Morgan
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As mentioned yesterday, on Saturday my second son and I got up at the crack of dawn to drive across to the Alpine town of Grindelwald. It's the third time I've made this particular pilgrimage in the last four years (last year I had a conflicting event in the UK) and it's become something of a rite of passage for my kids: as they turn 10 they come with their Dad and his silly car to meet lots of other people with silly cars. The event is the M3W Jungfrau Treffen, organised by Laurens and Rineke, a Dutch couple based…
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After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual "semaine blanche" around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th "Salon de l'Auto". I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year's show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly computer-generated…
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Back when FARO announced their new Freestyle3D handheld scanner, I contacted them to see whether they might have one for me to take a look at. They very kindly obliged, and a few weeks ago I received a loaner model in the post. I won't be writing an exhaustive review – at least not in this post – but I did want to share my first impressions, mainly to capture them for future discussion. Bear in mind that most of what I'm writing here is personal opinion and the rest is pure speculation :-). Hopefully someone at FARO will be…
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I headed over to Geneva yesterday afternoon for the first press day of this year's Geneva Motor Show. I was there courtesy of our friends at the Morgan Motor Company who launched their new Aero 8 (it was actually nice being there as a guest, in contrast to last year's collaboration). Here's the launch video for this exciting car: I love this video, but I did have one minor gripe for the Morgan team: why was Jon Wells, Morgan's Head of Design, shaving a piece of clay rather than using Autodesk tools to develop the design? I was joking –…
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Autodesk University 2014 ended really well on Thursday. Despite me nearly showing up late for my final speaking engagement (I somehow had it in my head that it started at 1:30pm rather than 1:00pm – thankfully I chose to show up 32 minutes early!), the session itself went very well. It was the only one of my sessions that ended up being recorded (it wasn't about AutoCAD, at all – it was all about the Geneva Motor Show project which was implemented using Autodesk VRED), and it was a fun one. The final keynote was, once again, very inspiring. Amar…
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It's suddenly Thursday morning. I feel like I've been in one of those hyperlapse videos since my last blog post. Here's a quick update on what I've been up to. When I wrote my last post I was actually sitting in on Albert Szilvasy's AutoCAD I/O session. This very interesting class was recorded so be sure to watch it when it comes online. From there I headed to the Exhibit Hall. This year the Exhibit Hall at AU is just incredible. I don't know what's changed, exactly, but I just love the way it's been laid out. And I've really…
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A few weeks ago I received the official retail version of Kinect for Windows 2 (having signed up for the pre-release program I had the right to two sensors: the initial developer version and the final retail version). After some initial integration work to get the AutoCAD-Kinect samples working with the pre-release Kinect SDK, I hadn't spent time looking at it in the meantime: the main reason being that I was waiting for Kinect Fusion to be part of the SDK. The good (actually, great) news is that it's now there and it's working really well. For those of you…
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As mentioned last week, I've been having fun with Fusion 360 to prepare a model to be displayed in the new Autodesk 360 viewer. The sample is now ready to view, although I'm not yet quite ready to post the code directly here, mainly because the API isn't yet publicly usable. Here's the app for you to take for a spin, as it were. The Autodesk 360 Viewing & Data API is currently being piloted by a few key partners, and hopefully we'll soon be broadening the scope to allow others to get involved (we first have to iron out…
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A quick reminder – as I already posted on this topic a few months ago – about the "early bird" $600 discount that's available now – and until August 19th – for this year's AU. It's a great way to get first dibs on the classes of your choice, as you get to register a week before people who don't hold advance passes (such as Autodesk employees, sniff-sniff ;-). It's already shaping up to be a hectic AU for me, again: both the classes I submitted got accepted (thanks, developer track leads!) and it turns out I'll be participating in…
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My friends in the Autodesk Developer Network team asked me to get involved with creating a sample for the API we're planning to launch soon for the new Autodesk 360 viewer. They were quite specific about the requirements, which was very helpful: something fun, perhaps with a steampunk theme, that shows some interesting possibilities around both the HTML5 container and the embedded viewer. I was also suggested the Morgan 3 Wheeler as a possible model to look into hosting, so I really didn't need to be asked twice. 😉 I started by tracking down a model: I ended up using…