It is Alive in the Lab

Updated Sustainable Materials Assistant for Inventor Now Available

2009-07-16T04:00:00-07:00

Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain't what they used to be
Where did all the blue sky go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north, east, south, and sea
Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas
Fish full of mercury
Radiation in the ground and in the sky
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying
Oh, mercy mercy me
"Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)", Marvin Gaye, What's Going On/Let's Get It On, 1980.

Software Development Manager, Feiqi Zhang, provided me with an update of the Sustainable Materials Assistant. I was happy to put it on the Autodesk Labs site:

Free Download of Sustainable Materials Assistant

This updated version now supports Inventor 2010. To continue support for Inventor 2009, the ZIP file contains both installers. I'd like to welcome the Inventor 2010 users to the party! Now 2009 and 2010 users can provide problem reports, insights, and success stories on their efforts to improve the sustainability of their designs with the assistance of this technology preview. Please share your feedback with labs.iv.sustainable@autodesk.com. Oh, mercy mercy me.

Keeping our technology previews current to keep the feedback coming is alive in the lab.

Sample Autodesk Labs Feedback from June

2009-07-15T04:00:00-07:00

Autodesk Labs is all about feedback. Every once in a while I get an email that says "I have downloaded the utility from the site. I have been using it. What kind of feedback are you looking for?" To give you an idea as to what others are saying, here is a sampling of some feedback we got in June.

Nichole McCarty
With regard to Project Cooper, I had a few suggestions you guys might want to think over. I was thinking it would be really cool if you could select separate text boxes and edit them together so that one click changes all the text boxes to one font and size you want. I wanted to change the text on the labeling and dimensions of my dog house, and I had to click each text box individually, which you could imagine was time consuming.
Iain Howell
I like dragonfly! My thoughts and feelings are it is a well designed, fairly complete offering. My only real frustration was the limits 'resizable' objects and that you couldn't actually specify the dimensions and are forced to select the closest value to the desired specs. A larger collections of items would also be fantastic...
Jui Hung Yen
Dear Project Draw team, I was totally amazed by your work when I stumbled into it while searching for a suitable tool for a project that I'm trying to build. Knowing the difficulties and challenges involved in developing such a tool as Draw, your work impressed me deeply.
Torben West Jensen
[After reporting a problem where Outlook is breaking up the long email URLs...] Is it not possible to make the Freewheel program use something like the: http://www.shorturl.com/ to get a short hyperlink?
Martin Sedlar
iCopy seems to be great tool. I´ve tried to use iCopy for frame where base subassembly was created by Frame generator. Skeleton sketch of base subassembly changed according to iCopy rules, but Frame subassembly didn´t. Does it work with data created by Frame generator, anyway? Or would I use these tools together with some particular technique only? I think that time which could be saved by iCopy and Frame generator cooperation, shouldn´t be lost by long time subassembly data preparation without Frame generator.
Jean-Paul Trehen
Many thanks for all your great job around our solutions. Please, please again, AEC and especially Revit Architecture needs direct Rhino import. We need a real import translator which each Rhino form, primitives, lines, splines per points, points (etc) would be (re)create in the Conceptual Design 2010 template.
Emy McGann
Revit RDB Link is an exciting tool! I’m already imagining the possibilities with this! When you use the Custom Parameters tool, it looks like it puts the parameters in its own txt file. Is there any way to get the parameters to be placed in an existing shared param .txt file? It also doesn’t look like it gives me all the units for mep (i.e. electrical, hvac, etc units). I’m daydreaming here, but it would be really powerful if you could map the parameters on a connector in a family to a shared parameter thru this tool. One of the hardest things with managing schedules in RMEP is ensuring all the families being used in the project have the connectors mapped to a shared param (and mapped to the same shared parameter especially if you download content from manufacturers) (i.e. duct size, pipe size, voltage, load, etc).
Alejandro Gaete
The most cumbersome part of a project is trade coordination. This is where the five prime contractors come together to make sure there are no conflicts with each other’s work that is to be fabricated and installed. Most of this coordination is still done on paper... I am seeing a shift in the mindset of owners and general contractors which I believe is going to result in a dramatic increase in the NavisWorks role for coordination. My idea is to see a multi-touch computer simultaneously running NavisWorks and AutoCAD where at a coordination meeting, any trade can modify their 3D model and instantly update the overall model in NavisWorks. Currently we have each trade set up a laptop, then the modeler has his PC running NavisWorks. That’s six computers, five too many if you ask me.

