Showcase 2014
Digital version

Autodesk Showcase 2014 Digital version visual communication software is an indispensable companion to Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Alias software products, enabling designers, engineers, and marketing teams to evaluate designs in context, more rapidly explore alternatives, and tell the stories of their designs with realistic imagery and higher-quality digital 3D environments.

Storytelling

Tell the stories of your Inventor and Alias Digital Prototypes more effectively by creating immersive design presentations using enhanced storyboard tools, new keyframe animation capabilities, interactive triggers, and a 360-degree Orbit Shot. Plus, you can publish your Showcase scenes as movies or Adobe Flash files so that they can more easily be posted to the Web and reviewed remotely.

Interoperability and Performance

Save valuable time with improved ability to read Autodesk Inventor data and certain free third-party CAD translators. Native 64-bit support helps boost performance and stability of complex scenes and higher-resolution rendering.

Review and Evaluate Designs in Context

Take a more detailed look at your design and evaluate it in a real-world context using new and enhanced environments, cross-section tools for creating more informative views, and a Bloom camera effect that creates lighting on highly reflective objects.

Storyboard Timing and Movie Creation

Slide-timing allows you to better control the timing of environment switching, alternative changes, behavioral triggering, or camera position changes. With slide-timing, you can more precisely define the creative direction of your presentations. Also, you can share work with colleagues or customers who do not use Showcase by more quickly and easily exporting slides as movies or rendering Showcase scenes to interactive Flash files.

Cross-Section Tool

Explore designs in detail with the new cross-section tool, which enables you to intersect model geometry with a freely position-able plane or box, in real time, to help create more informative views for design review.

Patch Level Access

Access model data with greater flexibility with the new patch-level access tool. Isolate and apply different materials to one or a group of surface patches.

Bloom Effect

Showcase 2011 software allows you to create lighting effects by over-exposing concentrated lights on highly reflective objects.

Ambient Shadows Textures on Polygons

Create highly realistic imagery by simulating more accurate Ambient Shadows for polygonal objects. Showcase 2011 enables users to better calculate ambient shadows on polygonal objects that contain UVs, using textures instead of vertices.

Autodesk Inventor Software Interoperability

Save time when working with Inventor software data. Showcase 2011 software reads Inventor software’s welding maps, thread maps, and decals, enabling you to repurpose information that has already been defined in Inventor.

New Environments and Environment User Interface (UI)

Showcase 2011 features a larger selection of photorealistic environments—some of which are included with Inventor 2011—and a new UI that helps make managing environments easier.

• Environments are now grouped into categories, so they can be managed with the same flexibility available for managing materials.
• Environments can also be saved with the scene to more effectively package scenes for sharing.

New Tessellation Settings and Enhanced Level of Detail (LOD)

Showcase 2011 tessellation settings have been simplified, improved, and optimized for Inventor interoperability. The product also includes a new geometry LOD system, offering better performance optimization as objects positioned far away from the camera are automatically displayed at a lower level of detail.

New Orbit Shot

Incorporate cinematic camera motion into your presentations with the new Orbit Shot, which allows you to move the camera 360 degrees around a center of interest.

Keyframe Animation and Triggers

Add greater interactivity to presentations with new animation features: keyframe animation techniques and triggers. Triggers help make geometry clickable in Presentation Mode, triggering an alternative, a shot, a behavior, an environment, or a storyboard slide. In Presentation Mode, the cursor will change when it hovers over Trigger geometry, indicating that it is a clickable trigger, with an optional tooltip to show the trigger name.

• CATIA v4/v5 third-party file formats are included at no additional cost.
• Now you can import advanced Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya camera animations directly into Showcase shots, via the Autodesk FBX data exchange.
• By installing the included driver, users who license Autodesk Showcase Professional and an X-Rite MA98 device can scan paint samples and assign accurate materials immediately to geometry with the intuitive Showcase user interface.
• The new Plug-in Manager helps simplify loading and unloading of Showcase plug-ins.
• The Organizer now displays object names in a manner consistent with the originating software.
• Showcase API documentation in the Software Developer’s Kit has been updated and enhanced.
• The new Camera Control UI allows you to specify camera parameters and position, for more precise camera control.