SCRUG 4/17/15

I've been away from SCRUG meetings for a few months. I was asked to serve as an adult adviser in the local chapter of the Order of the Arrow.

However, my OA meetings did not fall on the April 2015 SCRUG meeting which featured Scott Davis showing off the Autodesk 2016 suite of offerings.

Scott started by showing off the new features of 3DS MAX. Most notably, it now has the ability to place cameras and may use Cloud Rendering.

Presently the Revit 2016 site is up and the new software is available for download. Most of the programming efforts were spent on performance enhancement, not new features. Consequently there was not much to show. Scott's quote was, "100 times faster". From the demo videos and the live demo, it does look noticeably faster. One killer new feature - when you print to PDF, you may have Revit build-in the hyperlinks. Click on a bubble, go to that detail! Nice.

On the collaboration side, Autodesk has A360. This idea has some real potential. The way most of the industry works is that small firms get together to design a project, it goes out to build and the construction firms take over. There is also a large segment of the industry that are conglomerates that have all the various disciplines in house which design and build projects - usually very large projects. Autodesk has catered well to the needs of the large conglomerates. Now they bring the capability to the small firms. The project central file resides in the cloud and as each person logs in the software handles the "IT" in the background (creating local files, server settings, ...). Any files that the team share can be viewed in a simple browser without any plugins (up to 200 file formats). Autodesk is taking a page from facebook and other social networking by keeping a timeline on the project with a news feed. You can see who did what, when. There is an option to go back to previous saves of the project without the messy version keeping that happens on every user's desktop.As the projects are cloud based, there are potential benefits. Autodesk may add other automated services. Services like rendering selected views between logins, running clash detection reports on the fly, calculating energy models in near real time, or anything else they may come up with in the future.

All in all, I left after the Revit bit, but I was glad I could go and stay up on what is happening at Autodesk. Thanks to the Sponsors and members of SCRUG.

See you next year.

CRG