Manufacturing Pipes

Archive for February, 2012

From Inventor Beginner to Certified Professsional

Friday, February 24th, 2012

By, Dan Banach

Over the last year there has been many discussions about the types of training courses and method that are available to learn Autodesk Inventor. Inventor Certification has also been a growing topic, what is certification and should I get certified. I wrote an article that covers these topics for the February 2012 edition of the AUGIWorld magazine. My article as well as other articles on the topic of learning other Autodesk softwares can be seen at: http://www.augi.com/augiworld/current-issue

Happy learning.

Dan

Posted in General, Manufacturing | No Comments »

Keys to a Successful BIM Implementation: What Project Management Needs to Know about Your First Revit Project

Friday, February 17th, 2012

by Dave Webster, BIM/CAD Specialist for the AECOO Industry

Hi Again! Last we chatted we talked about kicking off your first Revit project and the aspects of a healthy launch. We discussed the personalities and responsibilities we are looking for on this initial project. The next and one of the biggest aspects needed for the success of this team and project is to be sure there is a good understanding of BIM and full buy-in from management and senior management staff. We have seen this so many times in firms where users understand the need and are embracing the tools but the project managers have a lack of interest in the tools; they are only interested in the time and effort and whether the project can meet schedule and budget constraints.

It is critical for project managers and staff managers to understand the fundamental differences between the CAD process and the BIM process! At a minimum, managers must have a full understanding of the time involved to model the project versus drafting the orthogonal views. The team will require more time during schematic design and design development phases of the project to achieve the model but if the model has been constructed intelligently, the team will make up the difference during the construction documentation phase of the project. I am sure you have seen the graph below at one time or another but I want to be sure this is something you keep in mind throughout the design and documentation process. It is obvious the time allocation needed in a BIM process shifts towards the early phases of the project. Managers need to understand this in order to properly schedule and allocate budget costs as well as align the client expectations. This is just one of many aspects of managing a BIM project that must be taught to project managers for better project success. I will most likely create an entire series of blogs for the “New BIM Project Manager Tips and Insights”. Stay Tuned!

So…what are your takeaways for today?

  • Support from management is a must!
  • Redefine your proposals with regards to tasks and cost allocation per project phases.
  • Educate and reset your client expectations regarding project schedule and deliverables.
  • Redesign your menu of services with costs that portray value based costs and not time and material costs!

CHECKLIST TO DATE:

  • Phased Goals: Established
  • Pilot Project: Identified
  • Training: Scheduled
  • Project Schedule: Comfortable
  • Design: Simple
  • Management Bought in
  • Team: Excited

Posted in Building / AEC | No Comments »

Demand More from your designs (and save!)

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Autodesk is offering a 20% savings on upgrades from current eligible software to Autodesk Design or Creation Suites, now through April 13, 2012. You can also take advantage of 0% financing for one year, with qualifying orders over $10,000.

Learn more about the Autodesk Demand More Promotion here.

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

Rendered Image Formats

Monday, February 6th, 2012

I see a lot of questions on output formats for renderings and which one to use. The output format has a great impact on the quality of the image, not only in the resolution of detail but the amount of color and also the size of the output file. Before we can talk about the quality of the format, we need to first understand how images are stored by the computer.

 

Color Depth

A standard computer image is stored in 24 bits of color consisting of 8 bits of red, green and blue for each pixel and these images are referred to as having an 8 bit color depth. In addition to 8 bits per channel, some formats can also store 8 bits of alpha channel which holds transparency data. Most rendering engines can separate the alpha channel but not all formats can save it and it is essential when working with a compositing work flow where images will be stacked one upon another. An 8 bit image with alpha is what is commonly called a 32 bit image, 24 bits of RGB plus 8 bits of alpha.

 

Higher format levels include 16 bits per channel and 32 bits per channel, with or without alpha channel. When 3ds Max renders, it actually renders to a greater bit depth of 16 bits of color per channel. This is far beyond the ability of current monitors to display but it is very useful when working in post operations such as compositing in Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Composite or Autodesk Smoke. The extra bits of color data allow you to adjust things like gamma and gain to improve appearance without re-rendering the image.

