Through the Interface

Simulate and control industrial robots with a new open source plugin for Autodesk Maya

Colleagues in Autodesk’s Office of the CTO (OCTO) – who work in the robotics lab on Pier 9 – have just released the code for a new tool called Mimic. Mimic is an open source plugin – with the Python code posted on GitHub – that allows you to simulate and control the use of a number of industrial robots (including various robots from ABB and KUKA). Here’s a screenshot: I’m really happy to see OCTO releasing open source projects in this way. If you’re interested in contributing to the project, be sure to check out the developer notes.... Read more →

Beyond BIM: adding campus or city views to Dasher 360

Those of you who have followed the progress on Dasher 360 will be aware that it currently works with a single building (or other) model. It’s always been our intention to go “Beyond BIM” (both in terms of addressing the needs of other industries but also scaling up to look at sites and cities) but over the last few weeks we’ve made a big push, making our first real forays into this new territory. Here’s a sneak peek at a campus view in Dasher 360 that integrates an additional Forge viewer control (this might also use a 3D mapping... Read more →

The future of AutoCAD

Yesterday was a big day for the AutoCAD product. A multi-year engineering project – started in the AutoCAD team way back when I was part of it – culminated in its first deliverables getting into the hands (or, in this case, browsers) of customers. The AutoCAD team has been working on a project codenamed “Fabric” for the last several years. It's has been a huge amount of work – something I’ll hopefully get into in a future blog post – but it’s finally bearing tangible fruit. In broad strokes the work was to take the core of AutoCAD and... Read more →

Blown away in Amsterdam

I was a little torn about my plans for this week: the Forge team is running a packed Accelerator in Munich, so it would have been great to have spent my week over there. As it happened I ended up coming to the Netherlands, instead, to meet with two incredibly innovative companies, Van Wijnen and MX3D. Despite missing the Accelerator the timing was actually pretty ideal: it proved possible to spend a day and a half with Van Wijnen at Autodesk’s office in Hoofddorp before coming into the city to join some of my Autodesk colleagues – Alex Tessier,... Read more →

One man’s trash… a patch panel punch down tool

As we continue clearing out cupboards and desks in the Neuchatel office, another potential treasure was uncovered by Francesco Tonioni. It seemed like a very interesting – and probably very useful – tool. We weren’t at all sure what it was until Hashim Mundol recognised it from a previous life. He identified it correctly as a patch panel punch down tool that’s apparently used by network technicians to wire network cables into patch panels. I have no idea if it’s something a reader of this blog might find useful. If so, drop me a mail with your name and... Read more →

Tickets are now on sale for AU London 2018

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s AU London. Until April 30th you can get the earlybird discount of £160 on the regular price: for the next several weeks the price is £540 + VAT instead of £700 + VAT. I’ll be attending – and speaking at – this year’s AU London. I’ll be presenting a session entitled “Using Forge to Connect BIM to the Internet of Things” on June 19th at 3:25pm. Here’s the class description from the AU London website: Autodesk Research has been working on the display of building performance data in a rich 3D... Read more →

One man’s trash… and the winner is…

Many thanks to all of you who responded to the last “one man’s trash” post offering a signed copy of The Autodesk File for one of the people answering John’s question correctly: What was the first Autodesk product which, after having been sold, was subsequently discontinued? The answer is, of course, AutoScreen. Of the 15 people who responded, 7 gave the correct answer (the other popular – albeit incorrect – answers were MicroCAD and Lightscape). John’s “bonus points” question really had people scratching their heads: What was the original in-house name for the product eventually introduced as AutoSketch? (In... Read more →

Celebrating a 20-year journey

When I first visited Neuchatel I instantly fell in love with the city. This was back in the summer of 1995, during my second round job interview for Autodesk. From that moment I knew I wanted to live here, but it was only in early 1998 that I had the chance to do so: a colleague had moved across to San Francisco to join the Kinetix development team, which left a Swiss-based vacancy in the European Developer Support team. I was thrilled to have the chance to move across and fill that role. During my first few weeks in... Read more →

One man’s trash… a copy of The Autodesk File signed by John Walker

I know this one is going to be extremely popular with the readers of this blog. While starting the clear-out of her bookshelf, a colleague in the Neuchatel office, Maria Elena Santoyo Torres, found a copy of The Autodesk File in book form. I hadn’t realised it had been bound into a book, so this was really exciting to me! I admit to having been more than a little tempted to hang on to it for myself. Ah well. (For those of you who are new to this series, we’re using this blog to give away interesting items we’ve... Read more →