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Archive for October, 2009

Autodesk® Inventor® Fusion Technology Preview 2 - Posted

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

By, Dan Banach

Autodesk posted the second preview release of Autodesk® Inventor® Fusion on Autodesk Labs.

The software can be downloaded for free from http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/fusion/

Inventor Fusion offers an easy way to manipulate models without worrying about the feature tree. This release also offers Autodesk Inventor 2010 subscription customers the ability to use Inventor Fusion’s change manager which allows:

The freedom of direct modeling with the ability to exercise control over change
Automatic creation, deletion or modification of features necessary to accommodate changes
Automatic update of a parametric model’s feature history with each change, ensuring critical design intent is maintained
It applies only to original Inventor data and can only be activated if you have Autodesk® Inventor® 2010 (Advantage Pack - subscription version) installed.

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Just for Fun: You Know You’re an AutoCAD Geek When…

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Someone asks you what your favorite color is and you say, “190″.
You’ve rubbed off the letters in the ESC key.
ALL YOUR FRIENDS KNOW THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS JUST MEANS YOU’RE WORKING, NOT SHOUTING.
You ask your mom to “plot” the directions to your aunt’s house.
You believe there is no such thing as too many monitors.
You think hand-drafted drawings are “adorable!”
You refer to cleaning your glasses as “doing a REGEN.”
You create detailed floorplans before moving any of your furniture around.
They’re not family photos, they’re raster images.
You’ve ever worked on AutoCAD in your pajamas…or underwear.
You use the middle mouse wheel to pan & zoom everything (and have messed up a Google map doing so.)
Most of your Facebook friends you know from AU or techcamp.
You don’t clean your house, you PURGE.

Happy Halloween!

-Lou

Posted in General | No Comments »

Inventor 2010 Subscription Advantage Pack

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

By, Dan Banach

Autodesk has released an Advantage Pack for Inventor 2010 subscription users. The Advantage Pack adds functionality for drawing creation, annotating, stress analysis and much more.

An overview video can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MlYPoPOctQ

A detailed video can be viewed at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QETW9ljZmSI

The Advantage Pack can be downloaded from www.autodesk.com/subscriptionlogin (a valid subscription login is required)

Enjoy,

Dan

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

What is your perspective?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Recently I was perusing some of the groups that I belong to on the different social sites. Professionally I am a member of the Autodesk Inventor Users, Autodesk iLogic User Group and Autodesk Data Management groups on LinkedIn and I also contribute to the Manufacturing Community discussion groups on Autodesk’s Community site. I like to look around and get some idea of where peoples heads are at when discussing issues or problems that they are having with both the software and workflows to use the software. As anyone knows, we all have our own agenda when using software and with this we all have our own perspective of how it should be used. Some people can clearly see the value of having a very capable parametric solid modeler in their toolbox while others, as I have noticed, do not.

I have seen a number of posts on different sites that go a little something like this:

"Why does Inventor have to be so expensive?"

"Doesn’t Autodesk understand how hard it is for a small company to justify the cost?"

"Why should I pay so much more for Inventor then I would for AutoCAD when all I get is pretty pictures?"

I love the last one. When I read that, I nearly fell off my chair. Pretty pictures, really? Let’s address these statements.

Inventor, in all actuality, is not expensive. Now some might think that $5k is alot of money and it is, but look at the comparison. AutoCAD will run you around $2k, which by the way is included at no additional cost when you purchase the Inventor Suite packages. Solidworks is very competitive with the cost of Inventor. I will give credit where credit is due. Sometimes they will offer "deals" which seem attractive at the time, until you realize that you still have to pay an additional cost if you want a real DWG application. Pro/E Wildfire is also competitive with Inventor and Solidworks but with less functionality and user friendliness as the latter two.

If you are looking for a better solid modeler then Inventor, you have a choice of 3 popular and powerful applications, Pro/E, CATIA and NX, formerly Unigraphics. Yes, these big players can do alot; NURBS Surfacing, FEA, Kinematic Simulation, Flow Analysis, you name it. This is why the larger engineering corporations use them, names like Boeing, Ford, General Dynamics and the like. But with a price tag in the order of $10k to $20k per seat, I’d be hard pressed to see a company with a 3 man engineering department using them. Not to mention the infrastructure necessary to run these applications, oh and don’t let me forget the training and time required to get up to speed in using these complicated applications. They do alot which means you as an end user need to know alot. Which also means that you as an end user would demand financial compensation for your skills and knowledge, which increases the overhead of using these applications. When you start adding it all up, the numbers for Inventor seem very attractive.

Let’s get back to the pretty pictures statement. If all you see a parametric solid modeler that is capable of Dynamic Simulation, Finite Element Analysis, Rules Based Design, Tabulated Components with tools specifically developed for Tool Design, Plastic Part Design and, in my opinion, one of the best Machine Design applications in the world, as being a means to create pretty pictures, then you my friend are in the wrong industry and should seriously consider a career in the basket weaving field. If you are interested in creating a higher quality product with the capability to not only mine real world engineering information from models but to validate and improve processes even before the first piece of steel is purchased, then you need Inventor. Period.

