Category Design

San Francisco Bay Bridge New Span Completed – Experience the HD Time Lapse

AutodeskSan Francisco Bay Bridge New Span Completed – Experience the Time Lapse has offices all around the world but the crown jewel is the One Market in San Francisco with a beautiful view of the Ferry Terminal, embarcadero as well as the Bay Bridge. For 5 years and at a cost of around 6.5 billion US dollars the new span has just been completed to replace the aged old span that was prone to potential failures during earthquakes something the Bay Area is known to experience.

Experience the over 42,000 hours of construction of the 2.2 mile span in under four minutes. http://youtu.be/GDUIYZKlknk

In many cases architecture, design, engineering, and construction are art! Check out more examples including a behind the scenes exhibit on the Bay Bridge at Autodesk Gallery at One Market (http://usa.autodesk.com/gallery/) that is open to the public every Wednesday and Friday.

Last Beam Placed on 2nd Largest Building in the World

Workers just placed the last beam on the second tallest building on Earth the Shanghai Tower. The Shanghai Tower is over 121 stories and will 2,073 feet tall when complete. It is designed to be a self-contained city with open air parks and gardens designed by the architecture firm Gensler.

Autodesk FormIt is Coming to the Android Tablet

When we originally announced Autodesk FormIt for the iPad last December, the Android question came up. I responded telling people that this product was designed for a tablet so logically you would start on the largest tablet market device then move out from their based on customer feedback. The Android tablet request was one of the top (if not the top) request, and the team will satisfy that Android Tablet request as I mentioned they would.

“Cloud Assisted Desktop” – Autodesk’s Fusion 360 Launched

Autodesk Fusion 360 went live today as an official Autodesk product after a great deal of evolution based on customer feedback and research. Autodesk Fusion 360 started in Autodesk Labs as a Technology Preview of a desktop product, then as a Cloud Assisted Desktop1 application for Mac and Windows on the Autodesk Feedback Community where betas are run. Now the Beta product sticker has been removed and it is ready for primetime production use by designers and engineers free for the first 90 days and around the small price of $25 a month. The powerful product combines industrial design sculpting of T-Splines to the power of a parametric 3D modeling tool along with cloud based collaboration, versioning, file translation and more. It is Cloud Assisted Desktop1 and not only powerful, but fun to use and design in as I have been using it personally for quite sometime now.

Autodesk FormIt 4.0 & Dynamo Announced at AIA 2013

Autodesk’s free conceptual tool for the ipad, Autodesk FormIt was just updated as version 4. FormIt is the 1st Architectural Form Modeler for the iPad. In addition to new features, there is a web based version of FormIt coming so that you will be able to use it from many more platforms. Before the Android tablet users fire up my comments section asking where is the Android version, the team is looking towards an Android tablet version sometime in the future.

The Innovation of Innovation

Autodesk’s Bill O’Connor created this nice short video on Innovation. This is very fitting since I have given two keynotes on innovation recently from an Autodesk perspective from taking CAD from the mainframe to the PC, BIM, digital prototyping, and cloud computing technologies.

The path to innovation is paved with seven questions. Bill O'Connor, Founder of the Innovation Genome Project, shows us how these questions have been used in innovations throughout history—from fire to flight, writing to recycling, and everything in between.

Autodesk Homestyler Goes Mobile

Autodesk Homestyler has been around since coming out of Autodesk Labs a couple years ago (August 2010) as Project Dragonfly. For those not aware of Autodesk Homestyler, it is a free web based 3D interior space design application to visualize the space before you jump into the project. You can pre-plan your dorm layout to the future layout of your home or future dream home or space. It is also perfect for couples and roommates to plan furniture changes so all parties are happy and can visualize the redesigned space. Trust me it is so much easier to move digital furniture up and down floors and around the room of a house on Homestyler than in real life multiple times to find just the right place. So many uses, and so darn easy to use that pretty much everyone in the house except your pet goldfish can use it. You can even export your design as a 3D Revit model.

Going to the small screen!

Autodesk Homestyler is available as a mobile app. The mobile app version allows some really unique features and workflow such as using the camera of your device to capture the room and it then approximates dimensions and allows you to adjust and fine tune. You can then place new furniture, electronics, décor, and more in your captured room to visualize a redesign of the room.

Autodesk FormIt 3.0 Released

Autodesk just released the 3rd version of the iPad App Autodesk FormIt after launching it at Autodesk University just a couple months ago at Autodesk University 2012. The team has been rapidly adding features and addressing requests based on users feedback. FormIt is the easy to use 3D conceptual modeler for the Apple iPad Tablet. You can create shapes and forms, and then later refine them in the auto-magically created Revit .RVT file or in another application using the SAT file.

While FormIt is great for architectural design, there really are no limits and you can just as easily model a robot or any other 3D concept model. It is just plain fun, oh and it is also FREE.