Also in 2013, the first RTC Europe will be held. It'll take place in late September in Delft, Holland -- or The Netherlands, if you prefer.

To end my coverage of  RTC Australasia 2012, I'll leave you with some photos I took during this remarkable week of living on the shores of Wollongong...

(Click pictures to view larger versions.) 

Surfers at Dusk 

 Sunrise From my Hotel Balcony

 
 Sailing Boats Safe in the Inner Harbour

Our Hotel (Behind the Trees)

You Just Know You Want to Enter 

Pelican Preening Itself, with Three Admirers

Early Morning Surfer Racing to Get to Work on Time

The Twin Towers Guarding Ships from the Wollongong Coastline 

Now we are at the Closing Ceremony, the first part of which is named "Glorius Gadgets." This is where interesting hardware is demo'ed, such as the Faro 3D laser scanner being demo'ed right now.

Final thoughts...

Most surprising vendor exhibiting: Bentley Systems, although I suppose this shows the independence of RTC, a user-based event.

Most surprising vendor not exhibiting: Gold-level sponsor Autodesk, although I suppose the behemoth was instead represented by several dealerships.

Overheard: "All of the staff on the project were modelers. Understand what I mean by this: all our staff did modeling, but not all of them are modelers."

Most interesting statement from a presenter: "Architects prefer to work in 2D. I think that the popularity of [2D] AutoCAD lead to a delay in 3D [Revit] being adopted by architectural firms."

If you're in North America or Europe, then you can still take part in Revit Technology Conference coming up June 28-30 in the American state of Georgia. Details here: www.revitconference.com.au/rtc2012us/index.htm

When I woke up this morning, there was a wind storm pushing trees around outside my hotel room windows. Naturally, I got up, got dressed, and went for a walk along the beach, and then onto the breakwater that shelters a sailboat harbour. Several signs warned me that I was now engaging in dangerous behavior; the joggers also ignored the signs.

Between the rocks of the breakwater, I captured the sun rising at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, at 6:40am.

 To make a switch from the management seminars I've sat in on, I decided on a programming seminar to start the last day of the Revit Technology Conference.

Matt Siebert of Xrev is going to tutor us on Coding for Revit. The API for Revit is only a couple of years old, and so is relatively new. Maybe that is why he has found that there are not many articles or blogs that explain how it works. He will cover .net, add-ins, and macros using Visual Studio.

"Programming is all about problem solving," he explains. Ways of programming Revit:

Macros. Opens a development environment that talks to Revit's APIs. Can store them in the drawing or with the application. Macros have security problems, just like with Office docs.

Add-ins. These are external commands and external applications,cwhich you access through the Add-in menu. Completely dependent on the user to click a button to start the command.

SDK.  Software development kit is provided with Revit, free, but is not well documented. It can activate commands on its own.

.Net Framework. The .Net API is an extra layer on top of the Revit API.  Lots of languages can program with .net. Autodesk is getting better with the API, but there are still lots of things missing. You might hit a wall as you program with .net.

Now he is taking us through a demo tutorial of using Visual Studio (Microsoft's official programming environment for Windows) and create the 'hello world" app for Revit. Setting up projects, selecting core APIs, and so on -- this is foreign stuff for someone like me who learned programming with FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, C, APL, and LISP.

The number of steps involved with Visual Studio is staggering to me, for I am used to typing (princ "hello world") and then pressing Enter.

Morning tea is over, and now I'm sitting in an "ideas" session. Justin Morris of Ardent Architects is talking about BIM: It's more about information and people, and less about 3D modeling -- perhaps the longest title of these four days at Revit Technology Conference.

Mr Morris finds that Revit is more of a concept than a tool, in practice. "We use revit only on Wednesdays." "If you need it quickly, we'll have to do it in AutoCAD." "We outsource Revit modeling." "We use it only for jobs under $5 million." "Our drafter did it only with lines and hatches in Revit drafting mode" so no model. And the city council that asks for the project to be done with BIM, but not knowing what that means.

Using Revit for hospitals is different from using Revit for shopping malls or residential towers.

"Information is power. Information is data. Information can be contained in models, linked to models, referenced by models, can be a database, a spreadsheet, a text file." Now he is showing us what information looks like in different forms -- he displays the same data different ways in Excel spreadsheet (rows, columns, tabs), and Access database software (fields and identifiers).

"You can get someone working on Access with 20 minutes training; in two days, they'll know how to write reports." He shows how to link Revit drawings with Access to change  values of details, such as door info.

