20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
20+ Years of Design, Technology & More
To view a design file such as a DWG, RVT, or IPT and over 50 other design file formats all you need to do is drag and drop to Autodesk cloud based A360 Viewer with nothing to install. After viewing…
Some of my Autodesk colleagues sent me into a daytime nightmare feeling simply with a URL to a web page in my email. On the web page in Google Chrome of browser with WebGL you see a 3D shaded head…
This annual Blogger and Social meetup event will be held this year on Wednesday December 3rd in the evening at 8 PM. It is so very difficult to find a time that works and a venue during the action packed…
We at Autodesk have now placed a cool 500 LED cube in the Autodesk Gallery. This cube was developed by an intern and responds with lighting up pulsating LED lights and effects to hashtags on Twitter. Huge thanks to the…
The Autodesk Remote team has posted an update that now supports iPad touch events for Maya 2015 and Revit 2014 & 2015. This update also provides improvements for some network environments.
It was August 21st, 2003 when this blog went public with the sole purpose to help fellow Autodesk software users, have some fun, and add a personal voice to Autodesk. It was started to help people by sharing knowledge and…
Autodesk Screencast provides a whole new way to share knowledge in short video recordings and provide training with in-depth contextual meta data from Autodesk products like AutoCAD, Fusion 360, Inventor and Revit you see the commands, dialogs, and menu items…
While writing your own software or apps, or even coding your own web page is not for everyone it is for some a very enjoyable hobby or career. The Hour of Code for the Computer Science Education Week is designed to expose people to coding or programming in hopes some may find it as their calling.
In life we need to be exposed to a little bit of everything especially when we are young to help find our passion, talent, and where we fit in. Those who know me know that I am a huge supporter of getting more young people involved in design, engineering, math, and science. So here is an opportunity to expose someone to computer science which is mainly logic and math but a great career with many opportunities and fun.
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.
I have my own private time machine on my laptop I still run AutoCAD 2.18 from 1985/86 using a Virtual Machine running a 10Mb DOS partition. It is pretty amazing to try and use 1980 software today especially AutoCAD 2.18 without the UNDO command, Autosnaps, real time pan and zoom and so much more. You really realize how far CAD and design software has come. In AutoCAD 2.18 it was the first release with AutoLISP and only had 90 commands. I run AutoCAD 2.18 on a virtual machine of DOS 5 and a 10Mb disk size maximum otherwise AutoCAD 2.18 will not run. Apparently in 1985 the idea of a hard disk larger than 10Mb was crazy talk.
Here are a couple more screen shots and a quick video:
AutoCAD 2.18 Start MenuAutoCAD 2.18 and Space Shuttle Sample Drawing
If you want to try running Windows 1.0 or 1980 software for Apple check out these crazy web hosted virtual machines of software. Perhaps I should see about placing AutoCAD 2.18 in a web based virtual machine for people to try.