Category Archives: Uncategorized

Autodesk University 2012

Being the geek I am I wanted to register early for AU so I woke up at 5:00 am Mtn time and started on the process.  I wasn’t surprised to find out that the classes were filling fast, this is why I register first thing.  One nice addition to the registration process this year is the display on the availability of the session.  If you hover over the class schedule title it will display how many seats are left.  I am not sure how accurate this is but it is nice to see how fast the class is filling up.  When I logged in this morning my session had 145 seats left, just over 4 hours later it has less than 90.

 

Oh I also hope they are going to add the twitter handles, facebook and/or linked in to the name badges since they ask for that during registration.

Good luck registering and I hope to see you all in Vegas

SketchBook Express update 2.4

Autodesk as released an update for SketchBook Express.  I guess the last update caused a bug so this got fixed in the new update

 

What’s New in Version 2.4

✓ Fixed brush performance on new iPad 
For those of you who haven’t downloaded this free app here is a description of what it does (Per the app store).

Autodesk SketchBook® Express for iPad is a fun and intuitive drawing application. Get a taste of the SketchBook Pro experience with SketchBook Express.

Use professional-grade tools and brushes to create doodles, quick sketches or artwork on-the-go.

Features:

✓ Full Screen work space with support for any device orientation ✓ Canvas size: 1024 x 768

✓Multi-Touch Interface: • Two finger pan & zoom navigation with 2500% zoom • Three finger tap for controls • Three finger swipe gestures for quick access

✓High Quality Brushes and Tools: • Professional-grade paint engine delivers smooth and precise brush strokes •15 preset brushes, including pencils, pens, markers and Fill Tool •SketchBook Store to purchase brush packs and a selection of Pro features. • Draw styles for creating straight lines, rectangles, and circles • 10 levels of undo and redo (Quick Access: three finger swipe left and right) • Dynamic symmetric drawing

✓Layers: • 3 Layers allowing easy build up of a drawing • Import layers from Photo Library • Duplicate, Merge and Reorder Layers • Move, scale, and rotate layers interactively using Multi-Touch • Toggle visibility and adjust Layer Opacity

✓Text: • Create text with a variety of fonts, colors, sizes and placement.

✓Colors: • Color Wheel with HSB and RBG color space • Eye-dropper color selection

✓Gallery: • Store and view work in progress • Export to Photo Library • Browse images in full-screen mode

✓ iCloud Support ∙ Option to set iCloud as default location to save canvases ∙ Controls in Gallery to upload or download from iCloud

✓Stay Connected: • Built-in SketchBook News panel for live info about Sketching events and announcements

✓ Visual help pages

 

For those of you using SketchBook Pro keep looking out for SketchBook INK coming out this spring.

Autodesk Design Review Mobile for Android

Autodesk had released Design Review Mobile app for the android market.  Read more on the blog Between the Lines with Shawn Hurley.  Similar to the app for the iPad it can only use files stored on your Autodesk Cloud account making it really only work if you are on subscription.  So if you want to be able to use your own documents then you will have to get your cloud account up and running first.  I have to say I have found the iPad version really nice to use out in the field to view all sheets and even the 3D model while on site, even with the size limitation because of the iPad.  I will look forward to testing this out on an Android device to see how the size limitation is going to be affected.

Automation

When I was getting started in the industry I was paying off bills by being a woodworker.  During my time I was fortunate enough to be at the cutting edge of the business and seeing all of the machinery become computerized and in some cases automated.  So this topic has always interested me in all industries and as new things develop I am always in awe, so when I came across the following C|NET article I was impressed again.  It has a short video of flying robots assembling a tower of blocks per a specified design.  I know this is in a controlled environment and many of the comments in the post elude to this but think of the potential…

Design Review Mobile

I got on my iPad this morning and noticed that Autodesk had released an update for the Design Review Mobile app.  I was hoping that this upgraded version would allow me to take my redlines back to the cloud and see them on my desktop.  Well that feature isn’t there yet but they did open it up for  other languages and the viewing of pdf documents you have stored on your cloud account.  As usual some bugs got fixed which is always a good thing.

This does bring me to an iPad or iPhone tip. If you hit the Home Button and the Power button simultaniously then it will create a screen capture of your device.  Since we cant’t get any Design Review redlines back to the cloud at least you can use this tip to email those captured redlines to the person who needs them.