"Don't put all possible information in the Revit model." Keep information like shipping costs and model numbers the spreadsheet linked to the model. Revit should only know it has desks and so on.

"You would be mad to run Revit on 32-bit Windows."

 From databases to hardware. It is lunch time, or should be, but the third class of the day is starting, instead.

Let's Explore Mobile Apps by Jim Balding. He looked at 60 mobile apps for today. He did his entire presentation on his iPad and is doing the presentation on an Apple TV. Problem is that the two are not talking to each other, and so we wait while the iOS devices agree to acknowledge each other.

80 tablet models were launched at CBIT last year -- nearly all of them Androids, of course. Oops, lost the connection. Mr Balding holds up his iPad for the entire audience to see, while a techie rushes a cable to the front.

He's going over office apps first; GoodReader sends like an interesting app. I am looking forward to the CAD-related ones coming up later in the hour. I wonder if he will cover HTML5 apps that run in browsers.

(Yesterday I installed AutoCAD WS on my new Android 4.0 tablet, to see if it would handle it. It did, including 3D realtime rotations. The fellow sitting next to me wondered what this software was? This Revit user had never heard of WS.)

(I read the other day that the iPad is now the most-lost item on airplanes. A fellow at this event told me he was at Delta airlines earlier this year, and they have 600 lost iPads stacked up in a warehouse. One speaker this morning showed us his 4-week-old iPad, because he had... lost his on an airplane. He used iPad software to wipe data from the lost unit.)

I've seen most of the software he's showing us, but there is a new class of augmented reality programs new to me. Sightspace and AR Media placed 3D models in the place where you are; use the camera of the iPad to integrate the images.

Good talk, Jim.

Lunch time!

(A) I don't know where the filtration outlet is. (B) What will happen if I don't keep clear? So far, however, so good. I have not been sucked down the filtration outlet to this point.

And what hotel can truly call itself a "hotel" wtihout the obligatory platinum-priced bottle of water, here at 5.5x the price of local gasoline.

Fortunately, the tap water is excellent tasting.

Finally, the elevators. When you have 500 guests and one of two elevators breaks down, then you, as an $8/litre-of-water-charging hotel, have a problem. In addition, on the conference floor, the call button works only next to the non-working elevator, while the call button next to the working elevator does not work.

To compensate, the hotel is allowing us to use the service elevators, down a dingy hallway. A sign requires us to give priority to room service personnel. The two aging elevators pressed into service are starting to show wear from 500 guests. The doors decide to close some minutes later. The call button light goes out, and no elevator arrives.

Best of all, the call buttons on our floor are both up:

That's the Novotel hotel for you, folks!

Chris Razzell and David Foley are first this morning, tag-team talking about Next generation BIM: deeper collaboration + greater trust = better results.

The example for this session is that architect does some electrical, but then the electrical enginers does his work, and so some electrical components are duplicated. The speakers are going to describe their experiences with designing RCPs (reflected ceiling plans):

1. Create lots of views for the architect

2. Set up colors for different electrical components, fire suppression, and so on

3. Architects sets up center lines for the electrical designer to locate service; this might take one or two passes

4.  Add fire supression components, like smoke detectors, and adjust the location of components out of the way of each other

5. May need to adjust the scale of symbols.

A third presenter could not make it here, and he was going to speak on using Navisworks. In summary, the design team would access the Navisworks file through Dropbox, and see if there are any clashes. If not, then no resolution meeting was neede. Typically, the first clash detection is a scarey one, but then things get better over time as conflicts are adjusted.

The sun is back. Lunch is done. And it's time for the afternoon sessions.

First up is Martin Taurer (see figure below) relating to use the history of BIM - Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. The first BIM program was ArchiCAD, developed by Graphisoft of Hungary, who used the term "virtual buildings." The term BIM was first used with the launch of Revit in 2000.

(At this show, I heard a story about how ArchiCAD came to be. Back in the days when communisim was still be imposed on Eastern Europe, Russia required Hungary to use Soviet-developed plans for constructing buildings. But the Hungarians did not trust the quality of the Russian designs, and so write this 3D software for checking the validity of the plans.)

Mr Taurer is taking us through the history of CAD, first 2D and then 3D. Sonata was the legendary mother that spawned all other object-oriented architectural design packages.  In the 1990s, 2D CAD vendors began acquiring firms and technologies to have their own 3D systems, such as Autodesk's pruchase of Softdesk and Bentley's use of technology from Bricsworks.

