Novedge Pulse™ of Shaan Hurley

Hey students and faculty, are you aware Autodesk pretty much gives all Autodesk products for free to you? Autodesk is is not only committed to our amazing current professional customers, but we are equally committed to helping build the future architects, engineers, and 3D fx and visualization professionals. All you need to have is a valid educational email, register at the link to the Autodesk Student Community, and you can download most any Autodesk product for free right now. There are also extra benefits such as some increased Autodesk 360 storage and some Autodesk product curriculum to assist you in learning the products. So students, go get your free Autodesk software at the Student Community now and start using the best professional design and 3D software out there for 3 years. This will help you be the best skilled when you graduate and begin looking for that job. You will be able to demonstrate your mastering of the software as a distinct advantage to that dream employer [more...]

This has to be one of the most common of all AutoCAD questions and issues encountered by AutoCAD users. They become puzzled when this system variable is set to 0 by accident, errant Lisp or script or perhaps evil coworkers messing with them. The most common clue is their Delete key and double click and Layer control are not working [more...]

This is a guest post by Michelle Rasmussen of ASCENT, who also happens to in Utah just a few minutes South of me. ASCENT is responsible for the official Autodesk Official Training Guides for Autodesk products. I am extremely excited to bring to you the first ever Autodesk Official Training Guide (AOTG) addressing an Autodesk Design Suite. This book introduces a seamless workflow for designing roads and highways, as described in the flow chart below. It uses multiple products found in Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suite Ultimate 2014 to design a new transportation corridor for a growing city [more...]

The Autodesk product teams receive several emails from the Autodesk Product Feedback Form. The Product Feedback form is the one that I had mentioned in the a recent post: Send Your Feedback or BBQ Recipe to an Autodesk Product Team. Your feedback goes to the products teams and they read them. In many cases team members respond if there is enough detail and time permitting as they can’t respond to every feedback submission and are not product support but do try to help. The AutoCAD QA Team wanted to address a couple of the common feedback form reported issues they have received in a few blog posts. This post on Stacked and Baseline Dimensions is by AutoCAD Test Development extraordinaire Chris Miller. How do I create Stacked Dimensions? [more...]

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 [more...]

Autodesk announced yesterday at Maker Faire which is essentially the center of the universe event for DIY & Makers our intent to acquire Tinkercad. Tinkercad is an easy-to-use browser-based 3D design tool and will become part of the popular Autodesk 123D family of apps and supports Autodesk’s vision to help anybody imagine, design and create anything.. The addition of Tinkercad to Autodesk will help broaden the The acquisition will also revive the Tinkercad service and community, despite a previously announced shutdown by its founders and creators. Tinkercad has been one of the favorite tools of many Makers just wanting a simple web based 3D design tool to create 3D models for 3D printing. With Autodesk as a new parent and placed into 123D Family it is not only not going away as was the case before Autodesk, but it will be improved and given much love and attention. Tinkercad Blog Post: Tinkercad has found a new home at Autodesk Go give Tinkercad a try, its super simple and a fun way to create 3D geometry for 3D printing or just for fun. http://www.tinkercad.com [more...]

Jessica Thrasher ^JES,Philip Schmelzer ^PHL and Amanda Kinley ^AK, and me (Shaan Hurley) ^PIA If there was ever a reason to jump on Twitter, @AutodeskHelp is one of them. Autodesk has a team that assists people in social media. They do not avoid a challenge and just take the easy ones but also actively engage those with highly charged tweets as those usually only take some personal assistance and attention to solve their problems, or just point them in the right direction. I was in San Francisco this Monday and Tuesday and finally met in person with the @AutodeskHelp team’s US members. This team is doing amazing things that more companies should be doing and that is use the power of social media to engage and assist customers. Simply put they are in the right place, doing the right thing [more...]

