Through the Interface

Quite the road trip: 3DRV

Some of you are probably aware of this activity from Shaan’s and Scott’s blogs, but I thought it was overdue a mention here, too. Autodesk is sponsoring the mother of all road trips: over the course of 8 months, TJ McCue is travelling the length and breadth of the United States in a brightly decorated recreational vehicle (RV), spreading the word about 3D technology. TJ is talking to people around the country about reality computing – capture, processing and fabrication processes such as 3D printing – as well as the availability of low-cost design tools. TJ is documenting his... Read more →

3 things I learned at last week’s Technical Summit

The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk’s engineering staff. I’ve been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I’ve been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as... 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 →

Pier 9

This is without a doubt the coolest office Autodesk has anywhere in the world. Pier 9, on San Francisco’s waterfront, houses the Autodesk Consumer Group, including the Tinkercad and Instructables teams, as well as members of Autodesk Research and visiting artists-in-residence. And it has the most phenomenal workshops, kitted out with cutting-edge technology. I’d been hoping to visit for some time but this was really my first real opportunity since its official opening back in September. I wandered across from our 1 Market office (which is also pretty cool, but relatively lacking in toys ;-) with Gaurav Sachdeva, a... Read more →

My first 3D print

Well, today was the day I printed my first 3D object. The missing feeder tube from our site’s MakerBot Replicator 2 hasn’t yet been replaced, but Francesco Tonioni, friend, colleague and probably the most practical person I know, cobbled something together as a stop-gap. So the game was on. :-) This initial project stems back to May of last year – when I was in Boston for our internal Technical Summit – when my son talked to me about an idea of his. My children really like LEGO, and, at the time – the specific product tie-in tends to... Read more →

Reality Computing updates

I’ve pulled together a few miscellaneous updates that relate to Autodesk’s Reality Computing efforts, which – as I mentioned earlier – is a term that’s intended to include “Reality Capture” at the beginning, followed by “Reality Modeling and Analysis” and then “Reality Delivery”. Firstly, looking at the capture side of things… Photo on ReCap 360 (the new name for ReCap Photo) now has free and paid versions available. Although at the time of writing it’s still possible to make use of the soon-to-be-paid benefits for free, but do hurry! Preview mode – with up to 50 source images of... Read more →

Browsing parts of the Smithsonian catalog online in 3D

Last week was an exciting one for the organisation at Autodesk that works on “Reality Computing” (a broader term I’ve seen recently that includes “Reality Capture” at the beginning, followed by “Reality Modeling and Analysis” and then “Reality Delivery”). Their big announcement was a partnership with the Smithsonian – the venerable Washington DC-based institution that is the world’s largest museum and research complex – to bring digital scans of many important exhibits online and accessible to all via the Smithsonian x3D Explorer. Shaan talks about the announcement in depth on his blog. I won’t repeat what he’s said over... Read more →

3D printing tech previews on Autodesk Labs: Projects Miller and Shapeshifter

I was chatting with a colleague in Tel Aviv, yesterday, and he gave me the heads-up on a project that was about to be launched on Autodesk Labs, developed by the Autodesk Research team based in his office (thanks, Benny! :-). I checked this morning and there it was… The project is called Project Shapeshifter – accessible via shapeshifter.io – and here’s what it says in its About box: Project Shapeshifter is a free technology preview by Autodesk. It provides an easy way to create complex 3D Printable models in your web browser. With a simple tweak of sliders,... Read more →

A quick trip back to the Fab Lab

I stopped by the Fab Lab in Neuchâtel, last week, to say a quick hello and find out what’s being worked on. Gaetan Bussy, the Lab manager, spent some time talking to me about some projects they have in the pipeline, one of which is to hack their Ultimaker to make it work with polar rather than (and eventually in addition to) Cartesian coordinates. Gaetan also showed me the latest addition to the Lab’s equipment, a B9Creator they received after backing its Kickstarter project. The project was successfully funded (and then some) a year ago, so I was quite... Read more →

Creating a grid of columns inside Tinkercad using JavaScript

A little over a month ago, Autodesk acquired Tinkercad. Tinkercad is a 3D CAD tool that uses WebGL to display graphics directly in your browser. While this tool is primarily targeted at consumers – it’s proving very popular among the 3D printing community – I thought I’d check it out to understand its customization capabilities. If you want to get to know the capabilities of the Tinkercad system, I suggest taking a look at these step-by-step lessons. I personally just dove right in – the system is very straightforward to learn – but I’m sure there are basics that... Read more →

