Articles tagged with Autodesk University

We covered this a little while ago, but Autodesk is expanding its Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program to European “clean technology companies working to address some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.” Basically, if your company is working in this area, you can get hold of a software grant that gives you up to five licenses of Inventor, Showcase, Vault, NavisWorks, Revit or Alias.

Full program information, including application process details for the Clean Tech software grant in Europe, is available at www.autodesk.co.uk/cleantech or (or here if you’re in Germany) - Quick Tip: look for the box on the right-hand side of the web-site.

I’ve been meaning to have a play around with this since AU late last year and finally got the chance today. At the Vegas event, Autodesk launched the latest addition to the Labs website (labs.autodesk.com) in the form of Inventor Publisher and its first Tech Preview. Like many things, this was first shown in the previous year’s event (2009) but this is the first time it’s been seen generally and made available.

What is it?

According to the web-site (labs.autodesk.com/utilities/inventor_publisher/) it is : “easy-to-use software for creating interactive 3D product documentation - from assembly instructions to operating procedures, repair instructions, and more. Inventor Publisher allows you to deliver clearer and more comprehensive technical instructions to your customers. Inventor Publisher allows technical publication and illustration teams to leverage the same digital prototype created in Inventor that is used in the design to manufacturing process. You can work directly with 3D design models to clearly communicate technical information without the need to learn CAD software.”

What is it really? That’s a pretty accurate statement, the system provides you with an environment in which you can load both Inventor and DWG data, create keyframe-based animations that show the various steps in how you can assembly, disassembly or service a product. It gives you tools for either automatically creating exploded views or diving in and knife and forking them yourself to create each step. The system has a wide range of presentation styles, from shaded views, through to more tech. illustration style display methods, colour control, perspective and orthogonal options and such as well as a number of annotation tools. The whole process is drive by snapshots within a storyboard.

Each Snapshot gives you each stage and at first it seems a little counter intuitive, but once you get a handle on the workflow, it’s easy to move components, create each explode sequence, then move onto the next. The system automatically adds in the animation sequences (tweened across a user controllable time span) to move both components and camera views.

The system has an interesting array of output options. As you might expect, there’s video output, which is handy (to both flash movies and AVIs - there’s an example of the latter below), but alongside that, there’s output to PowerPoint (shown, imported into Keynote as I avoid powerpoint like black death), Word as well as standard graphics file outputs, with full control over resolution, format, transparency and size.

The odd thing is that while the animation sequences are interesting, I would imagine that the last category of output might be the most used, particularly for those publishing technical documentation. That said, the video output is particularly compelling and when used in combination with animation and colour/transparency controls, pretty effective at communicating intent and instructions.

Coming next?

This is Tech Preview territory as with many things on Autodesk’s labs resource, so what you see here isn’t what’s going to ship. My guess would be integration of these tools into Inventor and it being bundled in with one of the Suite offerings. Other things that are to come are an iPhone publishing option. It’s unclear whether it’ll be cloud or download/sync based, but Josh at SolidSmack has a nice video from AU that I’m going to steal to show you how it works:

Green Ocean Energy relies on Inventor to develop groundbreaking wave energy devices.

After a discussion with Autodesk’s ultra impressive sustainability team (seriously, this team is intimidating with their knowledge on the subject) at AU last week, one thing that came up was the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program. Essentially, Autodesk is giving away grants of software to early-stage clean technology companies “who are working to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges”.

The grant gives you five licenses each of Inventor, Revit, Vault, Showcase, NavisWorks and Alias Design worth around $150k. At the moment the program is restricted to North America (US and Canada), but what I found most interesting is that while almost every vendor is making its sustainability play, Autodesk are putting its money where its mouth is and offering some assistance to companies looking to develop new ways to assist the planet. Without spending more on software tools, those companies that they engage with can spend more on developing new technology that can help. That, my friends, is a good thing which ever way you cut it.

For me, the one session that’s worth the trip to Autodesk University is the Manufacturing Solutions keynote session. This is where you get to see what Autodesk are working on, some of which, as history has proven, is due for the next release, some of it isn’t and is just concepts. But the chances are that what you see here will make it into a release some point in the next two years (the next major release cycle is due around march next year). So, here’s the crappy video. and then some notes.

Alias Sketch for AutoCAD

This was announced a few days ago and it sees the integration of SketchBook into AutoCAD. While the UI is adapted to its new home, the tools see to remain emminently usable. One of the key points about SketchBook and why it’s seen such success is that it has a very stripped back set of tools, unlike Photoshop, and some specialised tools for design-led users. Looks nice and should be available soon according to Shaan Hurley’s blog.

