Ellipsis

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  Ellipsis is the official blog of Autodesk's Technical Evangelist Team. We will discuss all things design and manufacturing related with a focus on industries such as automotive and transportation, consumer products, industrial machinery and building product manufacturing and fabrication. We also have resident experts who will blog about specific product developments in CAD, Simulation, Industrial Design and Data Management.

  We look forward to providing you, our user community, with the most relevant and up to date developments in our industry, and hopefully with information that will assist you in doing your job better, faster, and more precisely.

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  Lights, Camera...
  May 23, 2008 03:52 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Okay… here’s a quick one that will really help in setting camera position with AliasStudio 2009. Consider how to accomplish the following design task…

  

  We have to do some interior design concept sketches for the new yacht our company is working on. Yeah, I know, very few of us actually work for yacht design companies, but it happens to be something I am working on this week so just go with it. [grin] Anyway, as I was saying, we have to do these sketches for concept approval before we go ahead and start with the technical surfacing.
  Ideally, we want to sketch in context to where the design will actually end up being used, in this case the main deck level salon. One of the 4 default views when you start working with AliasStudio is a Perspective Camera View as you can see in the image above. It’s a beautiful thing… you don’t have to even create the camera, you get it by default. The problem is how to move it to get the views you want to generate sketch canvas images from.
  By holding down the Shift-Alt keys and using a combination of either mouse or tablet stylus movement and key selections you can Tumble, Track and Dolly the camera view and by extension actually move the camera itself. However, the center of rotation of the view is tied initially to the view (world) origin by default. This quickly becomes problematic, especially if you are working on a large model in an area at a great distance from the view origin.

  The solution is to set a new point of interest. This can be controlled via the Preferences/General Preferences/Input dialog box, but it should be on by default so all you have to do is select a piece of geometry while holding down the Shift-Alt key combination.

  

  If you select a model edge you can track the point of interest along the edge. Better yet, if you select a surface you can track along the surface, and the view direction will be normal to the surface at that point. The “normal direction” indicator will be blue or yellow, depending on whether or not the normal is facing towards you or away from you respectively. Way cool!
  To set the new view orientation, all there is for us to do is to select the blue or yellow arrow and the view will change so that we are looking down the normal. Selecting any of the direction arrows in the viewing panel (seen in the image above) will change the view to that orientation with respect to the new point of interest.

  So, with our view set, we change the orientation a bit, turn on the Hardware Shade for this view and then copy the image to our current canvas.

  

  Voila, we can now sketch and paint right on top of this view of the model. It’s a beautiful thing…

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  It's Back...
  May 16, 2008 08:13 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Garin Gardiner, in his “In the Machine” blog mentioned that Inventor LT 2009 would soon be available… well, I am happy to say it is now available on Autodesk Labs.
   
  Simply browse over to Labs… you can’t miss it, it’s the banner item on Labs at the moment. If you select the download hyperlink you can check out the new capabilities and download it yourself.
   
  In a nutshell, Autodesk Inventor LT 2009 helps to eliminate the challenges posed by working in a multi vendor CAD environment. It allows you to import, work with and then export 3D part models in a number of common file formats which makes communicating with the entire manufacturing supply chain much less painful.

  Autodesk Inventor LT Technology Preview 2009 delivers:

  • Multi-CAD translation capabilities for leading 3D file formats
  • 3D part model creation and editing
  • Automated mechanical drawings
  • Genuine DWG interoperability
  • Photorealistic rendering

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  Something old...
  May 9, 2008 10:47 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  Something old… is new again! Our own Kevin Richards (aka “Rockstar”) took the Inventor mast assembly I did a few years ago and totally tricked it out with Autodesk Showcase 2009.
   

  I always liked the “look” of this data, and it took me quite a while to get it to the point where I was satisfied with it, but Kevin definitely ramped it up a few notches. It has quite literally never looked so good.

  

  Looking at this it is easy enough to see why we call him the rockstar. Rock on Kevin! [grin]

   

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  From concept...
  May 2, 2008 06:26 PMby Jay Tedeschi

  From concept to finished product in 3:03… A better or faster example of Digital Prototyping I don’t think I have ever seen…

  

  The video, posted today on YouTube by Technogeekgal it is most definitely worth a look.

  0 Comment | Add CommentIn Ellipsis > Images, All