Between the Lines

Realize Your Ideas Tour

I will be attending tomorrows Realize Your Ideas Tour in San Francisco California. This is a free event for customers. The customer feedback from the tour so far has been great. There is a blog and podcasts covering the tour at http://ideasblog.adskhost.com/. Look me up at the event as I will be all over and carrying my camera. The Realize Your Ideas Tour will be in Anaheim California on Thursday June 2nd and then more locations such as Chicago in... Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 localized versions

I thought it might be a nice idea to start announcing when new language or localized versions of AutoCAD are released and shipping. Many are already shipping to customers: * Spanish * French * Italian * German * Japanese * Korean * Traditional Chinese and now the Nordic/Dutch version is shipping. More are soon to be released and shipping like the Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Czech versions. Cheers, Shaan Read more →

Peter Quinn joins Autodesk for Process and Power focus

Peter Quinn comes to Autodesk and the Platform Technologies Group with a strong Process and Power background. Peter was a recent product manager for Bentley Systems. Having Peter come on deck shows evidence that Autodesk is getting more serious about the P&P industry with the aim to better serve the Plant customers who run AutoCAD. Cheers, Shaan Read more →

Blog archiving in a book

I was searching for a nice printed archive of this blog and found one source www.blogbinders.com. It was really quite easy. The service downloaded all of the posts for a given time period minus the images. I am sure the images are not included because including the colors in the printing job would drastically increase the printing costs. In any case I had this blog from August 2003 to May 2005 archived into a 8.5 X 11 bound book. It... Read more →

ObjectARX Application Competition

Fellow CADBlogger and ObjectARX guru Fernando Malard of Brazil has started a competition with prizes for those that write the most innovative ObjectARX application for AutoCAD using AutoCAD 2006 features. I have donated 2 full AutoCAD 2006 (not for resale) versions as prizes. Winners can also donate their AutoCAD 2006 prize to anyone but I would suggest a local student or school. I may also serve as one of the judges for Fernando. Link Read more →

AutoCAD Service Packs?

I have received a few emails on how to find the downloads for the AutoCAD Service Packs. The AutoCAD Service Packs going back to AutoCAD Release 12 are located on the Autodesk website. You can get to the AutoCAD or other Autodesk product support by selecting support from the main Autodesk web page www.autodesk.com or going to support.autodesk.com. Now select the product. The service packs and updates are located in the section titled "Updates & Service Packs". Direct Link to... Read more →

DUH.... Dilbert Does DWF

Back on January 1st 2005 "New Years Day", fellow CADBlogger Robin Capper alerted me to the Dilbert's Ultimate House "DUH" project. Dilbert is the comic strip geek legend of mythical head proportions by Scott Adams. http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/house_news.html Robin suspected that Autodesk products had been used by the firm Heartwood Studios that did the design and 3D visualization work. It did look like a slam dunk especially since some of the images showed Dilbert in front of a computer with Autodesk 3ds... Read more →

Californians can now get daily earthquake forecast

I found this interesting. Now in addition to my weather and traffic forecast I can check the realtime earthquake forecast for the day. http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/step/ Read more →

New Autodesk Buzzsaw 6.2

On Saturday, May 14, 2005 a new Autodesk Buzzsaw client software was made available to customers. New Features and Benefits of Autodesk Buzzsaw 6.2 New Buzzsaw Viewing Components The new Buzzsaw Viewing Components represent the latest technology to view, print, measure, markup and annotate both 2D and 3D drawing files. These viewers are now the recommended view and markup tools for Buzzsaw and provide users with the following advanced capabilities: * New “View in Window” button available from the document... Read more →

Vacation

I will be working around the house most of this week trying to take a week off. I have to take the time off as I have reached the maximum vacation day accrual so I am actually losing vacation time benefits for each month that passes. I have a hard time taking vacations or days off for that matter. A few years back I was on vacation in Germany for a friends wedding. My well intentioned manager hoping for once... Read more →

The AutoCAD 2006 New Features Workshop is now live on autodesk.com

The New Features Workshop shows tutorials and informational overviews on the new features of AutoCAD 2006. You can specify what release you are coming from to tailor the new feature overviews and tutorials. Here is the link to get the online AutoCAD 2006 New Features Workshop: Link Shaan Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 and AutoComplete at the Commandline

AutoCAD 2006 has a new feature named AutoComplete. You can begin typing at the AutoCAD command line a few letters of a command, system variable, or command aliases and then hit the TAB key to cycle through the returned results. Read more →

Autodesk discussion groups now have RSS feeds

Kudos to Robin Capper for writing a detailed blog post instructing people on how to use the RSS feeds for the public Autodesk discussion groups. Now you don't need to read the discussion groups with an HTML browser or NNTP reader. Working with Autodesk Discussion Groups RSS feeds Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 Tutorial Videos