The other foremother is Reflex, acquired by PTC, briefly sold to end users, then acquired by Beck Systems, who call it Destini. Development on Revit began in 1997 by former programmers of Pro/E, under the name Charles River Software (the name of the river running through Boston). Launched in 2000, first only as a lease to keep a close relationship with customers. Two years later it was purchased by Autodesk, when Revit began running out of capital. The first name of Revit software was Perspective.

Dan Jurgens and Belinda Hodkinson are speaking on Shaping Change. Mr Jurgens talks about the qualifications and role of the BIM Manager. Ms Hodkinson concludes, "BIM implementation is more about business than technology."

Last session of the day for me is BIM Excellence: A Unique Approach to Performance Assessment and Certification by Bilal Succar of ChangeAgents AEC. His consulting firm specializes in measuring the actual BIM performance in projects, and then comparing it with the client's requirements. Assessments are based on...

• training programs
• modeling standards
• exchanges processes
• collaboration protocols
• certification and auditing 

For organizations, for instance, there are 68 measurement points. "It is not enough the assess the competency of the system or the manuals, but you must also assess the individuals." One user might be at 20%, another at 60% proficiency based on questionnaires that contain 150 to over 400 questions. (I gotta say, Mr Succar presents beautiful graphics.)

Once the site opens up, you will be able to do an initial assessment online at www.bimexcellence.net.

The start of the first session "BIM Management -- A Strategic Approach" is delayed, as the room is overpacked by attendees who didn't register for the class. Tsk, tsk. The dividing wall to the next room is being opened. Rodd Perey of Architectus BIM Consulting is making small talk with us keeners in the front row, as he waits to start.  "Revit basics are no longer so much of interest anymore; the whole area of BIM management is now of greater interest," he tells us.

But first, a word from our sponsor. All of the sponsors are given ten minutes to talk about themselves. Before the keynote, for instance, we had spiels from Autodesk and Oce, and now we get to hear from Bates | Cosgrave, accounting firm.

Mr Perey starts off by stating that very few projects are realizing the benefits that would be possible, because expectations and scepticism are both low. For instance, clash detection is common, but BiM deliverables are not identified. Roles and responsibilities are not identified in contracts. The lack of performance metrics means that the benefits of BIM are not known.

He tells us about the BIM Management Plan Template, Project Execution Planning Guide, Australia's National Guideline for Digital Modeling [PDF], and so on. He says a pre-project planning group could probably double the areas in which BIM is useful during a workshop session. 

Next up, we have Dominik Holzer of AEC Connect listing for us BIM's Seven Deadly Sins. Actually, the "seven" is arbitrary; he figures there are between seven and seven hundred sins in using BIM. And here we go...

1. Technocentricity -- the sin in thinking that technology solves all problems.

2. Ambiguity -- the sin of misunderstanding BIM, and so not agreeing on what BIM deliverables are.

3. Elision -- the sin of assuming that the MacLeamy Curve is accurate (which states that more information earlier results in a better outcome).

4. Hypocrisy -- the sin of using the IPD as a buzzword (integrated project delivery), which barely has any update in the industry.

5. Delusion -- the sin of asking for 2D but expecting to get 3D, 4D, 5D, and more.

6. Diffidence -- the sin of lack of understanding by leaders in how BIM actually works, while BIM teams fail to involve leaders in their work.

7. Monodisciplinearity -- the sin of keeping disciplines in silos.

The reasons we sin, he tells us, is because of cultural and political reasons -- not technological.

 Lunch time!

The crowd hushes, and the day begins! Welcome from organizer Wesley Benn of BD Group. The theme of the conference is "Bridging the Divide," and refers to the lack of conversation between players in construction. "We need to recognize the divide exist; we need to work as a single team, and pay more attention to the full lifecycle of the building." This conference hopes to bridge the divide.

Keynote speaker is Lee Crockett of the 21st Century Fluency Project, native of Vancouver, Canada -- like my kids. We're getting an overview of Zen Buddhism, which isn't particularly relevent at this point, other than to point out that "we" are uncomfortable with change. Well, Mr Crokett thinks so; I thrive on change, because change creates new opportunities.

After a lengthy list of not-yet-released tehnology products, and a description of failing entities (Kodak, US Postal Service, Encyclopedia Britannica), he asks, "Why am I telling you this? You don't want to be the next BlockBusters. It's the learners who inherit the earth."

The jobs that remain are location-dependent ones (service industry, helping jobs). White-color jobs are just blue-color jobs in nicer clothes. "Every time you book a flight online, you are taking away somebody's job. This is disruptive innovation." The only category to increase are creative jobs, which use technology to deliver their services.