Last week Autodesk hosted some of the Autodesk Expert Elite group members in our sunny San Francisco office. This group of customers are top nominated participants (Expert Elite Nomination Form) in their product assistance to their peers in the Autodesk discussion forums. My colleague Scott Sheppard presented to the group on Autodesk Labs and Autodesk Beta and promised to follow up on the topics in blog posts. Scott is posting a blog post on Autodesk Labs, and I am posting on Autodesk Beta. Beta has long been a passion and responsibility of mine, and is once again a responsibility of mine along with my other Office of the CTO role responsibilities. Bug SplatAutodesk Beta or the Autodesk Feedback Community is pre-release testing community for most every Autodesk product from desktop to mobile and cloud applications. Autodesk Feedback Community is where people can get involved in testing the pre-release products and provide feedback and help us identify the defects before final release. The Autodesk Feedback Community is also home to some of the future research projects where the product teams can speak confidentially under a non-disclosure with a group of users on possible concepts and ideas to solve user needs and work flows. The members of the community are even used by some teams to recruit for customer visits and in person gunslingers of early versions of software [more...]

The weather where I live in Utah is finally very warm, and the snow meting enough that I could make the first big hike/climb of the year just yesterday. I joined a meetup.com group “Ultimate Thrillseekers” to summit Mount Olympus which is one of the prominent peaks you see in the backdrop of Salt Lake City. It is not Mount Everest and actually 20,000 feet lower in elevation, but at just over 9000 feet it is no small hill either to break in the legs this year [more...]

I will be presenting at the following fine Autodesk partner events in June. I am pretty much heads down working on the presentation along with normal work. I will be covering Autodesk technology and innovation from the 15-20,000 foot level. I will be talking about and showing things you may have not seen publicly as well a personal invitation and challenge to help shape the future products and technologies [more...]

We're looking for the best, the brightest, and the most innovative and creative faculty, students, and researchers that you know, and we need your assistance in encouraging them to apply to the IDEA Studio - Autodesk's unique scholar-in-residence program. The IDEA Studio is now accepting proposals for residencies that will take place in November 2013 through January 2014, and proposals are due May 15 [more...]

I proudly present to you my spur gear building designed in AutoCAD Architectural Desktop (ADT) r1 circa 1998 and codenamed Portsmouth. I tried to convince the Autodesk AEC team then located in Henniker New Hampshire I was a mechanical designer and had little architectural design skills. It was the warped humor of mine, but as I recall the architecture professionals were not thinking it was as funny as did I [more...]

It is that time of the year and 216 days from today Autodesk University 2013 will be starting. The countdown has begun to the best and biggest Autodesk related event. If you want to be considered as a speaker, and for your hard work and expertise get much of your costs to attend Autodesk University covered then now is the time to submit your class proposals. Speakers and Lab assistants can receive honorarium ($$$) and an AU pass and in addition to getting to shine in the spotlight and showcase your expertise in front of your peers [more...]

Autodesk has two birthdays one for the company founding and the other for when it was legally incorporated. These are in addition to the big product anniversary dates like AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Inventor etc. Autodesk was founded on January 30th, 1982. Today April 26, 2013 marks the 31st birthday of Autodesk becoming a legal U.S. corporation [more...]

AutoCAD F3 has stood for Fit, Finish, and Fix or Fit & Finish which would also include customer and AUGI Wish List requests. It is these sometimes seemingly minor changes in a new release that in many cases mean the most to some users workflow, yet are the least highlighted in advertising or marketing as they are just not all that sexy. Since we setup a team and list back in AutoCAD 2000i I have considered these like little gold nuggets. I reached out to Autodesk’s Jon Page of AutoCAD User Experience “UX” (Product Design) for some of the F3 items that were included in the newly released AutoCAD 2014 [more...]

Problems Logging into Autodesk Feedback Beta Communit [more...]

A month ago I wrote about the wildly unique & creative 3D printed speakers and their built in LED lighting “The Coolest 3D Printed Speakers in the World”. Now a new video going behind the scenes on the inspiration, goals, design and creation of the 3D printed speaker enclosures has just been published on YouTube [more...]

Have you ever wanted to send some feedback to an Autodesk product team? Perhaps how you think something could and should be improved, something is broken, or you want to say how awesome something in the product is and in return, you want to share your grandmother’s secret barbeque chicken recipe [more...]

The file format of AutoCAD is DWG. Over the years I have heard it pronounced so many ways and I wanted to hear from you, and why. Do you say the letters D W G? (That’s what I do.) Do you say DraWinG Or do you say Dwig and make me cringe when you do [more...]

The Autodesk Feedback Community will be upgraded on Monday April 15th at 1PM PDT. Expected downtime will be an hour or two. The Autodesk Feedback Community is where most Autodesk pre-release alpha, beta, and some future research projects are managed with a community of over 50,000 people worldwide [more...]