Alias Freeform within Inventor

This bring a pretty easy looking set of geometry modelling tools directly within Inventor. While the video isn’t too clear, the concept is that you have a single feature which gives you all of the dynamic modelling operations you need to quickly create complex forms, then use the more standard existing tools to add engineering detail. The toolset demo’ed looks extensive and pretty powerful for manipulating geometry - one thing to consider is how straight edges are turned into curves, how planar geometry is is turned into curved surfaces. This demo reminded me of the ISDX-based Style feature within Pro/Engineer and any advanced Pro/E user will tell you that its worth its weight in gold - hope this one makes it into Inventor.

Direct Editing in Inventor

This is the first time Autodesk has shown any of its direct editing tools integrated into Inventor. While things are shaking out with regards Fusion and Change management, if this is what the future of Inventor’s direct editing tools looks like. again, that can’t arrive quickly enough.

Product Analytics and Data management

This is an intriguing one. Autodesk are looking at how to make data management more user experience. Using graphical output as the basis for data management interactions, using heavy use of colour coding, data filtering, it all makes sense - allowing you to grab the information you want and get on with the job. Also tagged on the end of the video is a quick look at the boosted graphics richness. Autodesk has a rich set of tools for visualisation (with Showcase, 3dsmax etc etc) and if these types of capabilities to work in a much more graphically rich environment are implemented, it’ll be useful and make working life much more pleasant for the user and provide a great deal of context for design work. Of course, visualisation tools have always had the benefit that it makes communicating complex forms much easier when dealing with those outside of the design environment

3D Printing

Autodesk worked with Stratasys to create the world’s largest 3D print of a turbo-prop aerospace engine. All 188 components were produced in 4 weeks and assembled in 2.5 weeks for a total production time of 6.5 weeks. Using conventional fabrication processes, such as machining and casting, a manufacturer would expect to spend 9 months or more producing a model like this. Costs were roughly $25,000 compared to estimated $800,000 to $1 million that would be required using conventional processes. Having seen the thing up close, its an incredible feat of prototyping.

We’ve discussed this already, but here you’ll see the Publisher application and the iPhone integration. Publisher makes huge sense and I’m fascinated to see where this is going to head. At present it covers 3D publishing, but as we all know, paper documentation is still heavily prevalent and I’m intrigued by what Autodesk has up its sleeve in this demand. One thing that came up this week was an element of dismissal of the iPhone has an industrial tool - I can see that point of view, but let me illustrate this for you. I recently saw an electrician turned up at a house to do some work. The part he was fitting wasn’t supplied with the correct manual. He flipped out an iPhone, looked up the part on the manufacturer’s web-site and read the PDF manual. Was he a young nerdy type? Nope. just a 50+ professional tradesman that found a solution that works wonderfully well. That’s a sea change in how tech gets adopted by the masses.

Moldflow visualisation

I like this one. Moldflow simulates how plastic is injected into a mould tool. But the results it gives are complex. What this shows is how you can take visualisation tools and provide an environment that shows users exactly how a part will look should manufacturing defects (such as sink marks) are left to enter into the manufacturing chain.

Simulation

Last thing is simulation tools for Frame analysis. Beam element modelling is something that’s perfectly suited for framework, but there’s often a disconnect between the framework design and the highly stripped back model you’d use for simulation. This solves that very nicely indeed.

First post for Autodesk University, so I figured we’d just jump straight in with a quick look at a new addition to Autodesk Labs. Inventor Publisher Technology Preview sees autodesk release a 3d product documentation application for creating assembly/disassembly instructions, manufacturing process instructions and all other manner of 3D documentation. It allows you, at present to bring in data from not only Inventor, but other formats, create keyframe style steps with automatic and manual explosion tools. The system gives you tools around the process, such as reversing workflows, managing views and step times as well as a range of output options, from DWF, through movie files (including flash output), powerpoint and word documents.

Taking much of its user interface queues from Fusion, the system looks pretty slick. What’s also interesting and coming soon is a publishing option for the iPhone platform which gives you 3D model animation, manipulation (panned, zooming, rotation etc). It’s not clear whether data will be local or hosted in the cloud, but it’s an interesting trend and one that makes huge sense for making documentation and instructions portable.

Experts, Like you - AU2008’s strap line - loving the branding scheme.