We're done with the keynote, and it's back to Mr Benn. "Each time someone says 'bim models', a fluffy kitten gets killed." We are to keep track of which speakers use the phrase, and a special prize will be awarded to the winner -- or lose.

Before the morning tea, we are seeing a show reel of projects designed by Revit.

The view from my hotel room window this morning at 6:30am.  

...back to the story. The headline that landed in my email inbox yesterday read:

$10B CAD industry disrupted for the 1st time in 30 years
by Sunglass.io

No kidding. Either you ROTFL or you are intriqued. I was both. With my nearly 25 years experience in this biz, I know such headlines are good for eyeroll-inducing chuckles and that companies making such claims don't last much beyond the initial hype. Remember Xitron's XCAD? It was going to be the first $1 billion-a-year MCAD company. More readers may remember TriSpectives' 3D/eye, software that actually was revolutionary, but eventually split itself, some to Autodesk and the rest becoming IronCAD.

Thing is, what Sunglass is doing is no longer unique. It may just be coincidence, but soon after Sunglass made its announcement yesterday from the Techcrunch Disrupt event, Jim Foster of Blackthorn Design posted a working version of his company's until-now-somewhat-secretive WebGL-based CAD package:

A Visual Hands-On Preview of To3D:
CAD in the Cloud

(You can try it out at http://www.to3dnow.com/to3d-visual-preview.aspx , if you have the right Web browser. It worked in Google Chrome running on my laptop computer, but not with the Chrome browser on my Android 4.0 smartphone.)

Back to Sunglass. It has these features:

• CAD on the cloud (meaning, running WebGL in a Web browser)
• 40 file formats supported (don't know the full list, but if it includes Catia and NX, then very useful)
• Collaboration between designers: "sharing 3-D files as easy as dragging [from Dropbox] and dropping a model in any file format into the Sunglass Stage"

There's more info at http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/22/cad-users-rejoice-sunglass-brings-slick-3d-modeling-to-the-browser/. For some background, try these links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16xhCZz8fGg

http://kaustuv.net/

I'm intrigued enough that I've got an interview lined up for next week with Sunglass. Suddenl, AutoCAD WS has competition. I wonder how many other young bucks this will challenge the aging stag.

First person is talking about the need to share data, so that everyone knows what's going on. "Amen,"  says one attendee. One of the conference organizers adds that this is the purpose of the RTC conference.

"When you look at it from a [Autodesk ceo] Carl Bass perspective, it's going to be a very different perspective from that of the user.  To inform beyond just the tools and technology, we need to also hear from builders and contractors."

Another attendee says, "There is a lot of secret sauce in how developers put everything together." One large developer just wants one thing: digital punch lists that work on iPads, using bar or QR codes (applied at the factory) to collect real-time data and track how things are going together.

Another attendee asks, "Are we worried that we might become more technicians than artists?" One reply: "This can be overcome by making more compelling story-telling in the presentations we create. People are getting scared as visualization tools become easier and easier to use (so that "anyone" can use it). Another reply: "Anyone can produce a good looking rendering, but there are things that set artists apart." For instance, anyone can render bricks and mortar (buildings), but hard to add people and vegetation. "Create an image with a soul."

"It's like in CAD: anyone can create drawings with an AutoCAD or MicroStation, but once you move to BIM, the bar is raised; the CAD monkeys don't operate at that level. Same for visualization."

 "The key thing to understand is what the client's business is. What is their budget, what are their time constraints, who are the players involved? We talk about emotions, sexiness of presetation; but it is the audience that matters, such as planning commison who approves the office tower. Learn as much as you can about the entire process, to be informed going in. Then you are not 'the renderer', you are 'Scott' or 'Dan'."

Summary

This was the first ever conference organized by the RTC folks for folks who do visualization, and at the end of the day a show of hands was asked if (a) the day was useful, (b) if this event should happen next year, (c) if it should be on a Friday or attached to RTC like this year. The informal poll results were encouraging, and so expect to revisit Vis.Day again next year.

revitconference.com.au/rtc2012auvis

Lon Grohs of Chaos Group is up first, showing us the start of a remarkably delicate video created entirely by rendering software, "The Third & the Seventh" by Alex Roman. See figure below.

 
Mr Grohs is giving us an overview of the progress of rendering, from the unbearable 2000s when you had to set up all lights "manually". After showing us an animated clip made with Lightworks ray tracing from back then, he said it a painful to watch, because of all of the work required to set up scenes. "V-Ray saved us just in time," he declared. Well, that's because Chaos Group writes the V-Ray software. Now he is showing us a 6-million polygon interior view of a restaurant, which would not be possible with ray tracing.

