Autodesk
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The clock is ticking… the Exchange Apps Portathon is being held next weekend, and it's not too late to participate. If you're not sure what this is all about, take a look at two previous posts about this event. In a nutshell: Autodesk is paying developers $100 for each of the first 5 apps that developers publish to Exchange Apps before the end of the weekend, and the DevTech team will be online for a solid 48 hours to help people get there. On a side note, the DevTech team now has a YouTube channel for their DevTV sessions. There…
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As mentioned previously, I spent much of last week visiting an Autodesk customer in the UK, the Morgan Motor Company. They're based in the beautiful West Midlands town of Great Malvern which lies at the foot of the Malvern Hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty (yes, that's an official designation :-). [Update: to clarify, Malvern is in the county of Worcestershire which is in the West Midlands region (not to be confused with the similarly named county). So I should probably have said "the beautiful Worcestershire town of…". Apologies for having stated this in a potentially confusing manner.] To…
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As Labor Day passes and the summer draws to a close, it's time to start thinking about Autodesk University. The AU team clearly knows this (they themselves have been thinking about the event since before AU 2012, so this is more for the rest of us 😉 and so they've gone ahead and posted a preview of the class schedule for this year's event. Take a look at rows 2^8 and 2^8+1 (that's 256 and 257 for non-programmers 🙂 if you're interested in seeing information on the two classes I'm delivering, this year: one is on Leap Motion, the other…
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I'm sitting at Geneva airport, waiting to board a Swiss flight to the UK. I've been hacking away in Python – and now IronPython – for the last few days, which has been very interesting. Here's a quick update on that… I'm now managing to save out PNGs of the de-skewed portions of perspective photographs with a high degree of quality, if not with exceptional speed. I'll post a little on the approaches I tried out – and settled on – when I get the chance. It's now time to get the code working inside AutoCAD: I have the basic…
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A picture is worth a thousand words, so whatever your feelings about infographics this must be worth at least a hundred. 😉 Lots of people are participating in the previously announced Exchange Apps Portathon. You have 3 weeks until it starts, so it's a good time to consider joining the fun. Here's a note from Jim Quanci and Stephen Preston, describing the value of the event: At the risk of repeating what's already been said: curated online marketplaces are becoming the preferred way for software users to find add-on functionality. This is also true of Autodesk software, with a million…
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After taking a look at Project Memento, last week, using it to manipulate a mesh I'd previously created with ReCap Photo, I decided to try out the latest update to the latter of these two tools. The first thing to notice with this new, improved version of ReCap Photo is that it has its own portal showing your active projects: The tool itself works in the same way: you simply select multiple photos in Autodesk 360 and select "Create 3D model" from the action menu. In fact, all I had to do to try this new version was to resubmit…
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This morning I went back to look at Project Memento, with a view to using it to trim down a model I captured using ReCap Photo. I started with the model of the Morgan 3 Wheeler shown in this previous post. The first thing you'll notice when launching Project Memento is the modern, chrome-free user interface making copious use of marking menus. Navigation is fairly simple using a 3-button mouse. It was straightforward to select sections of the mesh and delete them: I repeated this – along with various zoom/pan/rotate operations to make different sections of the model visible for…
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Another bit of news from while I was out on vacation – so my apologies if this is old news for you, personally – the ADN team is running a Portathon on September 13-14, 2013 to encourage developers to get their apps posted on Autodesk Exchange. You do not have to be an ADN member to participate and neither do you need to pay in any way (other than with your time and effort). In fact there's even a financial incentive for participants: for the first 5 apps per developer that get accepted in the Exchange Store – and be…
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In case you missed it, last week Scott Sheppard announced the availability of a new version of DesignScript on Autodesk Labs. This release unveils DesignScript Studio which brings a visual programming environment to the DesignScript language. People who are familiar with Rhino Grasshopper or SoftImage's ICE will be aware of the benefits of working with a graphical tool for mapping associations and flows of data. I personally prefer working directly in code, myself, but there are certainly times when this kind of tool can help unravel complexity. The other primary feature is a new lightweight OpenGL-based script execution tool that…
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I've now finished my recent trio of long-haul trips: the San Francisco Bay Area in late April, Singapore in mid-May and Boston in early June. So I can take a breather for a few weeks (maybe even months), at least: I have no firm travel plans until AU, although no doubt something will come up before then. [For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the title of the post is a reference to a common British house name. In the UK people often name (or used to, anyway) their houses in this way to announce that they're "Done…