It is Alive in the Lab

Pictures: Carl Bass at C2-MTL

2012-06-01T04:00:00-07:00

Commerce + Creativity Montreal (C2-MTL) is a conference that seeks to explore creative answers to commercial questions. It was held last week. In an earlier blog post I shared a link to an interview with our CEO, Carl Bass, at the C2-MTL conference.

Interview: Carl Bass at C2-MTL

As part of Carl's participation at C2-MTL, Carl gave a main stage presentation on creativity and innovation.

Principal User Experience Designer, Stephanie Labrie, was on hand to visually capture the notes from all of the main stage presentations.

Carl also had an all hands meeting where he covered the importance of making things as it related to imaging, designing, and creating a better world.

In addition to Stephanie, thanks to Autodesk Fellow, Tom Wujec, who was there first-hand to provide these pictures and information.

Pictures are alive in the lab.

Project Artoo for AutoCAD Map 3D Now Available

2012-05-31T07:11:36-07:00

"I don't always cleanup my Map 3D data, but when I do, I prefer Project Artoo. Stay clean my friend."
-- The Most Accurate Man Alive

Project Artoo for AutoCAD Map 3D is our free technology preview that lets you cleanup your geospatial data to improve the quality and accuracy of the data. You can use the cleanup tools to correct common errors that can be introduced during digitizing, importing, surveying, scanning, and drafting. With Project Artoo, you can perform cleanup operations on FDO-connected data stores, including SDF, SQLite, Esri SHP, geodatabase files or Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.

// Download Project Artoo for AutoCAD Map 3D

Please try cleansing your own data and let us know of your successes or failures at labs.map3d.artoo@autodesk.com or the discussion forum. Do it today. You have until February 1, 2013 to do so - based on the day we grabbed the build of the technology preview from our software development environment.

Accuracy is alive in the lab.

Vault 2013 Integration for MicroStation Available in Subscription Center

2012-05-31T04:00:00-07:00

The technology preview of the MicroStation integration for Vault has ended. This technology enables MicroStation V8i users to connect to an Autodesk Vault Collaboration AEC from within MicroStation, permitting MicroStation users the ability to manage their data within the context of their design application. The technology preview was conducted with Vault 2012. A Vault 2013-compatible version is available in the Subscription Center.

// Download Vault 2013 Integration for MicroStation from Subscription Center

Thanks to everyone who participated in the technology preview. You helped shape the technology from its preview state into its emergence on Subscription Center.

One vault for all (even competitor products) is alive in the lab.

LaunchPad for Product Design Suite Graduates from Autodesk Labs

2012-05-30T04:00:00-07:00

The technology preview of LaunchPad for Product Design Suite 2012 has ended. Thanks to everyone who participated. Your feedback helped shape this technology into its inclusion as part of Product Design Suite 2013. I love it when a technology preview results in a happy ending.

Graduation ceremonies are alive in the lab.

Examples of Project Geppetto in Action

2012-05-29T04:00:00-07:00

"I see dead people" is the famous line from the hit movie, The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis. When it comes to Project Geppetto, the opposite is true. Project Geppetto is our free technology preview where you can easily add life-like people to your 3ds Max scenes. Recently technical visionary, Josh Pabst, provided some feedback with some images of a West Loop Office Tower in Chicago.

enlarge

Design Credits: Architecture firm SMDP (Sarver Minn Design Partners) // more

CGI: Josh Pabst // more
Modeling: AutoCAD 2012 // more
Rendering: iray^® and 3ds Max 2012 // more

You too can try this too. Please so and share your results at labs.3dsmax.geppetto@autodesk.com.

Signs of life are alive in the lab.

^* iray is a registered trademark of NVIDIA Corporation.

getAbstract: a side by side comparison

2012-05-28T04:00:00-07:00

Out of respect for those who have given their lives in service to our country, Autodesk employees in the United States are not working today. My wife and I are attending a ceremony in Alameda to honor our fallen heroes. Before we go, I thought I'd talk a little about our getAbstract pilot.

Autodesk is trying a service called getAbstract. The getAbstract service is a web site that Autodesk subscribes to which provides 5 page summaries of books and articles. I used it to get the essential concepts contained in a book I had never read.

The Corporation by Joel Bakan blog post

In May 2009, after seeing the author on The Daily Show, I bought and read the book Uranium by Tom Zoellner. I then wrote a blog article about it.

