Category Visualization

Autodesk Design Night – Making Movie Magic

If you will be in San Francisco on February 6th, 2014 and love design and movies like me, then you better grab a ticket to one of the hottest monthly events in the city, Autodesk Design Night. The tickets go really fast for the Design Night events.

The February Design Night theme is Making Movie Magic so you should expect all the cool magic that is used behind the scenes with guest speakers like Rich McBride, VFX supervisor on the movie Gravity.

Running Autodesk Applications in My Web Browser

The Office of the CTO is trending all over the web and social media this week due to one announcement! Tuesday we made a joint announcement with Amazon, Mozilla and Otoy about Autodesk desktop applications running through the browser.

In short, we announced technology that lets customers fire up a Web browser, connect to an Amazon Web Services G2 instance, and run Autodesk Inventor, Revit, Maya and 3ds Max off the instance through the browser. Autodesk announced this under the brand umbrella of Autodesk Remote. Autodesk Remote is the name of the our remote computing initiative and it’s also the name of the PC-to-PC/iPad client that we launched earlier this year. The Amazon instance doesn’t have a brand name. Both are powered by OTOY’s ORBX encoder, with the distinction being that Autodesk Remote is peer-to-peer via the Autodesk Remote client; the Amazon instances are hosted and connect to any computer (PC, Mac or Linux) via the browser. ORBX.js is the javascript decoder. 30-day trials of Inventor, Revit, Max and Maya are pre-installed on the Amazon Instances.Your files can be stored on Autodesk 360, Dropbox, Google Drive, wherever you want.

I get to take it for a test drive!
Today and late into tonight I was delighted to be able to get my hands on this technology preview and run the four Autodesk applications over the web with nothing but HTML5 in a web browser.

Look ma, nothing to download, install, or plugins required!
That's' right there was no catch and nothing to download or install as stated I just fire up my web browser like Firefox and Chrome with HTML5 compatibility and ran full versions of Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Inventor, Maya, and Revit.

So how is this different from other remote access applications out there?
This technology allows hardware GPU acceleration and also since these Windows 2008 server machine instances are on the Amazon Web Servers along with modified Kepler Grid GPUs from Nvidia, I have one hell of a powerhouse machine that I can access anytime from almost any device. I can use Autodesk 3ds Max or Inventor from a MacBook Air. This my friends is what many with graphics hungry applications have been searching for, a scalable cloud GPU. The cloud based CPU cores have been around awhile now but those involved with graphics are more interested in GPUs and being able to use them in a cloud infrastructure where you can scale fast in a burst as needed unlike your local machine. I can just grab a new machine or device and fire up a HTML5 browser like Firefox and get to my desktop and run powerful applications without downloading or installing anything but a browser and also not sacrificing performance due to the local device hardware. I also wonder aloud if this will reduce the need for native platform applications if you can access them from most devices. For example I can run Revit on a Mac now without sacrificing performance.

I have noticed just testing today that the performance is about 30fps but the absolutely amazing part is the remote instance itself and how responsive it is in graphical operations like rendering and working with huge files.The remote machine instance actually renders frames in a test animation I ran about 4 times faster than my beefy local machine can.

Project Pinocchio 3D Character Controlled Real-time in Maya

As I mentioned on my Twitter account (@ShaanHurley) Friday, Autodesk’s own digital mad scientist or researcher in the Office of the CTO Brian Pene created a 3D rigged character using the new Project Pinocchio technology preview from Autodesk Labs and stepped it up a few levels. He took the rigged character he created and using a Xbox 360 Kinect & FaceShift was able to control the character in Autodesk Maya live in real-time. What a great way to read a bedtime stories to your young kids and give them deep dark nightmares.

Project Geppetto Makes it BIG after Graduating from Autodesk Labs

More concrete proof that the Autodesk Labs project feedback you provide feedback on can propel them into a real product, feature, or technology. Autodesk Labs Project Geppetto from last year that was a really huge hit and great to demo is making it into the core 3ds Max product as it is shown in a 3ds Max 2014 sneak peek video. It has evolved even more than the Autodesk Labs project and now named 3ds Max Populate feature. You can create autonomous random characters to populate your 3ds Max animation scene providing much more realism by having natural acting crowds following paths and interacting.

Oscar Nominated Disney Animation “Paperman” Released on YouTube

I first saw this animated short movie being shown before a feature movie Wreck-it Ralph in November at the cinema but now Disney is releasing the Oscar nominated "Paperman" on YouTube for everyone to enjoy. It is very creative animated short which blended traditional animation and some complex computer animation methods resulting in an amazing retro style.