Sharing what we've heard to spur you to send in your own feedback is alive in the lab.

Updated Inventor Fusion Technology Preview Now Available

2009-07-14T04:00:00-07:00

On Thursday, July 9, we posted an update to the Inventor Fusion Technology Preview. This update corrects some of the crashing defects you have reported to labs.iv.fusion@autodesk.com. Thanks for the defects. Please keep the feedback coming. This is exactly why we make technology previews available on labs.

Autodesk Revit Solar Radiation Technology Preview Now Available

2009-07-13T04:00:00-07:00

Solar radiation analysis is one of the ways architects can consider ecology when creating their designs.

"Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say it's all right."
"Here Comes the Sun," George Harrison, The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969.

Product Manager for Sustainable Design in the AEC community, Vidisha Salunke, got me a new utility for Revit users. I was happy to place it on the Autodesk Labs site. She also gave me the following blog article. Read on.

Designing for sustainability requires many analyses, and an understanding of the incident solar radiation on a building façade is one of those analyses. It is particularly compelling to be able to do this analysis from within Revit. The new Solar Radiation Technology Preview allows users to study incident solar radiation on a building form within the conceptual massing environment available to all Revit Architecture and Revit MEP users. There are many examples of how the information can be used, but some of the common ones are:

Studying how incident solar radiation on the façade of a specific form differs by orientation. This could be as simple as analyzing a basic rectangular form. It is easy but important to look at incident solar radiation on pitched roofs to understand the impact of various roof pitches and nearby shading elements early in the design process if solar panels are being considered.
To understand the relative importance of glazing for daylighting and solar heat gain of the building, it is useful to quantify the difference between the incident solar radiation that occurs on the lower floors vs. the higher floors of a tall building. This is especially significant in an urban context. Studying incident solar energy is one step towards understanding what types of glass might be appropriate different façades or floors. If the solar radiation on the north façade or lower floors is much lower than the flux on the southern or high floors, varying glass type and performance by face may be appropriate.
Much of the analysis associated with low carbon building design and sustainability is very numerical and not visually compelling. The solar radiation add-in is a great way to provide visual feedback within the context of a design whether as a means to communicate a design choice, or as part of a presentation.

It is worth repeating here that analyses for sustainability, including solar radiation analysis, should be done very early in the design process, and then repeated as needed when the form and design evolves. This new technology preview is available within the massing environment, which facilitates its early use.

The user chooses a weather file which contains the raw solar data required for the analysis, then chooses a date and time range for the analysis, and finally selects the surfaces to be analyzed.

The user has the ability to set the number of divisions or tiles that a surface gets sectioned into for the analysis, with the associated computation time implications. The results can be displayed as cumulative, peak or average values in user chosen units. The computation time varies depending on the calculation resolution, but examples shown here take approximately 10 seconds for the simplest analysis for the simplest form, to approximately 20 seconds for the more complicated form.

Finally, once the users are satisfied with their analyses, they can choose to publish the results in the form of images or output to a printer.

To help get you started, there's a video that accompanies this release:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfv1eEvnAas
non-YouTube: http://labs.autodesk.com/files/1801_1900/1811/file_1811.mp4

Thanks Vidisha. So take the solar radiation add-in for a whirl and let us know what you think at labs.revit.ecotect@autodesk.com.

Looking forward to your feedback in regards to our sustainability efforts is alive in the lab.

Request for Survey Participation: Graduate School of Design at Harvard University

2009-07-10T06:00:11-07:00

Dear owner, architect or energy consultant,

You are invited to participate in an online survey on the use of building energy simulation during design, construction and operation. A special emphasis of the survey is to better understand who on the design team owns and gets access to the energy model of a building, what role the model currently plays during building design and construction, and how the use of the model could be extended to the overall lifetime of a building.

The survey is being carried out by the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in collaboration with the Office for Sustainability. The survey is funded through the Harvard Real Estate Academic Initiative. The goal is to develop recommendations of how owners of large real state should interact with their building design teams to get maximum benefit from their building performance analysis contracts. The hope is that your input will help develop recommendations that are acceptable, fair, and profitable to all members of the design team.

