Through the Interface

SCOTT Sports – designing and manufacturing goggles using Autodesk Alias and Inventor

A few weeks ago a colleague – and keen mountain biker – from the Neuchatel office, Nicolas Barras, pointed me at a video created by one of his favourite local brands, SCOTT Sports, showing their goggle manufacturing process. Nicolas – a huge SCOTT fan – was curious about their use of design software. Watching the video with Nicolas, I could see Autodesk Inventor being used for their tooling design at around the 43s mark. This made me curious, too: I wondered whether it was also used to design the goggles, themselves. SCOTT is located at Givisiez, near Fribourg (it’s... Read more →

The Autodesk Knowledge Network gets a facelift

It’s been a couple of years since I last reported on an Autodesk web property getting cosmetic surgery. The AKN team has just unveiled a revamped portal enabling people to create, share and remix knowledge, whether of their industry or their usage of a particular product. Here’s my AKN profile, showing that I’ve contributed some screencasts but (so far) no articles. We’ll have to see what we can do about that. :-) Here’s some information I received from the Screencast team that describes the change: Your profile is an opportunity to showcase who you are and promote your contributions.... Read more →

AU 2015 handout: Integrating .NET Code with AutoCAD I/O to Add Design Intelligence to Your Website

With the clock ticking before next week’s AU 2015, here’s the second of my class handouts (here’s a link to the first). For those of you lucky enough to be heading to this year’s event, see you in Vegas! Introduction During the course of this session, we’re going to look at the steps required to implement a web-site for turning pictures into jigsaw puzzles. We’re not going to go quite as far as creating the puzzles, themselves, but rather the DWG or DWF files that can be used to drive a laser cutter to do the work. The premise... Read more →

Correcting creation and last modified folder attributes using PowerShell

The first snow of the season came, over the weekend, so it seemed a good time to write a post that was a little off-piste. :-) It’s a topic that I don’t recall ever having broached: using PowerShell to mess with files and folders on your hard drive or a network server. This is my first serious use of PowerShell, so please use the code in this post with caution: I really can’t promise it won’t do bad things to your system. A bit of background: a quick way to copy files around on Windows systems is using Explorer.... Read more →

An inspiring video about an old friend

A link to a video was posted to Autodesk’s intranet, a few days ago. It’s about Mark Webb, a friend and colleague based in our Manchester (New Hampshire) office. Mark and I started out at more or less the same time at Autodesk in the UK, in the charming town of Guildford. At least it’s charming when you compare it with Farnborough, where the office is located now. Back then Mark was working on one of our early AEC products – some UK-centric extensions to AutoCAD that pre-dated the Softdesk acquisition and the launch of Architecture Desktop – while... Read more →

AU 2015 handout: Virtual Reality Viewing of 3D Models Using Autodesk's View and Data API

I’ve been heads-down wrapping up my AU content, so I thought I’d publish at least some of it here. Here’s the handout for my “AU kick-off” class which is at 8am on the first day of the conference – the morning after the ADN party – so despite the fact the class is currently full, we’ll see if that turns out to be the case. ;-) VR comes of age Presenting 2D images that allow the brain to reconstruct 3D has its roots in the early stereoscopes invented in the late 1830s. These were eventually democratized by Sawyers and... Read more →

Project PRAXIS: a free, web-based, workflow diagramming tool

The Autodesk Knowledge Network team has created a new, web-based tool for diagramming Autodesk product workflows called Project PRAXIS. This free tool is currently in pre-release and allows you to document and share product workflows within your organisation or with your customers. I took it for a spin and quickly documented the Eat, Sleep, Code, Repeat cycle (inspired by Fatboy Slim’s Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat). The tool has been used extensively by our Global Services division, and I’m sure that many external consultants and channel partners will find it useful for mapping various activities. Give it a try and... Read more →

Developers, developers, developers, developers!

There’s a lot of developer-oriented fun coming up over the coming weeks/months. The ADN team’s DevDays tour kicks off in Beijing in a few days, with the largest single event taking place – as usual – the day before AU 2015 in Las Vegas. I’ll be there for that, of course, but I’ve also booked my travel to be in Munich for the main European DevDay + Accelerator during the week of January 18-22, 2016. I’m very much looking forward to spending some more “quality time” with developers from across Europe – it should be a lot of fun... Read more →

Creating AutoCAD Xrefs as overlays with relative paths using .NET

After showing how to automatically attach xrefs at the origin inside AutoCAD, and then redoing the approach to take care of different unit systems, I then had the request from a couple of places to look at making the xrefs overlays and adjusting their paths to be relative rather than absolute. Looking around, I found some code on the AutoCAD DevBlog that changes an attachment to an overlay, after the fact. Henrik Ericson found the code didn’t work for him, but did spot the db.OverlayXref() method which did. So I went ahead and made use of that for overlays.... Read more →

Converting units between different AutoCAD drawings using .NET

This is actually a redo of last week’s post, just with a different title: while the approach shown worked well when creating external references to drawings using the same units, when bringing in (for instance) metric xrefs into an imperial master drawing the scale was all messed up. Thanks to Hans Lammerts for reporting the issue. The scaling ended up being straightforward to implement: the hard work was done by UnitsConverter.GetConversionFactor(), which established the scale factor to use, converting between the Units property of the new block table record and the Insunits property of the target database. Then it... Read more →

Updates to Autodesk ReCap and Memento

Some serious updates to our reality computing tools have been released in the last few days… here’s a quick round-up with links you can use to go and find out more. ReCap 2.2 Each member of the ReCap portfolio – ReCap, ReCap 360 and ReCap Ultimate – has significant new features in this release. Full details are available here. To summarize just a few, there are new features focused on noise clean-up of point clouds as well as optimizing them for editing performance and project size, and a number of improvements relating to creation of presentation assets such as... Read more →

Creating an AutoCAD layout with custom plot and viewport settings using .NET

This request from Thomas Longnecker languished in my inbox for several weeks before I finally found the time to work on it. It would be tremendously helpful to me if you could give an explanatory example of how to: Create a new layout, add a page-setup with plot-settings and then either delete the default viewport and create a new one or possible change the default viewport. […] Within the newly created layouts I needed to set some of the general Plot setting, mainly Paper size and Plot style table. Some of the main things for the viewport was to... Read more →

Attaching AutoCAD Xrefs and inserting them at the origin using .NET

I just received this interesting (and quick to solve) question from Henrik Ericson, this morning: I’m looking for a new xref command (or perhaps overriding the internal xref command) that always insert the selected xref at 0,0,0 coordinates and in World coordinate system. I’m often inserting an xref and ’nothing happens’ and then I realize that I’m in a UCS. I created a simple command called XAO – for XrefAttach[At]Origin – that does just this. As a helper function I implemented a simple extension method to both attach and insert an external reference in the current space of the... Read more →