Through the Interface

Free Autodesk software for students and educators

I attended a student event in Montreux last week, where students from the “Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale” from various sites in French-speaking Switzerland congregated to visit and find out about prospective employers. We talked to students about the importance of checking the Autodesk careers site, of course, but also the fact that students can download and use pretty much the full range of Autodesk software for free* from the Education Community site. Many of the students I spoke to knew about this already – which was very encouraging, especially as the public announcement was made just a... Read more →

A sneak peek at the new Autodesk 360 viewer

For those of you who have signed up for the Autodesk 360 Technical Preview, you may well have already gotten a taste for its new viewing capability. Upload a 3D model of pretty much any format (the list is pretty exhaustive and goes well beyond Autodesk’s own formats, but you might try with DWG, RVT, IAM, IPT, NWD and DWF, to name a few to get you started) and you’ll see the viewer enabled for that model: Before we go on, please bear in mind that this is very much still in Beta: it’s early days and the team... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Viewing 3D solids using Three.js

After introducing the series and looking at sample applications for 2D graphics using Paper.js and 2.5D graphics using Isomer, it’s now really time to go 3D. We’re going to use much of the same code we saw in the last post – with some simplification as we no longer need to sort the solids by distance – but this time we’re going to feed data into an HTML client app that’s fundamentally similar in nature to the one seen in this series of posts using Three.js. I’m happy to have some experience using Three.js, because it happens to be... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Isometric views of 3D solids

After introducing the series and looking at a sample 2D JavaScript application, it’s time to go 3D. Well, 2.5D, anyway. We’re going to implement a simple sample using the Isomer library that extracts bounding box information about 3D solids – which could be extended to get more detailed topological information, albeit with quite some work – and displays them in an isometric view in the HTML canvas. This time we’re only going to have a single button in our UI allowing model updates to be refreshed in our isometric view. I decided to leave this as a manual operation,... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Revision clouds using Paper.js

Having introduced this series, it’s time to look at some code. This first sample shows how to create and host a web-page that uses an external graphics library – in our case Paper.js – within an AutoCAD application. The main “trick” to this is going to be getting the data from the HTML page into AutoCAD, which we’ll do by extending AutoCAD’s shaping layer. Bear in mind that this code will work with AutoCAD 2015, but I can’t guarantee it will do so with 2014 (the JavaScript API was very much a “preview” in that release). Something I should... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Introducing the series

During the last week or so I’ve put together a number of new sample integrations of JavaScript-based technologies with AutoCAD, mainly to form the basis of my proposed AU2014 class but also (obviously) to share here. This first post introduces the series, giving an overview of some benefits – as I see them – of adopting this development environment. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, over the years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with HTML and JavaScript: I’m comfortable working with them but have lived through plenty of frustrating moments. These days, though, I’m finding it to be very... Read more →

Autodesk Exchange Apps webinar

A quick note to mention another webinar that’s happening next Thursday, this one on Autodesk Exchange Apps. AutoCAD’s (and a number of other Autodesk products’, of course) very own App Store is going from strength to strength, by all accounts: it’s had nearly 2 million visitors and upwards of 600,000 downloads, many of which have been paid for. There’s gold in them thar hills, AutoCAD developers! :-) Anyway, for more specific details on this webinar – which is being hosted by Jim Quanci and Stephen Preston from the ADN team – you can check Jeremy’s or Kevin’s blogs. Otherwise... Read more →

Christer Janson, Maker of the Day

My good friend and colleague, Christer Janson, was named 123D’s Maker of the Day a couple of weeks ago. This post is to congratulate Christer but also to talk about Christer’s background at Autodesk and the key role he plays in the AutoCAD team. I met Christer during the second round interview for my first job at Autodesk, back in 1995. I’d flown across to Switzerland for the interview, although the job itself was to be in the UK: it was a couple more years before I managed to move to Neuchatel for the first time. Back then Christer... Read more →

Reality Computing updates

There’s a lot happening in the Reality Computing team. Firstly, there’s a new Reality Computing blog in town. Be sure to bookmark it or subscribe to it to keep up-to-date on the goings-on in this fast-moving field. Secondly, [thanks to the blog we know] there’s a series of webinars – starting today, apologies for the short notice – on Reality Computing topics. They are being held on May 13th, 20th and 27th and the series kicks off today at 9am PST with a session on “The basics of terrestrial 3D laser scanning with ReCap”. If you happen to read... Read more →

Highlighting and removing blanked out AutoCAD text using .NET

I had an interesting email last week from Josh Mathews: I'm having some trouble figuring out how to fix this problem I have and I'm not sure what the best way is to attack it. I have a large set of drawings that have these random strings of underscores strewn throughout the drawing (which look like random lines scattered all around when the drawing is printed – and make it confusing to look at), and so I'm trying to write a function that will iterate through the drawing and find all the text strings that contain ONLY underscores and... Read more →

Creating an index of blog posts to launch Windows Live Writer

This one’s mainly for my fellow bloggers – especially those using the Typepad blogging platform – to help address a problem related to editing old blog posts using Windows Live Writer, a tool I can honestly say I can no longer blog without. Incidentally I’m now working with Live Writer 2012. With that said, it may also be of interest for people who want to programmatically query their favourite blogs and create offline indices into their posts. Maybe. :-) I use Live Writer primarily to author blog posts – which it allows me to do offline, something I find... Read more →

AU2014: Class proposals and advance passes

After a minor technical glitch, I’ve now been able to submit two class proposals for Autodesk University 2014. Both are currently planned as 90-minute lectures. The first is about AutoCAD’s JavaScript API: Connect AutoCAD to the web with HTML5 and JavaScript AutoCAD 2015's JavaScript API enables a whole new generation of web-enabled applications. This session focuses on how you can use this API to connect web-based applications with AutoCAD. We'll look at how HTML5 can be used to implement user interface components inside AutoCAD – modal & modeless dialogs, palettes and new document windows – including calling into core... Read more →

Adding a WPF document tab in AutoCAD 2015 using .NET

A few people expressed an interest in understanding how AutoCAD 2015’s ability to open HTML pages inside its frame – shown in this recent post – could be extended to work with “native” user interfaces. This post shows how that can be done using WPF – the other supported mechanism for adding new documents to AutoCAD’s main frame introduced in the 2015 release. Just as with last week’s post, there really isn’t that much to it: you just need to add your own WPF UserControl to the project and load that into an Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows.WPFDocumentWindow object and pass it to... Read more →

Adding a cursor badge in AutoCAD 2015 using .NET

I have to say that I’m having an absolute blast getting to know the new API features in AutoCAD 2015. It turns out I’d barely scratched the surface with my original post about the impact for developers. It’s a release that just keeps on giving. :-) One new feature that I’ve had a lot of fun playing with is the “cursor badge” capability, something you may have seen blogged about from a user’s perspective. The good news is that the ability to add your own cursor badges is provided in the public API (although I did end up using... Read more →