in this issue
	Upcoming SFAUG Meeting Changing the image in your tool palette Making A Profound Change: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Next Gig Future for Accurender in Revit Bright 3D CONFIG - NEW SYSTEM 2004 VARIABLE

Changing the image in your tool palette

You can change the image in your tool palette fairly easily. Simply select the tool, right click and select Properties. Place your mouse in the image area of the Properties dialog. Right click and select Specify Image This will bring up a dialog allowing you to select the image. You can create an image in your Style Manager. Simply right click in the image window and select Save Image. You can save an image as png, jpg, bmp, or tif. The tool palette can use any image file type.

Making A Profound Change: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Next Gig

Thom Franklin, professional coach and change agent, discusses six key stages of profound change, and how to navigate through them to your next opportunity. Please don't attend if you are looking for a boring lecture. You'll get to try out some well proven tools and exercises to locate the quickest and least painful path to your next income opportunity. Thom is also currently leading a free online course on this topic called The Life Change Project. It's located at No charge (RSVP required for Togos' sandwich - $5) Location: Santa Clara University - Bannan Engineering (bld404) rm 107 (NOT to be confused with Bannan Law next building over!) 500 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA, 95053 Parking is permitted without permit in the parking garage after ~7pm. Please park in the upper levels of the garage because the lower level requires faculty permits. If you arrive earlier, a visitor permit can be obtained from the guardhouse or the Safety Office in the base of the parking garage (next to the juice store). Tell them you are there for a meeting. Presented by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Event Date Tuesday July 29, 2003 Event Time 6:30PM to 8:30PM For information on this and other ASME events »

Future for Accurender in Revit Bright

I recently was speaking with Randall Stevens, President of ArchVision, about ADT 2004's ability to read and use RPC (photo realistic content). This is very cool as the content is very high quality and because it is 3D it looks great from any view. In the course of the conversation, Randall mentioned that RPC can be used in ADT and Revit, so if you are currently an ADT user, but plan to move over to Revit - any RPC you buy will still work. I told Randall that I really liked how the trees in Revit can change depending on the season you set and asked if it would work the same way in ADT. Randall thought this might be because of the Accurender engine included in Revit. ADT uses a Viz engine. This brought up the question whether Autodesk, which had acquired Revit, would change Revit to use the Viz engine (since Autodesk owns and develops that engine in-house) instead of the Accurender engine (which is owned by Robert McNeel & Associates). Revit users are very enamored by the Accurender engine as it is much more photo-realistic than Viz. So, the next question in my mind was the future of Accurender in Revit. "Although Autodesk retains it right to modify its products at any time, we have no current plans to change our use of Accurender in Autodesk Revit, " reports Rick Rundell, Autodesk's Revit Product Manager. No doubt, Revit users will be thrilled. Andy le Bihan, AccuRender Project Manager, tells me that Accurender licenses their engine at a very reasonable cost and provides excellent support to developers. He is also confident that the partnership with Autodesk will continue and grow. To download the plug-in and free content... »