I’ll get off my soap box now. Thanks

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

Doing Lines (in AutoCAD)

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

A few handy line variables to know:

LTSCALE - This is very straightforward. LTSCALE set to 1 draws your lines as defined in the *.LIN file. LTSCALE set to 0.5 makes it half as big. LTSCALE of 2 makes it twice as big and so on. This is a drawing-wide setting. If you change LTSCALE, all your lines will adjust accordingly, unless you’ve set the LTSCALE by object or if you used CELTSCALE.

CELTSCALE - Similar to LTSCALE, but does not affect lines that have already been created. Think of it as an alternative to setting line scale by object. Say you set your LTSCALE to 1, draw a bunch of stuff, and then need to draw more stuff with an LTSCALE of 10. But you don’t want to whack out the stuff you already drew. Set CELTSCALE to 10 (leave LTSCALE alone) and draw your new stuff.

PSLTSCALE - you want this to be 1, which means the viewport scale will effect the scale of the lines. With this set to 0, your lines will look the same in paperspace as in modelspace, regardless of the viewport scale.

PLINEGEN - AKA “Linetype generation.” By default this is zero, meaning that if a line segment is too short to show dashes, it will appear solid. What is happening is that CAD sees the short segment and starts the pattern over, centering the pattern at the midpoint of the segment. If you don’t like that, you can set your PLINEGEN variable to 0, where CAD doesn’t start over at each segment. In Civil 3D 2009 and earlier this comes into play when creating existing ground profiles (in Civil 3D 2010, profiles always act like PLINEGEN = 1).

PLINEGEN=0

PLINEGEN=1

Hope this clears up some line mysteries out there!

-Lou

Posted in Building / AEC, Civil, General | No Comments »

Manufacturing Subscription Webcast - October 27

Monday, October 12th, 2009

By, Dan Banach

Over the last couple of years Autodesk has been increasing the value of their software subscription program. Besides offering online support Autodesk has made available add-ins specifically for subscription customers. To continue to add value to the subscription program Autodesk will be hosting a Subscription webcast for manufacturing customers on October 27.

The session will be hosted by Emily Crane, Autodesk WW Subscription Sales Support Rep, and Daryl Corelli, Autodesk Manufacturing Application Specialist. Emily and Daryl will cover the overall value of the Autodesk® Subscription program as well as what Autodesk will be delivering in the midyear software release to the Manufacturing Subscription customers.

Topics will include:

Value of Subscription
Subscription Contract Administration
How to access benefits through Subscription Center
What value is being delivered in the midyear software release
How to get the midyear software release (Software Advantage Pack)

Topic: Autodesk Subscription 101 Webcast for Manufacturing Customers
Date and time: Tuesday, October 27, 11:00–11:45 AM PDT
URL: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/autodesklearning/join?id=SUBM&role=attend&pw=Audience
Meeting ID: SUBM
Meeting Key: Audience
Audio: Toll-free: +1-888-790-3346
Participant code: 2432161

Posted in Manufacturing | 1 Comment »

Rendering on GPUs

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

A common question is what kind of graphics card do I need for rendering. The answer is you don’t. Rendering is executed exclusively on the main CPU of the computer and all you need is a display adapter to show the results so the graphics card has little to nothing to do with the actual rendering. The graphics card still helps with displaying the scene while you are editing, but it just doesn’t help your rendering. But soon, that will not be true.

Some time ago, nVidia purchased mental images, the company that makes the mental ray rendering engine and since then, we’ve all been holding our collective breaths waiting for the marriage to produce offspring and that has finally happened. On September 30th, mental images announced the release of iray, a GPU based rendering system that uses the fast and immensely parallel processing system found in nVidia graphics cards to render out final quality images. GPUs (graphics processing units) are tailor built to handle rendering data making them faster and more efficient at this task than a more generally built CPU that relies on software to adjust its function to its current demands. iray will be available with the release of mental ray 3.8 later this month but it will likely take several months at the least before we see any integration with software like Max, Maya or SoftImage.

They have promised reducing rendering times from hours down to minutes which I’ll have to see to believe but I can certainly say the potential is there to greatly improve the rendering times, especially if the software allows the bridging of multiple cards as distributed rendering nodes. Time will tell but I feel a lot of excitement on this release and look forward to seeing what it can do for us.

You can read the release post at:

http://www.mentalimages.com/news/detail/article//mental-image-29.html

Stephen Gabriel

Senior Application Engineer

MasterGraphics

Posted in Visualization | No Comments »

Service Pack-Web Update 2 Available for Revit 2010 Products

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

By: Dwane Lindsey

The second service pack for the Revit 2010 prodcts has been released. You can download the updates and take a look at the update lists at the following links…

Revit Architecture

Revit Structure

Revit MEP

Posted in Building / AEC | No Comments »