Uranium by Tom Zoellner blog post

Each getAbstract summary provides a set of take-aways. For fun I decided to compare the Uranium take-aways provided as part of the getAbstract site with the Uranium summary I provided in my blog article.

It's Alive in the Lab	}getabstract
Uranium is the heaviest element that occurs naturally. With a large number of protons in its nucleus, it lends itself to releasing energy when its nucleus is split in a collision with another particle.	Uranium holds huge danger as a source of the apocalypse and great promise as a source of clean energy. One ton can produce as much power as 20,000 tons of coal.
Uranium is so unstable that it naturally sheds particles. As it loses protons, it becomes radium, then radon, and then polonium. Despite this, the ore itself can be picked up and carried around safely as long as the dust is not inhaled.	Uranium breaks down into radium, radon and plutonium. It is common and lethal.
Uranium ore must be concentrated into U-235 before there is a danger of a spontaneous chain reaction. Creating U-235 does not come easy. Processing requires a plant the size of a football field. This is not like making homemade beer in one's apartment bathtub.	The core element in the Hiroshima atomic bomb was uranium’s most powerful, heavily concentrated form: enriched U-235. Making U-235 is an immense job, but a small piece in a bomb can vaporize a city.
Prior to its use for nuclear reactions, when mining for precious metals like gold and silver, uranium was often found and cast aside as a "bad luck" metal.
Cancer often results from uranium poisoning because the particles cast off from the material bombard the cell's nucleus and disrupt the makeup of the cell.	Inhaled in a closed space, like a mine, uranium enters the lungs, causing cancer.
X-rays got their name because "X" was a placeholder for an unknown source of energy. The original MIME type for DWF was drawing/x-dwf where "x" was for experimental.
Plutonium does not occur naturally and only exists as a result of a freakish occurrence when uranium is bombarded with neutrons. It got its name from the planet Pluto that had been spotted only 11 years earlier. Plutonium is easier to manufacture in bulk than U-235 but is more dangerous to use.	The amount of plutonium that flashed into energy in the Nagasaki bomb was about one-third the weight of a penny and killed more than 40,000 people, ending WWII.
	The U.S. spent $2 billion on the Manhattan Project, which built the WWII atomic bomb. President Harry Truman called it the "greatest scientific gamble in history."
	By the mid-1960s, during the Cold War, the U.S. had 30,000 nuclear warheads.
	Much of the former U.S.S.R.’s nuclear material is not catalogued, and the material that is identified and stored is badly secured.
	Today, about 40% of the world’s known uranium is in Australia. The largest single uranium mine is in Niger.

So they are surprisingly similar. I guess you could say getAbstract provides tangible benefits. (Rim-shot!)

The business versions of Cliff's Notes are alive in the lab.

Interview: Carl Bass at C2-MTL

2012-05-25T12:04:40-07:00

Our CEO, Carl Bass, presented yesterday to about 1,000 people at the C2-MTL conference. Commerce + Creativity Montreal is a conference that seeks to explore creative answers to commercial questions.

Carl's strong message around innovation contrasted with many of the other "creative" and "innovative" presentations. Carl provided real direction about how to achieve those things, supported by great imagery, and presented in Carl's unique style. His presentation was very well received as observed via the Twitter stream and the nodding heads in the room.

Following the talk, Carl was interviewed for C2-MTL TV.

Colorful communication is alive in the lab.

Book Review (sort of): The Corporation by Joel Bakan

2012-05-25T04:00:00-07:00

A few of us at Autodesk are piloting a service called getAbstract. The service provides compressed knowledge by providing summaries of books and articles. I thought I would give it a try by reading a 5 page condensation of The Corporation by Joel Bakan.

