Here is all of the news we’ve collected about Autodesk, creators of such products as AutoCAD, Maya, 3ds Max, and Mudbox.
Browse around, then check out some other popular software producers like:
There’s a new version of the glu3D fluid motion simulator for 3dsMax that brings it up to date with 3dsMax2012 and adds in CUDA computation for improved performance.
It speeds up intensive computations that glu3D performs to calculate particle fluid dynamics. With this glu3D edition it is possible to simulate faster and with more particles than before; it is possible to simulate your scene more times; it is almost interactive. Animated fluid scenes with more quality and level of detai
You can download their free Demo version at their site, or buy it for $760.
Click for Fullsize
The Autodesk Research team has just published “Citeology” on their website. It’s a java applet for visualizing a large collection of technical research papers. As you can see from the image above, the end result combines both the text of the papers along with a timeline and information on a chosen topic and where it appears within.
Citeology looks at the relationship between research publications through their use of citations. The names of each of the 3,502 papers published at the CHI and UIST Human Computer Interaction (HCI) conferences between 1982 and 2010 are listed by year and sorted with the most cited papers in the middle. In total, 11,699 citations were made from one article to another within this collection. These citations are represented by the curved lines in the graphic, linking each paper to those that it referenced.
I’m surprised to see this coming from Autodesk Research, not what I would typically expect from them. Nonetheless it’s an impressive visualization that’s both beautiful and functional.
Yesterday GraphicSpeak ran an article detailing all the may acquisitions Autodesk has been involved in this year. Ranging from engineering products to web collaboration systems, they’ve maintained their place in the headlines through constantly buying up more companies.
In a recent meeting with the press Autodesk CEO Carl Bass confessed that during the last twelve months, Autodesk has been even more enthusiastically acquisitive than usual and promised the company would slow down for a while. But, he said, Autodesk is not going to stop acquiring companies because it is an important part of their strategy for growth.
Then today, as if to prove their point, they announced their acquisition of T-Splines, a popular modeling plugin used by Rhino and SolidWorks. Not only this is an interesting move to acquire a huge tool used by their competition, it’s an interesting addition to the Autodesk portfolio.
This tech is particularly interesting in that in has applications for the entire line of Autodesk products, from Alias and Maya to Inventor and Revit. Where Inventor Fusion eases the process for those moving from AutoCAD to Inventor and history-driven modeling to history-free direct modeling, T-Splines technology adds the ease of creating and transitioning to creating complex manufacturable geometry.
FireUser.com has a user-contribution from Antonio Fontenele benchmarking a Quadro 1800FX against the AMD FirePro v5800 in a variety of tests. In an interesting twist he compares the various vendor “optimized” drivers against their counterparts provided by Autodesk (Both of these cards are Autodesk approved), and finds a startling different in performance.
In Cadalyst Systems Benchmark 2011 test, Quadro a little faster than FirePro while using AutoCAD default drivers due c2011_8.dwg file score, but it was slower than FirePro in the other files (where FirePro was 102.32% faster). However, using AutoCAD optimized drivers, Quadro earned 613 points while FirePro earned a higher score equal to 2060 points. This is means about 336.05% faster in AutoCAD 2011.
Get all the numbers in the article.
Autodesk is currently in the process of gathering up resources for their upcoming GDC2012 booth, and has asked the community to submit stills and video for inclusion not only at the conference, but on their website, Youtube channel, and more.
We’re especially interested in HD material. Of course, video submissions in other formats are still welcome. We’re also looking for your high-resolution images for inclusion in our marketing throughout the year. The deadline for video and imagery submissions is January 13, 2012.
via Autodesk – Games – Autodesk 2012 Games Show Reel Call for Submissions.
3Dconnexion, manufacturers of the impressive SpacePilot 3D mouse and other interesting multi-DOF input devices, is running a contest right now for a big free trip to the upcoming Autodesk University in Las Vegas next month.
Register now to enter to win:
- One full-conference pass to Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas, NV
- Nov 29 through Dec 1, 2011
- Airfare and hotel accommodations for 3 nights
- A SpacePilot PRO – The Ultimate Professional 3D Mouse
Available only in the US, unfortunately.
Professional animation tools like Mental Ray and various Autodesk products have been slowly making inroads into classic scientific visualization areas for the last several years, mostly due to their ability to add subtle realism details like refraction and diffuse light effects to renderings in ways not typically supported by scientific packages. Autodesk took a trip to the IGEM event, the International Genetically Engineered Machine event, and saw how Maya is being used in their work.
You may be asking yourselves why a scientific competition merits mention in a blog dedicated towards Maya, or even whether my coworkers stumbled into the wrong event. Our Research team has been driving a number of initiatives to study how Maya can benefit the synthetic biology and nanotechnology industries through collaboration with academic institutions and researchers. Maya is being used within the life and material sciences to create stunning visual simulations of molecular structures and behaviors.
Autodesk has a a nice case study online from Double Negative, discussing how they were able to use Autodesk Maya to create many of the effects in the Harry Potter franchise, focusing heavily on the latest and final chapter.
“We had a Dragon Team and a Hogwarts Team,” says Vickery. “They were almost like 2 separate production facilities in many ways. The complexity of the work on this film was so massive, with this incredible white dragon and a fully CG Hogwarts that had to be destroyed in epic fashion. It was such a big operation, in fact, that the filmmakers held a lot of the work back for the first installment of Deathly Hallows, mainly so we could build a well-oiled machine for the second part. Maya, of course, was a big part of that machine.”
Autodesk is now accepting entries into their 2011 Design Visualization Show Reel. Pretty much anything along Autodesk’s design lines is eligible, and the winners get a pretty substantial bit of visibility in everything Autodesk.
The show reel will be featured in all Autodesk University sessions from November 29 through December 1, 2011, and to the opening of the Autodesk University main stage presentation on the Autodesk Web site, AREA, and YouTube Channel, as well as various events throughout 2012.
via Computer Graphics World – Autodesk Design Visualization Show Reel 2011 Call for Submissions.
Autodesk’s Project Photofly is still going strong, and to prove it they’ve posted on their own blog a nice assortment of videos showing what users have done with it.
One of the convenience features of the Photo Scene Editor, a small application that you use to work with the Project Photofly web service, is that it will create and publish a video to YouTube for you. It uses the camera location of each of your submitted pictures as a key frame and combines them to make an animation. Several users have leveraged this capability to share what they have been able to create using Project Photofly.
Some impressive stuff there, and I can’t wait to see how Autodesk works this into their professional products.
via Recent Project Photofly YouTube videos from users – It is Alive in the Lab.
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