Autodesk
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I'm excited to announce some revolutionary new technology our "reality capture" team is working on at Autodesk. By now many people will be familiar with the Rip-Mod-Fab workflow (the 3D equivalent of Rip-Mix-Burn for music). The problem with this is that there's something fundamental missing from the equation: that most aromatic of dimensions, the world of odours. How many of you have used 123D Catch to copy a real-world object, printing it using with MakerBot, only to find something missing? That once you've got over the utter coolness of being able to print something in three dimensions, you're somehow left…
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In this previous post, we looked at using PointCloud Browser to visualize an AR scene containing a mesh generated by 123D Creature, a new iPad app from Autodesk. In this post, we head on over to Autodesk Labs to take Project Pinocchio for a spin. Project Pinocchio is an online character generator that helps you "create, customize, and download your very own rigged 3D characters from a catalog of over 100 body types, outfits, hairstyles, and physical attributes in a few simple steps." Once you've signed in, it's a simple process to create a character. You start by choosing your…
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A few weeks ago, we looked at using PointCloud Browser to visualize simple spherical primitives brought down from a web-service, as well as creating a simple AR game to obliterate them. Visualizing (and popping) spheres is all well and good, but clearly it'd ultimately be much more interesting to visualize more complex objects in an AR scene. The good news is that PointCloud Browser supports loading models from .OBJ files, a format generated by a number of Autodesk products – particularly those used in the Media & Entertainment space. I'm not a big user of 3ds Max or Maya, and…
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As I had to meet someone at Geneva airport, this morning, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and spend a few hours visiting the 83rd International Motor Show. The show opened its doors to the public, today, and includes such stunning vehicles as the $4.6 million Lamborghini Veneno: Yes, that wasn't a typo. This car would set you back the best part of $5 million. Ouch. I went quickly past most of the stands, though, and spent most of my time at Morgan Motor Company's. As I've mentioned before, MMC is a big user of Autodesk software.…
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I clicked on through to the Chrome Web Lab from the Google home-page, yesterday. It contains some cool "experiments" that showcase the capabilities of modern web-browsers (and presumably Google Chrome, in particular). The one that especially caught my interest was number 3, the Sketchbots experiment: The experiment starts with an uploaded photo or – and this is what I did, in my case – a snapshot taken from your system's webcam. Some image processing and computer vision techniques then get applied to it – essentially to perform edge detection and convert those edges to vectors – and the resultant sketch…
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This one did the rounds over the holiday and so I expect many of you will have missed it (unless you also happen to read Jeremy's blog). I'm still finishing up some work that I'll hopefully be able to unveil during the coming weeks, and I thought I'd post this in the meantime. Autodesk Research has published a pretty amazing visualization of Autodesk's organizational evolution over a period of four years, from May 2007 to June 2011. Like many nodes in the tree who remained static during that particular period, it can come as a bit of a surprise to…
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Congratulations to fellow Autodesker, Jeremy Sawicki, on claiming first prize in the ICFP (International Conference on Functional Programming) Programming Contest 2012. In his day job, Jeremy is a fellow software architect on the Revit team, although to win this prestigious competition Jeremy clearly functions at a much higher order (yes, that was actually a functional programming joke, right there ;-). To find out more about the task and Jeremy's solution, watch this video (Jeremy's team – Frictionless Bananas, of which Jeremy was captain and sole member – is introduced at around the 24m mark and talks about his implementation from…
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There is big news from the Autodesk Developer Network team: there's a new membership tier in town, and it's free! ADN Open is designed for people who are interested in developing with Autodesk software, but can't justify the expense of $1,000+ dollars per year in membership fees. Over the last year or more, we've been investing significant resources to put in place the infrastructure to support this free tier of ADN: Publishing a significant portion of our DevNotes – which were previously only available to ADN members – via our public DevBlogs. The only exceptions will be deprecated or confidential…
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I registered for AU 2012, yesterday. I had originally thought it was opening early for speakers, but apparently not: anyone can now register to attend and receive an early bird discount of $500 (before October 15). If you're interested in seeing what classes are scheduled for this year's AU – which will be held from Nov 27-29 in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, Las Vegas – you can browse the class catalog online. Here are the classes I'm scheduled to deliver or participate in, for instance: As you can see, there's more detail on the class timings than I provided in…
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This year's Autodesk football tournament was excellent – congratulations to the IPG 1 team, this year's well-deserving winners! (I've included a picture from their 2-1 quarter-final victory over us, below.) Towards the end of our last game of the day (thankfully) I managed to sustain a thigh injury after a collision with Fenton (he was playing for the GS-ISM team, while I was playing for Swiss 2). This made walking around pretty painful for the next few days, and certainly made the drive up to Brittany (with an overnight stay at a fantastic guest-house in Blois to break up the…