Friday, May 29, 2009

BIM City Comes to Life

This week we replicated... err... printed BIM City on our Z-Corp Z-Printer 450. Needless to say, it was a learning experience. We have plans for a larger version of the model showcasing the buildings better and allowing a better view of the city.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Real Time Rendering - is it possible?

What if I told you it were possible to have instantaneous feedback on changes made to your rendering? What if individual frames could be rendered in sub-seconds instead of 20-40 minutes a piece? What if you could work with your animated content from any program and render out Beauty, AO, DOF, etc. passes for editing in post - still in sub-seconds? What if poly count was no longer something you needed to worry about and could deal with scenes in the billions of polygon range? What if I could do this all on ONE desktop computer and ditch my hoard of render farms?

Would you think I'm on crack? Probably. I thought the people telling me about this were too - until I saw it with my own eyes.

I visited a company called Studio GPU this week. I can't tell you how incredible it was to see this first hand! Whether tuning your AO pass or playing with lighting conditions or camera bloom effects or scrubbing through the fully rendered animation - it's real! The DoF pass was so easy to tune and you could do it real time as if you were in post! You can even generate volumetric lighting in real time. HDR lighting is supported too for matching existing environments. It was so sweet it almost made me break down and cry. Pure joy!

Check it out!

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Let the voting for AU Classes begin!

Hey all! In a shameless bit of advertising, AU is looking to have the general public vote to see which classes they want to make the slate in December. Don't forget to vote for your favorite speaker!

I've submitted 2 topics this year. One will be an encore presentation of "Implementation Tools and Techniques That No CAD Manager Can Live Without" and the other will be "Making Autodesk Products Sing the Interoperability Highway Song".

The second class I mentioned will have Melanie Santer, Tod Wallace, Carlos Orona and myself as co-speakers. Your vote can help make these classes happen! Use this link to go vote for a class! All you need is an AU Online account. Look for other U.S. CAD instructors listed in the speaker list – vote for them! Get their classes approved!

Monday, May 04, 2009

Looking for Informational Resources?

Whether you use AutoCAD or 3ds MAX, Revit or Civil 3d - you'll find something for you at the Autodesk Resource Center. Check it out! http://resources.autodesk.com/ You'll find webcasts, tutorials white papers and more. Finally they have consolidated everything in a one stop shop!