"In the old days, walkthroughs and flythroughs were so cold, so emotional-less. We had to add a character or other effects to add warmth." So now we see a video that integrates a realistic looking woman enjoying her new apartment in Las Vegas, along with moving sunlight, opening flowers, dripping faucets (aren't those illegal yet?), and clouds passing by.

Here is a screen grab from another architectural project, rendered by V-Ray:

 
A number of movies were rendered with V-Ray, such as X-Men and Tron.

In the future, we can expect real-time rendering, an easier rendering where no training is needed.

Because we are in Australia, there are no "coffee" breaks, but tea breaks. First one is now!

Break over, and it's time to don the 3D glasses, as we watch a 3D rendered movie made by the design firm FloodSlicer of the next speaker, Daniel Flood. He's talking about Immersive Visualization, and the the sample video is on a 7-minute loop, while the music is on a 12-minute loop, so that viewers get a different experience, depending on when they start watching/listening.

Watching 3D video during VizDay.

He's describing some of the problems of making 3D videos. For example, the blur effect does not work well, motion has to be slower than in 2D, and so on.

Next up is Pat Carmichael from HKS, speaking about the free Unreal gaming engine for dealing with extremely large data sets. "In Dallas right now," he jokes, "the best way to find an architect is to call, 'Oh, waiter...'!"

The same technology that works with game engines works well with point clouds. The idea is to get a building model in CAD, and so they can do something as huge as a stadium from scan to CAD model in three days. In the past, this would have taken 6 months.

HKS's ArchEngine lets you view 50 million textured polygons at 60fps. It is useful a $2 billion stadium being built in Texas right now, whose owner wanted to see the view from every seat. The drawback: the files are so huge that they are not given to clients; HKS makes a movie file -- as wel learn as we sit waiting for the stadium model to load in Unreal on a 28-pound laptop computer. "Live by technology, die by technology." We may have to use thumb puppets, he says, if it doesn't finish loading soon. Found the problem: the laptop was accidently running on its battery, meaning the CPU/GPU was in power-save mode, slowing it down greatly.

The other issue is licensing: as long as you don't give the environment to a client, there are no royalties or so. Large Revit models are a problem, and can take a half-week to clean up the model for use in Unreal. Because Unreal models are so huge (5x more than any other engine), the quality is not as good as as videos we saw earlier today.

Scott Ballis of Atomic 3D is going through all the steps -- and missteps -- involved in producing a rendered movie for promotional uses, a shopping mall in this case. Aerial shots are crucial for setting the location; you don't need helicopters ($12,000 to $15,000 for a couple of hours), but can get decent footage from Google Earth. See figure below.

In another for instance, using green screen to integrate live people into computer renderings. But live people can double the cost, like hair and makeup alone costing $7,000 for two days.

The last speaker of the day is Phil Read of M-SIX. Lux is the name of the platform, the foundation for the steps for making buildings: Track (tracking the project in real time), Pulse (real time sensor data), Archive (model-linked document library)... missed the meanings of the others (Time, Logic).

VEO (Latin for to see, and short for visualize, execute, operate) is their (cloud-based) platform for designing, constructing, and operating buildings. You can have Veo on a thumb drive to cache offline data when there is no Internet link. It is agnostic software, so you can use it with Revit and other design programs.

The challenge is to overcome the problem of decoupled information and decoupled workflow, which may result in different versions of the truth. You can have a lot of software that gives you the a lot of wrong answers.

He mentions a project in Los Angeles that is easily handling 30GB of data. Pricing is a fraction of Navisworks. Being Web-based, it works on the hardware of any OS. Data can be stored on your internal servers or on Amazon.

[Disclosure: RTC provided me with airfare, accomodation, ground transportation, and meals.] 