Autodesk are hosting their huge, annual user event at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas this week. As with all such events, things kick off with Keynotes from the executives and a special guest. For AU2008, this meant CEO Carl Bass, CTO (that’s Chief Technical Officer to you, punk) took the stage with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO. Kelley gave a very foreshorten speech based on his book, “the Ten Faces of Innovation”, combined with Bass’ empassioned whistlestop tour through how Autodesk products are being used to enable innovative design, meant that Jeff Kowalski took the stage to show off some of the future technology that the company is working on. Among the many things shown, a few things lept out.

For those Inventor users out there, a chunk of modelling technology was shown that ‘might’ be the future look and feel of Inventor - the video shown was cropped out so you can’t tell what the application was, but it’s pretty clear where this is headed.

What we can see here is a stripped back ui, a feature tree that’s integrated into the modelling window and some telling geometry manipulation. Whether its Direct Editing, Sync Tech, the 3D design world is going ape for the ability to directly manipulate geometry - this shows this working inside an Autodesk product - an intriguing thought.

Here you can see Marking Menu (something that Alias mastered years ago) being used to extend the operations available at the cursor, on the model and ready to go when you need them.

Secondly, Kowalski offering the thought that we should not think about what we can do with the computing technology now available (which he stated is currently being vastly unused due to legacy code issues across the IT industry). This image shows a concept of having a multi-core workstation or perahps across a cloud, running multiple simulation analyses. What’s displayed appears to be a chart showing results from design optimisation runs, displayed as a strength vs. weight chart, with live previews of FEA results.

The last was something I thought was very cool indeed. It showed a very sparse sketching interface, with tools that interpret your inputs to create not only explicit sketch strokes, but also to create smooth splines. That’s impressive alone, but the demo went further to show how that same workflow and data could then be flipped into a 3D environment and the same sketching-style inputs could be used to generate surfaces (we don’t have an image of that just yet). Looks a lot like this:

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

Final thing isn’t particularly new (SolidWorks did it a while ago), and the idea of online rapid prototype order certainly isn’t, but Autodesk has signed up with Z Corp (who in turn have created the Zprint service in partnership with QuickParts.com) and Stratasys (presumably using its RedEye bureau to enable print and delivery)to offer a direct link between AutoCAD and Rapid Prototyping service providers. Available from a File/Menu pick, the tools convert your 3D AutoCAD data to STL and communicate it with the chosen vendor.

This whole bike was built on Stratasys’s FDM machines

Details are sketchy at the moment, but its due to be delivered with the next Bonus Pack (the goodies provided to Subscription customers). No word yet of whether or not this is going to roll out to Inventor and Revit, but its a smart move, for both Autodesk and the service providers involved.

NOTE: Autodesk went to great lengths to ensure that we all understood that what’s shown here is based on technology in development and maybe not even make it to final products and that attendees shouldn’t base purchasing decisions on the back of what was shown. And you should do the same.

But having watched this, it would be a damn shame if it doesn’t.

I might be missing out on the weather, the casinos, the showgirls and something called Autodesk University in Las Vegas next week, but the AU Design Slam by the guys behind Cut&Paste is something I’d really have loved to have seen.

The live on-stage design competition is going to be the first to feature 3D design, with teams hacking out designs against the clock using Autodesk Maya, AliasStudio, SketchBook Pro, and Revit Architecture software.

20 minute rounds mean competitors are pushed to use their wits and showmanship to entertain the crowds as their progress is projected in real-time onto massive screens.

In an interview in the build-up to AU, Cut&Paste executive director John Fiorelli, said: “It’s a live battle between industrial designers and between architects, it’s very similar to the digital design series we do for graphic designers around the world. We’re working with Autodesk University to bring it to industrial design and architecture for the first time this year.

“The idea is to do in 3D what we do in 2D: Give people a chance to see what the creative process is like; give people a chance to see what industrial designers and architects do in real-time,” explained John. “In essence the show is pretty straightforward. We put designers on stage, we give them a theme or a brief and they create work alive in front of your very eyes on LCD projectors. You can watch every brushstroke, every mistake, every scratch-out, every revision, and it gives you the chance to see what people do using Autodesk tools.”

The design briefs are issued to contestants a week or so in advance to allow for concepts to begin developing, but organisers throw in extra elements just before the battle begins, adding a bit more spice to the events.

In case you’re wondering where I’ll be while the rest of the D3D team apply their factor 30, bare their pale flesh, and delve into the 3D battles in Vegas; I’ll be reporting back from deepest-winter Frankfurt. Chilling.

*might not constitute actual death