To participate in the survey simply go to:

A Survey on the Use of Building Energy Models during Design, Construction and Operation.

Thank you for your participation! Please forward the survey link to your professional networks. We will be keeping the survey open until August 15th.

Project Freewheel will be down on Monday from 9 AM to 12 PM

2009-07-10T04:00:00-07:00

Our IT department will be performing some routine maintenance on Monday. As such, the Project Freewheel servers will be down from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific time. We thank you for your patience and your continued interest in Project Freewheel. We're always glad to hear Project Freewheel usage stores at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.

Twitter Status: Tweets, Following, and Followers

2009-07-09T04:00:00-07:00

I will follow you. Will you follow me?
All the days and nights that we know will be.
I will stay with you. Will you stay with me?
Just one single tear in each passing year there will be.
"Follow You, Follow Me," ...And Then There Were Three..., Genesis, 1978.

My Twitter account is:

http://www.twitter.com/scottsh115/

To get a perspective on what others in the Twitter community had to say, in June I expanded my list of people I was following. In Twitter terms, "following" someone means that their updates, called Tweets, appear on my Twitter page.

Actually I use a program called TweetDeck, so what I really see is their Tweets in nice columns.

Once I follow someone, in turn many of these people reciprocate by following me. At the start of July my Twitter status looked like:

Twitter only allows me to follow up to 2,000 other people. I also use a service called Twitterfeed to share It's Alive in the Lab blog postings with people who follow me on Twitter. I have found that if I fully follow 2,000 people, Twitterfeed stops working, It's best to keep one's follow list at no more than 1990. So I will be spreading things around. I will unfollow some people to make room to follow others.

On a side note, it was really cool to see our Autodesk Gallery mentioned as one of the top 11 3D companies and artists to follow on Twitter. 11? I guess the author has seen This is Spinal Tap.

Sharing what the deal is with this "Twitter thing" is alive in the lab.

Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline: Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco

2009-07-08T06:56:52-07:00

Marketing Communications Manager, Julie Hayes, let me know that recently, the award-winning broadcaster Dave Graveline, host of the technology talk show “Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline,” interviewed Autodesk leaders and customers at the Autodesk Gallery at One Market. A sampling of topics ranged from mixed reality interfaces (Technical Evangelist, Brian Pene), how technology has a positive impact in the classroom (Alhambra High School), Autodesk’s response to demands in the gaming world (Senior Games Industry Manager, Mary Beth Haggerty), and how we are helping to provide our 9 million customers with the tools to make sustainable decisions.

Julie invites you to take a watch/listen:

Into Tomorrow: Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco

Check it out.

thinkdigit: The Online Desktop Experience: Autodesk Project Dragonfly

2009-07-08T04:00:00-07:00

Product Manager, Patrick Aragon, alerted me to a recent review of Project Dragonfly. Recall that Project Dragonfly is our software as a service approach to floor planning. For the review, see:

thinkdigit: The Online Desktop Experience: Autodesk Project Dragonfly

This is one of the more comprehensive reviews that I’ve read since our June update. It even covers Project Dragonfly's object placement rules and our Amazon implementation. The article also contains several embedded videos from YouTube. This is the first article in a series which will “explore the blurring lines between desktop and web applications." Check it out. To take Project Dragonfly for a test drive yourself, please see:

Autodesk Project Dragonfly

Let us know what you think at labs.dragonfly@autodesk.com. Do you agree with the review?

Sharing expert evaluations of our software as a service floor planning solution is alive in the lab.

Return from Feature Recognition in Inventor 2010

2009-07-07T04:00:00-07:00

In 1962 Elvis Presely had a hit entitled "Return to Sender." The song tells the story of unrequited love as demonstrated by a letter being returned unopened by its recipient. I couldn't help but have that song play through my head as a I read a recent email from a Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey:

There apears to be no return tool to exit the feature recognition in Inventor 2010 back to the main part modeling enviroment unless you manualy create a custom toolbar.

In response to Richard's question about the Feature Recognition Tool for Inventor, Software Engineer, Shekar Sub, noted that although it is small, the ability to return is indeed present:

The UI element is highlighted in red. Thanks Shekar. "Thank you. Thank you very much."

Sharing customer feedback is alive in the lab.