Wednesday, May 23
All Day     RTC VisDay 2012

Thursday, May 24

9:00am     Introduction & Keynote Address
11:30am     BIM Management: A Strategic Approach & BIM's Seven Deadly Sins
1:45pm     Shaping Change
2:55pm     Digitising the real world - Using Project Photofly and Revit to fast track the modelling of existing

Friday, May 25

9:00 am     Next generation BIM; deeper collaboration + greater trust = better results
10:45 am     BIM and Gaming Engines: How We Present our Navisworks 4D Models Using Design Suite and Gaming Engine
12:15 pm     Design Validation: Increasing your value through decreasing uncertainty
2:10pm     BIM - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow  
3:20 pm     Managing and validating complex building programs in early design stages and beyond
4:35 pm     Let's get READY TO RUMBLE - Modelling vs Detailing

Saturday, May 26

9:00 am     Coding for Revit
10:45 am     BIM: It's more about information and people and less about 3D modelling
12:15 pm     Lets explore Mobile device Apps
2:10 pm     New tools in Revit Architecture v2013

revitconference.com.au/rtc2012au

People are more optimistic, and I think partially, it's that people have gotten a little bit immune in the business community less than in the financial community to concerns over Greece, Spain, Portugal, whatever. So I think there's a sense in the business community that people need to drive their businesses forward.

I think the business environment remains one in which people feel like they need to move their business forward.  In Europe, we're seeing a tightening of credit. That shouldn't be news to anybody if you're reading the newspapers, that the banks are experiencing some amount of trauma.

If we just put a finer point on it and reinforce the strength in Northern and Central Europe and the weakness in Southern Europe. The thing that struck me particularly is that we did well in Manufacturing and AEC and that Germany had a record quarter. And so I think you really just see the tale of two nations, and I think it's Northern and Southern Europe are just going in divergent directions.

Let me a give you a concrete example. The PLM sales force that we continue to build out... it makes no sense in my mind to go there [to Southern Europe] when there's so much business in the U.S., Germany. As you saw from the results, Japan and Korea did well. So you have other places that are really strong in Manufacturing, and so why not go there instead of go to Southern Europe?

I think we're taking a more cautious attitude to EMEA as we look to the long term. I really don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow and read that the Eurozone is falling apart and Greek is out of it or whether a bank defaults.

Source:
seekingalpha.com/article/599311-autodesk-management-discusses-q1-2013-results-earnings-call-transcript

During its earnings call, Autodesk claimed weak sales to EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Asia] and Media & Entertainment customers are hurting results; it blames the latter on a mix shift towards suites, and weak demand for Creative Finishing software.

[Financial analyst] Jefferies also notes maintenance and backlog numbers were weak, but thinks Autodesk's margin improvements and transition to a subscription-based model will drive shares higher.

Future Outlook Lower than Expected

Although results weren't bad, the CAD software giant is guiding for FQ2 [fiscal quarter] revenue of $580M-$600M [million] and EPS [earnings per share] of $0.46-$0.51, largely below a consensus of $600.7M and $0.51.

Also, guidance for FY13 [fiscal year] revenue growth of 10% is slightly below a 10.4% consensus, and below a long-term target of 12%-14%.

Source:
seekingalpha.com/symbol/adsk

Tailoring CUI for AutoCAD 2013 has been updated, and is now available for purchase. I'll be frank with you in saying that Autodesk did not make many changes to the CUI interface, but any changes that did occur are completely documented by this 200-page ebook. The ebook's Web page is at www.upfrontezine.com/cui13. 

To get this PDF ebook for $30.00 through Paypal, please follow these steps:

1. Log into www.paypal.com
2. Click Send Money
3. Enter the following information:

To: grabowski@telus.net
Amount: $30.00
Purchase: Goods

4. Click Continue.

If you prefer to mail a cheque or money order, then please use the following address:

Tailoring CUI for AutoCAD 2013
34486 Donlyn Avenue
Abbotsford, BC
V2S 4W7 Canada

Table of Contents

1. Working with CUI
2. Workspaces
3. Toolbars and Quick Access Toolbar
4. Ribbon part i: Tabs
5. Ribbon part ii: Panels
6. Ribbon part iii: Contextual Tabs
7. Menu Bar
8. Quick Properties
9. Rollover Tooltips
10. Shortcut Menus
11. Keyboard Shortcuts and Temporary Override Keys
12. Double Click Actions
13. Mouse Buttons
14. LISP Files
15. Legacy Section

1. Q&A: Siemens Rulestream Engineer-to-Order

2. Your AutoCAD Upgrades Are Getting Upgraded

3. Out of the Inbox, and other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2012/upf-735.htm

The conference consits two events, actually:

• RTC VisDay 2012 (visualisation tech and methods). Wednesday 23 May
• 8th International Revit Technology Conference, Thursday-Saturday,  24-26 May

If Australia isn't near your neck of the woods, the same people are sponsoring Revit Technology Conference, North America in Georgia, USA June 28-30 June. The keynote speaker for this event will be Richard Morley.

All the info you need to know about all three conferences is at www.rtcevents.com.