Here is a fun rare flashback to 1992 and the rare AutoCAD R11 for Macintosh. Having the actual R11 and R12 for Macintosh is like having your own private unicorn herd in a CAD geek way [more...]

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 [more...]

Join the next Autodesk Design Night event "Making It!". May 2, 2013 in the evening located at the amazing Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco. Past Design Nights have been huge hits, and the tickets sold out [more...]

Matt Murphy emailed to let me know that CADLearning has launched a FREE 144 page streaming eBook on the new AutoCAD 2014. The new eBook titled “AutoCAD 2014 New Features & Enhancements Revealed” is an interactive eBook with video, text, and images throughout the 33 included lessons. More Autodesk product titles are in the works [more...]

The AutoCAD 2014 ObjectARX SDK is now available for download from the "Autodesk Developer Network “ADN” site. Many of the 2014 products in multiple languages are also available for download by ADN members [more...]

Math and design go hand in hand like cream in a Twinkie. Autodesk is conducting research about how CAD designers and engineers use mathematical software and tools in their design workflows. We are especially interested in hearing from people who use tools like Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, Excel or QuickCalc. Perhaps you calculate electrical capacity, material weight, center of gravity, required tube count and pitch in a heat exchanger tubesheet, or heat transfer loads, and we want to know what tools you are you currently using. We are also interested in hearing about other types mathematics software tools support the design process [more...]

Autodesk teammates Arthur Harsuvanakit and Evan Atherton are an amazing dynamic duo (3Duo) researching digital design, fabrication, and 3D printing technologies. They have developed some 3D printed speaker enclosures after Maurice Conti said “Hey, this would make a cool speaker” and then determined the project goals. The first speaker appeared on the cable channel Current TV with Autodesk CEO Carl Bass as well as featured in my Autodesk University 2012 session [more...]

On this April Fools day I am shooting straight and no silly stuff for once in 10 years of blogging. No offering a 3D printable DVD of Autodesk products like last year or a hacked blog. This year, I almost went with a post explaining I was finally changing my name “Shaan” to a more standard spelling so people would stop calling me "shan” pronouncing it like “man” instead of Shaan pronounced like “shawn”, but I didn't. In addition Scott posted the great internal Autodesk April Fools fun and that’s a hard one to compete with. Organizational Announcement: Welcome, Everybody, to CEO Staff Last week Autodesk announced several new Autodesk 2014 products and most want to know how to get them so here is the latest [more...]

You can now download a completely functional 30 day trial version of the newly released AutoCAD 2014. Take the 28th AutoCAD release for a test drive no strings attached [more...]

The AutoCAD 2014 and the AutoCAD LT 2014 Preview Guides in PDF format are a nice highlight of the new releases written by Autodesk’s very own Heidi Hewett. The Preview Guide is like an exceptionally nice cliff notes guide for the new product releases under 30 pages, but not a 700+ page complete how to use the product [more...]

This list will be updated as I find and am sent more Autodesk 2014 product news posts from the blogosphere. Please feel free to Email Me or post your link in the comments and I will add them to the list [more...]

So you have just heard about AutoCAD 2014 and looking to purchase or upgrade, one of your first questions are is “does my current system meet the system requirements?” Below are the system requirements for AutoCAD 2014 but like anything it all depends on what type of data you work with. If you do small 2D work then you have less system horsepower. But if you work with large files and especially 3D then the system requirements really should be considered the minimum to get good performance and stability [more...]

You can watch the recording event that was live from the Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco just an hour ago. Autodesk’s Amar Hanspal Senior Vice President, Information Modeling & Platform Products Group announced and showed some of the new Autodesk 2014 product & suites. http://youtu.be/w-kxV8C4xr [more...]

Yes its true! Drawing Tabs are now part of the core AutoCAD 2014 product and now named File Tabs. History: Back on Halloween (31 October 2006) I posted on this blog a Bonus Tool named Drawing Tabs also MDITabs. The Bonus Tool was very very popular and when some API versions changed in AutoCAD I would have to make calls encouraging someone to please assign a developer to update it. We re-released it several times for new versions until we added it to the Autodesk App Exchange last year for AutoCAD 2013. But now it is built right into AutoCAD 2014 as File Tabs. Thank you AutoCAD Team for incorporating this [more...]