If you have visited Autodesk's website recently, there is a flash video showing a video wall with users manipulating the images on the wall on the home page.

 

Frankly, I thought it was just "smoke and mirrors",  but it turns out to be an actual product which works the way it seems.  A video screen the size of a wall that allows users to interface with the images by touch.  At a $100,000 per unit, I don't expect most people will have one in their homes, but I expect to see them to start popping up in shopping malls, upscale stores, and museums.

 

 

IDX has launched a FREE beta version of software that plugs into AutoCAD to create parametric models. 

 

Check it out here

 

A few weeks back I posted a question posed by a user...how to get text to follow a polyline.  A second user responded that you should be able to do this in Adobe Illustrator and then bring it into AutoCAD.  That sounded plausible to me, but I am not an Adobe Illustrator user.  However, my colleague, Lillian Crist, who teaches CAD as well as Illustrator as well as other cool software at SFSU and SF College is.  So, I asked Lillian what she thought.

 

The answer was yes, you can create the text following the polyline in Illustrator and bring it into AutoCAD, the text when exported to AutoCAD becomes a block containing a nested block containing a hatch pattern. However, in its native Illustrator format, the text remains editable.  So, that didn't sound like a good workaround to me.

 

Lillian also sent me a lisp routine written by George Omura, another Autodesk guru, that supposedly allowed users to create meandering text.  That sounded promising.  However, when I tested the routine, the results were, well, disappointing.

 

 

 

With all the excitement about Autodesk's new 2009 line-up of software, some users may miss the announcements of which software packages are getting killed off.

 

On the top of the list - Autodesk's 3D Viz.  Viz was a low-end animation and rendering software for users who couldnt afford 3DMax or Maya.  The idea is that AutoCAD has improved it's built-in rendering and animation features enough that users don't need Viz.

I liked Viz, wrote books for Viz, and I will miss it.  It was used primarily by students as an entry-level software to introduce kids into the world of animation.  I have no idea what software can be used instead.

 

Architectural Studio has been dead a while, but apparently Autodesk only recently acknowledged in public that the software will not be continued.  This software was a loser from the start, as far as I was concerned.  Serious architects weren't going to be bothered with a flashy toy when they could do real work in ADT or Revit and developers weren't going to comprise enough of a customer base.

 

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