3D CONFIG - NEW SYSTEM 2004 VARIABLE

If you enter 3dconfig at the Command prompt, the following prompt is displayed on the command line: Enter option: [Adaptive degradation/Dynamic tessellation/Render options/Geometry/acceLeration/eXit] : Enter the configuration you want to change or press ENTER to change adaptive degradation settings. You will stay in the 3DCONFIG command until you enter eXit or press ESC. Adaptive Degradation Specifies the display options to which the view can degrade to maintain the speed of the view manipulation. For example, if a large drawing is currently Gouraud shaded, you can select Wireframe to allow the drawing to degrade to a wireframe representation of the view. You can turn on one or more than one of the available options. If more than one option is turned on, the display changes to the most detailed option first and then degrades until it reaches the least detailed option. Configure: Adaptive Degradation Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want adaptive degradation turned on or off If Adaptive Degradation is turned on, you can specify the type. If no type is specified, then no degradation will occur. Current display options: Wireframe Bounding Box Enter option [Flat shaded/Wireframe/Bounding box/Maintain speed fps/eXit] : Specify the type of adaptive degradation you want to use Configure: Flat shaded Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want flat-shaded display turned on or off Configure: Wireframe Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want wireframe display turned on or off Configure: Bounding box Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want bounding box display turned on or off Configure: Maintain speed fps Enter speed<5>: Enter a value between 1 and 60 to adjust the frame rate Flat Shaded Specifies that the display can change to flat shaded. Wireframe Specifies that the display can change to wireframe. This uses less of the system resources and allows the drawing to move at a faster speed. Bounding Box Specifies that the display can change to a bounding box. A box is displayed in place of each object in your view. This choice requires the least amount of system resources. Maintain Speed FPS Specifies the display speed in frames per second. The drawing degrades to maintain the specified speed. Dynamic Tesselation Sets the options that determine the smoothness of the objects in a drawing. AutoCAD draws objects using many short lines (or triangles when drawing spheres). These lines are called tessellation lines. Objects in your drawing appear smoother when you use more tessellation lines. Configure: Dynamic tessellation Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want dynamic tessellation turned on or off If Dynamic Tessellation is turned on, you can specify the number of surface tessellations, curve tessellations, or tessellations to cache. Configure: Dynamic tessellation Enter option [Surface tessellation/Curve tessellation/Tessellations to cache/eXit] : Specify the type of dynamic tessellation you want to use Configure: Surface tessellation Enter tolerance<88>: Enter a value between 0 and 100 Configure: Curve tessellation Enter tolerance<88>: Enter a value between 0 and 100 Configure: Tessellations to cache Enter number of tessellations to cache<3>: Enter a value between 1 and 10 Surface Tessellation Determines the amount of detail for surfaces in your drawing. The lower numbers provide less detail; the higher numbers provide more detail but use more tessellation lines and more memory. Curve Tessellation Determines the amount of detail for curves in your drawing. The lower numbers provide less detail; the higher numbers provide more detail but use more tessellation lines and more memory. Number of Tessellations to Cache Configures your system according to memory and performance requirements. A cache is a special memory subsystem that stores frequently accessed information. The 3D cache always stores at least one tessellation. When the number of tessellations to cache is set to 1, the tessellation for all viewports is the same and may cause some objects in the drawing to be regenerated as you zoom in and out. Setting the number of tessellations to cache to 2 or more is useful when you have more than one viewport with different views. Increasing the number requires more memory. Render Options Makes settings available for enhancing the display of lights, materials, textures, and transparency in 3D views. This includes objects in the 3D Orbit view and objects shaded using the SHADEMODE command. Configure: Render options Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want to turn on render options Configure: Render options Enter option [Lights/Materials/eXit] : Specify whether you want to configure lights or materials Configure: Lights Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want lights turned on or off Configure: Materials Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want materials turned on or off If Render Options is turned on, you can specify if you want lights and materials turned on or off. Lights In 3D views, illuminates objects and attached materials by lights that were defined with the LIGHT command. If this option is not selected, or if the LIGHT command has not been used for the drawing, then the default lighting for 3D views is used. Enable Materials In 3D views, displays materials for objects that have materials that were attached using the RMAT command. If the object has no attached material, the default global material is used. If this option is not selected, or if the RMAT command has not been used in the drawing, then no materials are displayed. Configure: Textures Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want textures turned on or off Configure: Transparency Enter mode [Low/Medium/High] : Select a transparency level If Materials is turned on, you can also configure textures and transparency. Enable Textures In 3D views, shows textures attached to objects using the RMAT and SETUV commands. Materials must also be turned on for textures to be visible. Transparency Adjusts the transparency quality to improve image quality, but at the expense of redraw time. At the low- quality setting, a screen-door effect achieves transparency without sacrificing speed. At the medium- quality setting, blending improves image quality. At the high-quality setting, blending and extra processing produce an image free of visual artifacts, but at the cost of drawing speed. Materials must also be turned on for transparency to be visible. Geometry Determines how to display isolines in 3D and whether to display back faces in 3D. Configure: Geometry Enter option [Isolines on top/Discard backfaces] : Specify an option to configure Configure: Isolines on top Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want isolines on top Configure: Discard backfaces Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want back faces to be discarded Isolines on Top Displays isolines for front and back faces in all shade modes except Hidden. Isolines for the back faces are displayed on top of the shading for the objects in 3D. Turning this option off hides the isolines for the back faces. Discard Back Faces Discards back faces when drawing objects. You cannot see the effect of discarding back faces on some objects, such as spheres, because you cannot see the back face even when it is present. The effect of discarding back faces is visible on objects such as those that don't have a top. Discarding back faces enhances performance. Acceleration Specifies whether you want to use software or hardware acceleration in 3D. Configure: Acceleration Enter option [Hardware/Software/eXit] : Specify whether you want to configure hardware or software Configure: Hardware Enter option [Driver name/Geometry acceleration/Antialias lines/eXit] : Specify an option to configure Available drivers: wopengl8.hdi Enter driver name : Enter a driver name Configure: Geometry acceleration Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want geometry acceleration turned on or off Configure: Antialias lines Enter mode [ON/OFF] : Specify whether you want anti-alias lines turned on or off If you select Hardware, you can also specify whether geometry acceleration and anti-alias lines are turned on or off. Hardware Specifies hardware acceleration. Select to use the hardware graphics card to perform most of the drawing tasks in 3D. This speeds up the drawing time. When you select Hardware, the default driver is set to the wopengl8.hdi driver that is included with AutoCAD. If you select the Driver Name option, you can select a driver from a list of available hardware-accelerated drivers found in the AutoCAD drv directory. If you want to use a hardware driver from another vendor, it must be supported by the Heidi Graphics System. Software Specifies software acceleration. Select to use the software graphics system to perform all of the drawing tasks in 3D. Geometry Acceleration Specifies whether to use geometry acceleration. Geometry acceleration must be supported by your graphics card. See your vendor documentation for information on your graphics card. Using geometry acceleration makes more efficient use of the graphics card. With this option turned on, you are drawing in single precision. Use this option only if you know that your drawing is within the single- precision limit. Anti-alias Lines Specifies using anti-aliasing lines. 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