's start with some basics. We clearly need two views in our web-page, one for each eye.…

  • I'm heading back across to the Bay Area on Wednesday for 10 days. There seems to be a pattern forming to my trips across: I'll spend the first few days in San Francisco – in this case attending internal strategy meetings in our 1 Market office – and then head up after the weekend to San Rafael to work with the members of the AutoCAD engineering team based up there. I'll still probably head back into SF for the odd day, the following week, but that's fine: I really like commuting by ferry from Larkspur to the Embarcadero. The weekend…

  • As reported over on Scott's blog, Project Memento v1.0.10.5 is now available on Autodesk Labs. I won't repeat the specific new features in this release – Scott covers those thoroughly – but I will say that I'm personally most excited about trying the improved .OBJ and .FBX export and the workflows that they enable. To find out more about Memento, there's a webinar on Wednesday October 15 at 9am Pacific talking about the tool. During the webinar, Tatjana Dzambazova – whom you may have seen in her excellent TEDx session – will cover topics such from uploading photos, working with…

  • I mentioned this initiative a few months ago, but it turns it hadn't been rolled out everywhere: there were regional exceptions meaning that students in certain countries weren't eligible for the program at that point. So my apologies if it sounds like I'm repeating myself, but at least it's good news that I'm announcing twice. 🙂 The last kinks have been ironed out of the program, so now students, teachers and schools anywhere in the world can now download and use the following Autodesk software for free… So if you're a student who was expecting to be able to get…

  • 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…

  • There's still time to participate in the Autodesk Exchange Apps Hackathon, a virtual event taking place this weekend (September 20-21). The point of this event is to encourage developers to post apps to the Autodesk Exchange Apps store, and we're even paying cool, hard cash ($50 or $100, whether free or paid) for each app that gets published. Presentations and discussions will include: How to architect your app for Exchange: How to build your AutoCAD® app How to build your Autodesk® Revit® app How to build your Autodesk® Inventor® app How to build your Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Autodesk® Maya®…