Autodesk
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For those of you who have signed up for the Autodesk 360 Technical Preview, you may well have already gotten a taste for its new viewing capability. Upload a 3D model of pretty much any format (the list is pretty exhaustive and goes well beyond Autodesk's own formats, but you might try with DWG, RVT, IAM, IPT, NWD and DWF, to name a few to get you started) and you'll see the viewer enabled for that model: Before we go on, please bear in mind that this is very much still in Beta: it's early days and the team is…
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My good friend and colleague, Christer Janson, was named 123D's Maker of the Day a couple of weeks ago. This post is to congratulate Christer but also to talk about Christer's background at Autodesk and the key role he plays in the AutoCAD team. I met Christer during the second round interview for my first job at Autodesk, back in 1995. I'd flown across to Switzerland for the interview, although the job itself was to be in the UK: it was a couple more years before I managed to move to Neuchatel for the first time. Back then Christer was…
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After a minor technical glitch, I've now been able to submit two class proposals for Autodesk University 2014. Both are currently planned as 90-minute lectures. The first is about AutoCAD's JavaScript API: Connect AutoCAD to the web with HTML5 and JavaScript AutoCAD 2015's JavaScript API enables a whole new generation of web-enabled applications. This session focuses on how you can use this API to connect web-based applications with AutoCAD. We'll look at how HTML5 can be used to implement user interface components inside AutoCAD – modal & modeless dialogs, palettes and new document windows – including calling into core AutoCAD…
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It's Good Friday, so much of the world will be offline today, but I thought I'd post quickly on some (good) news that may be of interest to people. The ReCap team has officially launched a new partner program. This provides access to a number of mechanisms for integrating with or harnessing Autodesk ReCap products and services. The Capture Codec Kit is primarily for importing custom point cloud formats – something important for hardware manufacturers, particularly – into Autodesk ReCap on the desktop. Embedded ReCap OEM allows generated or post-processed point cloud data to be brought into Autodesk's design products…
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As Jeremy has pointed out on his blog, in lieu of a dedicated AEC DevCamp – as has been run every other year for some years – Autodesk and the ADN team will be supporting the upcoming AEC Technology Symposium being held in New York on May 16-18. As with the DevCamps, this is a great opportunity to get to know the people behind our AEC products – whether product management or software engineering – so you can build relationships and get a better sense of where Autodesk is heading in the AEC industry. There will also be a Hackathon…
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The "call for proposals" for AU2014 is going out on April 23rd and will remain open for about a month. This is approaching quickly, so get your thinking hats on if you're considering submitting a class proposal. From my side I'm thinking about a few possible topics: Implementing a tangible user interface for AutoCAD using SensorTag Integrating a web-based user interface into AutoCAD via its JavaScript API I'm also toying around with the idea of doing a kind of "meta" session, during which we'd look at some of my favourite blog posts/areas of research over the years. Something like "8…
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This is without a doubt the coolest office Autodesk has anywhere in the world. Pier 9, on San Francisco's waterfront, houses the Autodesk Consumer Group, including the Tinkercad and Instructables teams, as well as members of Autodesk Research and visiting artists-in-residence. And it has the most phenomenal workshops, kitted out with cutting-edge technology. I'd been hoping to visit for some time but this was really my first real opportunity since its official opening back in September. I wandered across from our 1 Market office (which is also pretty cool, but relatively lacking in toys 😉 with Gaurav Sachdeva, a colleague…
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It's nice being back in the Bay Area. I got in on Monday night and took BART into the city, checking into the Hyatt Regency (just across the street from our 1 Market office). That first evening I caught up with my old team – the DevTech managers, now under Stephen Preston's leadership – for dinner and then went for an over-priced green beer with my former boss, Jim Quanci. It was St. Patrick's Day, after all. 🙂 Then it was a short night's sleep before the usual jetlag woke me at 3:30am. On the plus side, it gave me…
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I saw an announcement for this competition back at Autodesk University 2013, but haven't yet posted about it on this blog. The competition is now in its final stages – the deadline is on March 26, 2014 at 10am PST – but that means exactly 9 days left to enter from the time this post goes live. The concept is simple: you have to use one of three Autodesk products – Inventor, Showcase or 3ds Max – to create a rendering of the Morgan 3 Wheeler to be published as an advertisement in MOG Magazine. Aside from installing one or…
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Many of you will have seen last week's announcement about the creation of the Autodesk Foundation. The foundation has been set up to formalise something that's long been part of Autodesk's culture: supporting charitable causes through direct investment, software donation and matching of employee gifts. This formalisation will also bring greater alignment around our support for the broader design community, which is something that's new. I'm particularly excited about changes being made to Autodesk's employee volunteering program. As an Autodesk employee I'm able to spend 4 hours per month of company time volunteering for qualifying nonprofit organisations (political and religious…