 

Formats

I’ll look at three separate groupings of formats, each with their own pros and cons.

The first groups are the loss based compression formats like .jpg and .gif. These formats are convenient because they are small in size and can be readily opened. The downside is that they lose image resolution during their compression which introduces noise and loss of detail. The use of these formats is really limited to preview images and they should never be used for final rendered output.

 

The second group are the main stay formats that are well established and include .tif, .tga and .png. The TIFF (.tif) format was developed for the printing industry and this format will allow you to set and embed the dpi(printed dots per inch) of the image. TIFF supports 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel and you can automatically save the alpha channel as a separate file but it suffers from very large file sizes. The Targa format can store in 16, 24 and 32 bit color, not color depth. The 16 bit color is a holdover from the old days when computer monitors could only display thousands of colors, not the millions in a 24 bit color, which is 8 bit color depth. The 32 bit color is 8 bit color depth with alpha. Targa is an older but still used format that has some compression so doesn’t suffer from the extremely large files size of the TIFF while still not losing any resolution as the compression is loss less. The Portable Network Graphics (.png) format can store in 8 bit or 16 bit color with or without the alpha channel embedded in the file. This is one of the most commonly used formats in visualization as it is easily opened, has a loss less compression to keep the file size down and can carry the alpha channel all in one file. While many programs can easily open and view .png files, you need to be careful with the color depth as only graphics specialized programs can properly open a 16 bit color depth image. Opening a 16 bit color depth image in Microsoft Outlook or PowerPoint will result in a washed out image while it will appear perfectly fine in Adobe Photoshop.

 

The last category of formats are the radiance image formats(.hdr and .exr). Radiance image formats contain 16 bits or more of data per color. Radiance formats are typically large and require specific software to open properly but they allow you to select the range of color brightness data to be viewed and are frequently used in design visualization to actually light a scene. Of the two formats, the OpenEXR is receiving quite a bit of attention as it supports the use of layers, allowing you to save all passes from the Render Elements settings to individual layers within the same file so that they can be used downstream in post processing. These formats are very useful if your pipeline already integrates high bit depth post processing but they are not the ones you’d want to use to send your output to your client.

 

Video Formats

The first question people ask is what format should I render my video to. The answer is DON’T. It is never a good idea to output renders to a video format and for a number of reasons. Video output is always compressed out of 3ds Max which means you are always losing image quality without any control. Video can only be output from a single machine which means your render farm is useless except for the one node rendering the video stream. And if you crash, well, you lose everything because the video file will not be complete and you won’t be able to open it up. So, always render everything to a still image format. Still images can be compressed into video through RAM Player or Video Post, both are in the Rendering top menu and there are instructions in the Help files. You can also use outside apps such as Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Smoke or a whole host of other commercial, shareware or free applications.

 

Stephen Gabriel

Senior Application Engineer

MasterGraphics Inc.

 

Posted in General | No Comments »

Inventor Online User Group Meeting: Feb 8, 2012

Monday, February 6th, 2012

By, Dan Banach

If you are a current MasterGraphics client you are invited to join our Inventor Online User Group meeting on Wednesday February 8th from 10:00 am – 11:00 am (central time). The topic for this meeting is Inventor Tips and Techniques. For this meeting to be successful, I’m asking that everyone participate by sharing a tip or two (you can present more if you want).

To register for this event and receive the URL for this meeting go to: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/984490345

Posted in Manufacturing | No Comments »

View an e-Training demo webinar! Feb. 7, 2012

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Our innovative e-Training solution provides a viable and important complement to the traditional MasterGraphics classroom training. In addition to the comprehensive and accurate content consistently offered through MasterGraphics, e-Training students can also enjoy the following benefits:

  • Flexible scheduling to ensure work schedules remain the priority
  • Interactive and engaging methodology for increased retention
  • All learning methods are accommodated: visual, auditory and hands-on
  • Competency-based progress to ensure understanding of topics
  • Cost-effective, as courses are not limited to class sizes or start dates
  • Enterprise and Individual Pricing Available!

Attend our upcoming webinar to learn more!

  • Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 12pm Central

Contact your MasterGraphics Account Manager at (800) 873.7238, who will then send you the webinar information via Outlook appointment.

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