Morgan
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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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Today marks the first public day of this year's Geneva Motor Show. After having spent time on Monday setting up the configurator Autodesk provided to Morgan Motor Company, on Tuesday I went along to make sure everything was working well. It wasn't exactly smooth sailing, but we got there. To start with, the connection from the iPad to the system performing the rendering work locally using Autodesk VRED – the iPad connection is the only part of the system that requiring wifi, we don't actually use it for the rendering itself – was intermittent and very slow. I whipped out…
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Yesterday I had a really interesting day. I spent it at Geneva's Palexpo exhibition centre, helping Morgan Motor Company set up their stand for this year's Salon International de l"Auto & Accessoires (i.e. the 84th Geneva Motor Show). It was really cool being there before even the press were allowed in (they get to attend today and tomorrow), while most of the cars were still under wraps: I've been to the show – and visited the Morgan stand – before, but this year was very exciting for me as it marks the culmination of some months of collaboration between Morgan…
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I'm up in the mountains for the week as the kids have their winter half-term break (which in Switzerland is actually intended for kids to ski… very civilized :-). I'm going to take a few meetings and probably write a few blog posts, but otherwise I'm planning on hitting the slopes whenever I get the chance. I did want to comment on how my research into right-click menus ended up, last week. I put together some code that made use of the technique shown in this previous post to create and load a partial CUIx file containing our OBJECT_ACAD_TABLE shortcut…
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I've pulled together a few miscellaneous updates that relate to Autodesk's Reality Computing efforts, which – as I mentioned earlier – is a term that's intended to include "Reality Capture" at the beginning, followed by "Reality Modeling and Analysis" and then "Reality Delivery". Firstly, looking at the capture side of things… Photo on ReCap 360 (the new name for ReCap Photo) now has free and paid versions available. Although at the time of writing it's still possible to make use of the soon-to-be-paid benefits for free, but do hurry! Preview mode – with up to 50 source images of 12…
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This is the second part of the two-part interview with Morgan Motor Company's Head of Design, Jon Wells. Here's the first part, in case you missed it. How long has Morgan been using Autodesk software? I introduced Autodesk software to the company when I joined. I was the link between the aesthetic designer that had just joined the company – who was very visual-based – and the engineering team. With my technical background and understanding of 3D and surfacing, I was able to understand both the aesthetics and how that would interpret into an actual, physical component. And to enable…
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A few weeks ago I visited Morgan Motor Company in the UK. The highlight of the visit for me was getting the chance to sit down with Jon Wells, Morgan's Head of Design, to talk about the company and their use of Autodesk software. I'm a huge fan of this company and the way they meld the traditional – cars are built in much the same way as they have been for 100 years – with the modern – aside from their advanced use of software they're also pushing boundaries in terms of materials science in the automotive industry. The interview…
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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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Well, that was indeed fun. For my first afternoon in Great Malvern visiting one of my favourite Autodesk customers – the Morgan Motor Company – I took a 1/2 day Morgan 3 Wheeler familiarization course. The course was run by a company called 3 Wheel Drive (what a great name 🙂 and involved focused, hands-on guidance from highly-qualified advanced driving instructors. My tutor, Norm, was a former professional police driver with many years of experience on the roads around Malvern. I started the day at the MMC Visitor's Centre: Norm met me there and introduced me to the Morgan 3…
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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…