The getAbstract web site makes it really simple in that it even lays out what it calls Take-Aways at the start of the synopsis. For The Corporation, the take-aways included:

Corporations play a crucial role in deciding what people eat, wear, read and watch.
The rise of the corporation began in the late nineteenth century, with the introduction of limited liability for corporate shareholders. The thinking was "Why should someone who only invested $100 in a company lose his house when the company did something wrong?"
In the early twentieth century, a court ruled that Ford Motor Company had a legal duty to maximize profits for shareholders at the expense of all other concerns. The Dodge brothers, investors in Ford, disagreed with Henry Ford who lowered the price of cars because he felt guilty about how much money the company was making.
As a result of that court ruling, corporations have become similar to exploitative "psychopathic" personalities. In their single-minded pursuit of lucre, in their quest to exploit any weakness and cast off regulatory oversight, corporations have become psychopathic organizations.
Corporations pursue profit but ignore their actions' environmental and social costs. For example, they pass the costs of pollution and unsafe products on to the rest of society.
In recent years, corporations have taken pains to appear socially responsible; however, this lip service to philanthropy is aimed at maximizing profits.

Though I have no doubt what is expressed is true for many corporations, at Autodesk we have a different perspective. Our approach to philanthropy is not at odds with our quest for profits.

Autodesk employees regularly volunteer their time at local organizations. For example, Autodesk allows up to 4 paid hours per month for parents to help out at their children's schools. This flexibility allows employees to maintain a healthy work-life balance and probably be more productive when they are at work instead of worrying about how their children are doing in school. Many of us are salaried employees so we easily work more than 44 hours a week, let alone 4 extra hours in a month.
Autodesk makes its design applications free to students. Yes this is a blessing for educators and students alike who do not have the means to purchase suites of design applications to learn how to design automobiles, buildings, bridges, or the next TV commercial. On the other hand when these students enter the workforce and need software for their professional lives, which design applications will the choose? Hopefully ones that they are already familiar with.
In these tough economic times, Autodesk has extended the use of free student versions to the unemployed. When these displaced workers reenter the workforce, they will become users of our design applications. With time on their hands that they can put towards self-betterment, having access to design applications is a win for both the person and Autodesk.
Autodesk is committed to sustainability. We pay attention to how much energy our computers use. We watch how much we travel. Our second floor at One Market (where I work) has a LEED Platinum certification for commercial interior renovation. Our office in Singapore also earned LEED Platinum certification yesterday. Yes we do all that, but we also make software that allows our customers to analyze and visualize the sustainability of the designs they create. Being familiar with sustainability ourselves helps us make and sell better products.

So although the getAbstract The Corporation summary appears to do this topic justice, all corporations cannot be tarred with the same brush. The getAbstract site gave this book a 6 out of 10 rating: "getAbstract.com recommends this study to those who would like to explore corporate behavior and its impact on society, albeit from a contrarian’s point of view." My next test of getAbstract will be to read a summary of a book I have actually read already and compare that to my recollection of what is in the book.

Speed reading is alive in the lab.

SketchBook Ink Now Available

2012-05-24T07:33:51-07:00

Sketchbook Ink is available in the Apple App store for the iPad. Whereas SketchBook Pro creates bitmaps, SketchBook Ink creates resolution-independent bitmaps. Think of MacPaint versus MacDraw. I drew this up in under a minute.

I call it Sheryl in Wind. I know what you're thinking - "My gosh Scott - how do you do it?" I admit the resemblance to my wife is uncanny. That's kind of the point. This app is fun. You don't have to be any good at it to enjoy it. If you want to see some examples from people who do know what they are doing.

Unskilled drawing is alive in the lab.

Autodesk Gallery: 3D Sculpting Exhibit

2012-05-24T04:00:00-07:00

People:

Jesse Sandifer, Chickwalker // more
CGHub // more

Software:

Autodesk Mudbox // more
Autodesk 123D Sculpt // more

Jesse Sandifer is an award winning artist who has been creating 3D digital characters for over a decade. His clients include Warner Brothers, FOX Broadcasting, and the NFL. When Autodesk and online community CGHub had a contest where digital artists could design the ultimate warrior, Sandifer took his inspiration from a snapping turtle.

Sandifer used Autodesk Mudbox to create a wire frame of a muscular, masculine figure. He was able to go through many iterations, freely experimenting with texture and detail, before arriving at the winning version of his entry. Autodesk uses the same technology in Autodesk Mudbox to power 123D Sculpt. Now creative people who are not professionals like Sandifer can just as easily get in on the action.

// Learn more about 123D Sculpt

Some of the images from the flip book that are part of this exhibit include:

This is just one of the many exhibits in the gallery at One Market in San Francisco. The gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays from 12 pm to 5 pm, and admission is free. Visit us.

Consumer-based honing of technology for professionals is alive in the lab.