The following post about AutoCAD 2010 and 3D is from a fellow team member of mine Guillermo Melantoni who is a 3D rock star for the AutoCAD 2010 release. Guillermo will hopefully be getting a blog in the near future to share his expertise and passion for design and AutoCAD. - Shaan
My name is Guillermo Melantoni and I’m Senior Product Manager for AutoCAD, focusing on 3D and parametric design in general.
3D in AutoCAD has been underrated for a long time, and with AutoCAD 2010, it’s time to make sure that the word is out: “AutoCAD is also about 3D!”
This may seem obvious to many of you, but there’s definitely a lot to say about AutoCAD on this subject.
In future postings, we’ll be covering new features, best practices, tips and tricks for modeling with solids, meshes, navigation, rendering, and interoperability with verticals.
So let’s start with one of the most exciting features in AutoCAD 2010, called Free-Form Design.
The new Mesh Modeler, is based on subdivision surfaces, and allows a very intuitive creation of 3D objects that would be very difficult to model with NURBS, polygons, or solid modeling alone. It is basically similar to the way Maya generates subdivision surfaces.
Free-Form Design uses very simple and intuitive modeling techniques, based on pushing and pulling vertices, edges, or faces of a mesh. These operations are done through direct manipulation of the mesh, and some other commands like extrude and split. The modeler then has the ability to smooth the mesh, making an approximation of a curve with different levels of complexity. You can smooth a mesh primitive or smooth different entities like existing solids, closed polylines, etc.
The beauty of this method is that at any time you will be able to convert a mesh into a solid, and then apply any operations allowed for solids (like Thicken, Shell, Boolean operations in general, etc). This also means that the solid can be exported into Revit and use AutoCAD as front end for conceptual design. That’s something we’ll also be covering in future postings.
This example is the model of a building I developed for AutoCAD’s hero image, and done completely with AutoCAD. In this case, the image comes from Showcase, which, by the way, has been released in a bundle with AutoCAD and 3ds Max (AutoCAD Visualization Suite).
Stay tuned for more information in the coming days.
About Guillermo
My name is Guillermo Melantoni Cortabarria. I was born in Uruguay, where I got my degree in Architecture, and immediately started working as an architect, consultant and teacher at both state and private Schools of Architecture in Montevideo (subjects ranging from History and Theory of Architecture to Project and a varied number of applications –AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Revit, Photoshop-).
Before getting hired as an Application Engineer for Autodesk in Latin America (based in Argentina), I worked as consultant for an Autodesk Authorized Reseller in Uruguay (Geosys), where I covered AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, the Revit Platform, Inventor, and 3ds Max.
I spent two years as an AE, mainly making Revit implementations around Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as helping to develop awareness on the whole Autodesk portfolio in my region. At that time, I collaborated in the Introducing and Mastering Revit Architecture books, and had a Revit blog in Spanish called Revit Latino.
I then moved to USA with my wife and became one of AutoCAD’s Product Managers. I’m basically in charge of the vision around 3D, and trying to help with the interoperability with the rest of the portfolio. That is still my main focus, now also enlarged by parametric drawing.
I’ve been a bass player for the last 20 years, playing, recording and touring in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Originally a metal head, I now just look for people that want to play good music, not caring too much about style (though I still have a bias towards metal). I’m also an avid video gamer in my free time.