Taking reality capture to the next level: 3D scentsing

I’m excited to announce some revolutionary new technology our "reality capture” team is working on at Autodesk. By now many people will be familiar with the Rip-Mod-Fab workflow (the 3D equivalent of Rip-Mix-Burn for music). The problem with this is that there’s something fundamental missing from the equation: that most aromatic of dimensions, the world of odours. How many of you have used 123D Catch to copy a real-world object, printing it using with MakerBot, only to find something missing? That once you’ve got over the utter coolness of being able to print something in three dimensions, you’re somehow... Read more →

Using augmented reality to preview the output of 123D Creature

A few weeks ago, we looked at using PointCloud Browser to visualize simple spherical primitives brought down from a web-service, as well as creating a simple AR game to obliterate them. Visualizing (and popping) spheres is all well and good, but clearly it’d ultimately be much more interesting to visualize more complex objects in an AR scene. The good news is that PointCloud Browser supports loading models from .OBJ files, a format generated by a number of Autodesk products – particularly those used in the Media & Entertainment space. I’m not a big user of 3ds Max or Maya,... Read more →

3D printing Star Wars weaponry using an AutoCAD model

Being a bit of a Star Wars fan, I was delighted to come across this blog post by former MakerBot employee Todd Blatt (now working at Custom 3D Stuff), who modeled an Imperial Scout Trooper Blaster in AutoCAD for 3D printing. You can download the STL output and the original DWG file from here. Here’s a view on the finished gun with the “shades of gray” visual style: And here’s one that’s “realistic” with a nice metallic material applied to it: 3D printing functional weapon parts is clearly a contentious subject – which, according to some, may sadly lead... Read more →

Google Chrome Web Lab’s Sketchbots: bits to atoms, zen-style

I clicked on through to the Chrome Web Lab from the Google home-page, yesterday. It contains some cool “experiments” that showcase the capabilities of modern web-browsers (and presumably Google Chrome, in particular). The one that especially caught my interest was number 3, the Sketchbots experiment: The experiment starts with an uploaded photo or – and this is what I did, in my case – a snapshot taken from your system’s webcam. Some image processing and computer vision techniques then get applied to it – essentially to perform edge detection and convert those edges to vectors – and the resultant... Read more →

New versions of 123D Catch for web and iPad

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about our “reality capture” (or 3D reconstruction) technologies, but I still like to play around with them, when I get the chance. My previous projects have all been with the PC version of 123D Catch (previously known as the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly), but I’ve just spent a few hours messing around with the new web and iPad versions of this tool (Shaan has already spent some time talking about these new versions over on his blog, in case). Thinking about it, these two new versions have been made possible... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: filling an arbitrary solid using .NET

As we’re nearing the end of this series, it seems a good time to do a quick recap of where we’ve been with the posts leading up to this point. Here goes… An interesting challenge: generating variable density fill patterns for 3D printing Generating hyperbolic geometry on a Poincaré disk in AutoCAD using .NET Generating hyperbolic tessellations inside AutoCAD using .NET Scripting the generation of hyperbolic tessellations inside AutoCAD Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian gasket using .NET Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian gasket using F# – Part 1 Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 3

As suggested in the last post, today we’re going to take the results of running the code from that post and use them to generate a hollowed-out sphere. A big thanks to Francesco Tonioni, from our Product Support team in Neuchatel, who spent some time throwing ideas around on a lazy (but very cold) Sunday afternoon, contributing significantly to this post. A few minor changes to the code were needed: rather than creating the spheres at exactly the size at which they were generated by the F# code, I adjusted the C# code to multiply the radius by 0.98... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 2

This post continues the series on fill algorithms for 3D printing by looking specifically at an Apollonian sphere packing. In the last post we got most of the way there, but today we’re going to introduce a more elegant algorithm for solving the problem (with pretty impressive results :-). Many thanks to Professor Ronald Peikert from ETH Zurich for kindly providing the C++ code used to generate the F# code in today’s post. The original algorithm was outlined in this paper co-authored by Professor Peikert, under the section The “Inversion Algorithm” and – as you might divine from the... Read more →

Sphere packing in AutoCAD: creating an Apollonian packing using F# – Part 1

So far in this series, we’ve looked at Apollonian circle packing using C# and also F#. The next few posts will look at solving this problem in 3D: performing Apollonian sphere packing. I’ve decided to stay in F# for the algorithmic side of things: it just feels a much cleaner environment for dealing with this kind of problem, and, besides, I’ve been having too much fun with it. :-) One thing I should mention, as this series is nominally about 3D printing fill algorithms: printing hollow spheres isn’t at all straightforward with today’s 3D printing technology, as support material... Read more →