Through the Interface

AI projects at Autodesk Research

There’s a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023’s Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I’m less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All... Read more →

Forge Data Days (and DevDays Online 2022) videos

I’ve signed up to help with the Forge Developer Zone in the Exhibit Hall of Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans, if you’re going to be there. Right now I’m planning on being there at these times, in case you want to swing by for a chat: Wednesday September 28th | 11:30am – 1:00pm Thursday September 29th | 11:30am – 1:00pm If you’re attending AU – whether physically or virtually – and have an interest in the Forge platform, then you may find this article to be of use. For my own preparation I thought I’d brush up on... Read more →

Going viral during a pandemic

I’ve been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean, Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently being circulated all around the globe in a viral meme? Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of... Read more →

DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

The material for this year’s online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here’s the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from... Read more →

Join us for DevDays Online

Not everyone can make it to the Forge team’s annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here’s a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn’t work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays... Read more →

Free webinar series on Forge Design Automation for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and 3ds Max

The Forge team has published details of a series of free webinars coming up over the next few weeks that take an in-depth look at the various Design Automation APIs for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and 3ds Max. Here are the dates and presenters for the various versions of the Design Automation API. All times are 8am Pacific. December 5th, 2019 | AutoCAD | Albert Szilvasy December 10th, 2019 | Revit | Sasha Crotty December 11th, 2019 | Inventor | Andrew Akenson December 12th, 2019 | 3ds Max | Kevin Vandecar For more details and to register, head on over... Read more →

Join DevDays Online to learn what’s coming with Autodesk platform technology

There’s a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what’s coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It’s also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year’s DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don’t worry if that time’s inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk... Read more →

The Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK and importing custom point clouds into AutoCAD

This isn’t exactly new news, but it was to me. Today I found out we’ve made a very useful component, the Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK, available to the public. This is a C++ library that allows you to read and write Autodesk’s RCP and RCS formats, as well as to create custom plugins for new point cloud definition formats. ADN members can log in today and download the SDK and accompanying samples. Non-members can send an email and get access to it that way. There’s a particular reason I find this to be important news: it will enable developers... Read more →

More on AutoCAD Web at Google I/O

After the previous day’s excitement of seeing AutoCAD Web on mainstage at the Google I/O developer keynote, on Wednesday our very own Marcus O’Brien, Senior Product Line Manager in the AutoCAD team, took to the stage during another session at Google I/O – entitled “Building the Future Web with WebAssembly” – to talk a bit more about AutoCAD’s history and the path that led to this latest incarnation of AutoCAD Web. Here’s a video of the session. It’s probably worth watching more of this one, but for your convenience I’ve set the below video to start with the AutoCAD... Read more →

AutoCAD Web featured at Google I/O

As a great way to demonstrate the promise WebAssembly holds for software developers, AutoCAD Web was showcased during yesterday’s developer keynote at Google I/O. This is well-deserved recognition of the important work done by the AutoCAD team on the Fabric project (and on AutoCAD Web itself, of course). Congratulations to all those involved! Read more →

One man's treasure... unboxing AutoCAD 2.6

This is a slightly anomalous post in the “one man’s trash” series, in that we’ve actually found something I can’t bear to part with. This was nearly the case for The Autodesk File 3rd Edition, but I did bring myself to ship that one off to Oregon. Today’s item, once again uncovered by Francesco Tonioni, is a boxed version of AutoCAD 2.6. It’s probably too heavy and fragile to ship around the world, but if I’m honest that’s only part of the reason. It’s just too precious! It’s the German edition, which for sure was localized from the English... Read more →

Creating the AutoCAD 2019 brand imagery

For the latest release of AutoCAD a new set of imagery was created. This is the first major evolution of the AutoCAD product brand in several years: our Brand Strategy & Design group recently shared some material about the work they do that I thought would be of interest to readers of this blog. Many thanks to Sabrina Humphreys and Bonnie Cha for contributing the content for this post. The last major redesign happened for the AutoCAD 2014 product family, and was used until AutoCAD 2018. Here’s what the team said about this effort (I’ll share their words verbatim... Read more →

A brief history of rearchitecting AutoCAD (or the importance of R13)

Over the weekend I received an email from Jürgen Becker. It came with this image, which certainly brought back memories. The email referred to our recent trip down memory lane… I read your last post and remembered a poster. Do you remember that release, it was terrible? This is one of my favourite “chat over a beer” topics, and one that seems relevant to where we are today with Fabric, so I wrote Jürgen a quick note to say that I’d reply via my blog. Here is that reply. R13 was bad, but it had to happen I joined... Read more →

One man’s trash… AutoCAD R14 and 2000 digitizing tablet overlays

Firstly, I’d like to thank the few people who engaged on the last One Man’s Trash, which was clearly (but hopefully not too clearly) an April 1st prank. I’d have expected more people to “bite”, but then it was posted over the weekend, so perhaps not that many people saw it. Or perhaps it was obviously just for fun, in which case I hope people appreciated it at some level. Anyway, today’s giveaway is fo realz, yo. An old friend and colleague in our Localization department, Paul-Henri Arnaud, dug out a number of digitizing tablet overlays dating back to... 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 →

DevDays Online

For those of you who (like me) missed this year’s in-person DevDays – or perhaps have colleagues who would benefit from seeing sessions you managed to attend yourself in Las Vegas or elsewhere – you’ll be interested to hear that DevDays Online will be disseminating all that DevDays goodness over the wire during the month of February. The great news is that this isn’t being limited to ADN members: anyone can sign up and attend. The sessions will also be recorded, in case any are at times that don’t work for you. You can register to attend the various... Read more →

Integrating the 3dRudder with AutoCAD

I mentioned this device, late last year, and have been meaning to spend time integrating it into AutoCAD ever since. The 3dRudder is an interesting perpheral: while currently targeted at helping seated VR users navigate intuitively in 3D – effectively keeping their hands free – it was originally intended for CAD users. So it’s nice that it’s going back to its roots, as it were. Here’s an excerpt of a video of Christian Slater demoing the 3dRudder integration with Rhino (I’m kidding about it being Christian Slater – he just looks a bit like him :-). Over the last... Read more →

A taste of things to come with AutoCAD

The AutoCAD team recently released a preview version of a new AutoCAD web viewer. Give it a try using the latest version of Chrome. What’s interesting about this is that it’s very much a taste of things to come – something I alluded to in this recent post. Here are some screenshots: The top three thumbnails link to standard models so that you can quickly take the new viewer for a spin: Here’s the “Plumbing.dwg” drawing loaded in the browser: The text on the left of this page is very interesting, particularly the piece I’ve highlighted below in bold.... Read more →

AutoCAD 2018 has been released

While I’m not spending much time working with AutoCAD, these days, I’ve been waiting impatiently for the release of AutoCAD 2018 (codenamed “Omega”). There’s one key feature, in particular, that I’ve been waiting for – but more on that later. From a user perspective you can find information on the new release in this blog post and this preview guide. There’s also a subset covered in this intro video, if that’s your preference: Here are a few notes on the major user features. Some of these features were already part of the 2017.1 release, but many people will be... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD leader with directional text using .NET

I’m sure some of you will be relieved to see I can still (more or less) manage to write code for AutoCAD… the last few days I’ve been feeling quite under-the-weather, so today’s post is a little bit of “comfort code”: sometimes while you’re brain is struggling to handle the unfamiliar, it’s very happy to tackle the familiar. At least that was the plan, and the reason I decided to tackle this recent question from Thomas Heitz: I would like to write an code to change automatically the structure label style while dragging the label. So I created two... Read more →