Shawn Gilmour of Autodesk recorded a few quick AutoCAD 2006 video tutorials with audio. These videos were recorded in the Microsoft wmv format and can be played in the Windows Media Player. Introduction to the AutoCAD 2006 CUI Editor Link Introduction to the AutoCAD 2006 Workspaces Link Creating a Toolbar with the AutoCAD 2006 CUI Editor Link Creating a Flyout Toolbar with the AutoCAD 2006 CUI Editor Link Introduction to the AutoCAD 2006 Enterprise CUI files Link Read more →

Updated System Variable Dialog Express Tool for AutoCAD 2006

The System Variable Editor is a tool included in the AutoCAD Express Tools which are an option when Installing AutoCAD 2006. Lee Ambrosius has graciously updated the data file for the AutoCAD 2006 system variables because we had for some reason missed updating it when we released AutoCAD 2006. I have wrote previously on the System Variable Editor and its nice features. Link Download sysvdlg.dat Place the sysvdlg.dat file in the \Express directory such as the location for my install... Read more →

Capture 3D DWF files from almost any application!

While Autodesk design applications (AutoCAD, Inventor, etc.) support the creation of 2D and 3D DWF files, how do you capture data from non-Autodesk applications? For 2D there has always been the free Autodesk DWF Writer (www.autodesk.com/dwfwriter) which enables users to publish DWF files from applications that do not offer built-in DWF publishing. But what about 3D? Autodesk is previewing a utility for capturing 3D graphics from almost any OpenGL based application (such as Bentley® MicroStation® or Dassault’s Solidworks® software). The... Read more →

How large of a DPI value should I use when generating a DWF?

Autodesk Product Manager Doug Look works with customers who use DWF Composer for digital measurement. Many of these customers asked how to determine the appropriate DPI to get appropriate levels of precision in their DWF files. They wanted to ensure a certain number of significant digits in the readouts provided by Autodesk DWF Composer. As such, Eric Haines, one of our Lead Software Engineers on DWF Composer, devised a formula for determining appropriate DPI settings that AutoCAD or other authors... Read more →

Incredible high resolution earth image

This is one of the nicest high resolution images I have ever seen of the Earth. It was released yesterday by the European Space Agency. It took 1561 orbits of the Envisat satellite over the course of many months in 2004 to get the images composited without clouds and in such fine detail. The 4Mb PNG image is really worth looking at. It took over 20 terabytes of data to construct the image. Simply amazing... Link to ESA article and... Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 XREF Bubble Notification Enhancements

XREF Notifications streamlined No need to open XREF Manager to reload XREFS Link shows Xref name Login of user who made change Hostname of machine where changed Click on link in Bubble Reloads XREF Right click on Status Bar icon Launch XREF Manager Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 Tables Enhancements

Some of the enhancements: * You can now add Formulas Sum/Average/Count/Cell as well as combinations. * Will roundtrip if not edited in previous release * Cells will work similar to Excel. You could have a column for cost and one for quantity then take the quantity and multiply it by the cost and then sum the total. * Can share data between tables. This means you can now link data from one table to a cell in another. Perhaps you... Read more →

Displaying the Hatch Area with a Field in AutoCAD 2006

A brief example on how to attach a AutoCAD 2006 Field to a Hatch object. This will result in a Field that will update when the Hatch boundary is modified. It is a perfect way to keep track of areas of rooms, brick, pavement, or perhaps the surface area of a heating surface of a heat exchanger. In this example I show how to attach the Field to the brick hatch for a patio. Here is a patio with an... Read more →

Rainy day for a Team Outing

I am going with the AutoCAD Team today to an Oakland A's baseball game. The problem is that it is raining pretty hard here currently. Hopefully the area where we are going to be seated is covered and has plenty of refreshments. Of course I will be posting some photos of the event to my Daily Grind II photo gallery. Even the blog has been effected by all of the rain. Link. At least it is not as bad as... Read more →

Specifying the Hatch Origin in AutoCAD 2006

Just a quick example of the new ability to specify the Hatch origin in AutoCAD 2006. Lets say you have a brick Hatch pattern. You want to have the brick Hatch to be centered or start at a certain point to be accurate. You would not want the brick Hatch pattern to be splitting bricks. Select the Hatch and then double-click to get the Hatch dialog. Now select the option to set a new Hatch origin. That's all there is... Read more →

Autodesk 3ds Max 7.5 is now released and shipping

This new 7.5 release is for current 3ds Max subscription customers. http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax From the announcement: Release 7.5 provides new and enhanced functionality in three key areas: * Autodesk VIZ - With the very latest technologies from Autodesk VIZ 2006, product designers, architects, inventors and others in the design visualization arena have the advanced modeling, lighting, rendering and animation tools that are exclusive to 3ds Max combined with the unique design-oriented functionality of Autodesk VIZ 2006 - all in a single... Read more →

AutoCAD 2006 Hatch enhancements

* Specify Hatch Origin * Hatch Boundaries enhanced * Create Separate hatch objects * Hatch Areas * Streamlined Hatch and Gradient dialog * Renamed it from Boundary Hatch and Fill * Expandable to reveal more options Read more →