Friday, April 20, 2007

What a week

My goodness that was a long week. I'm going to have to take some time to digest it all, but I can at the very least give a quick wrap up on some of the big ticket items.
  • Annotative scaling for AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) and AutoCAD MEP (AMEP).
  • IFC 2x3 compliancy for ACA and AMEP along with the Revit based products is now built into the software package.
  • Display settings are now available on the Properties palette for editing (my personal favorite)
  • VIZ 2008 inherited all the sweet mental ray goodies from MAX 9.
I have a feeling that I will be leaning towards more info on Design Visualization in the future and how AutoCAD, ACA, AMEP, Revit, AutoCAD Civil 3D and Inventor work together with VIZ and MAX. It always been something I've wanted to get into on a deeper level and now I finally am in a position to do so.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Autodesk Techcamp 2007

Well, next week is the Autodesk Techcamp (formerly known as bootcamp and something more appropriate in my opinion). We will be going over the new features of the new products and how to implement them. I think this year has some of the greatest enhancements to the software packages offered in a while. If you are wondering what Techcamp is like, it's similar to AU, but no where near as fun. Being held in Orlando has a little to do with that and the fact that you must attend classes affects the atmosphere too. This will also be my first chance to really get in depth with the new software. I've participated in the betas for AutoCAD and AutoCAD Architecture, but not to the extent I would have liked to. We will see what stuff this year turns up.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

No More VIZ Render

I knew there would be a select few wondering were VIZ Render (VIZR) has gone to when they load ACA2008. This portion of ACA (formerly ADT) has been discontinued. In my opinion, it has always been lacking in features to make it really useful. In addition to that, I found it extremely cumbersome to use after spending so much time using full VIZ and MAX as well. Really, what you should be looking into, is the core 3D functionality that was added to AutoCAD (actually rebuilt) starting with the release in 2007. They incorporated the mental ray engine that has been part of MAX and VIZ for some time now. So now you can achieve the same effects in AutoCAD/ACA as you could have done with VIZR - only without the pain of linking your model, struggling thru the material editor that lacked many features of VIZ and not having to worry what happens when you have an update to the building. Of course you can still link to VIZ or MAX, but that is only if you have them as a whole.