It’s a wrap! M&E DevDays for the M&E ADN team are now officially over. We spent Monday of last week in Las Vegas presenting an entire day of M&E ADN developer activities. The event went very well and was then followed by the annual Autodesk University conference. Because the DevDay event includes mostly upcoming features and roadmap for the products, I cannot talk about much of it here publically. But I wanted to mention some things that happened during the DevDay events and at AU.
The APAC DevDay events occurred in Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo. My colleagues Zhong Wu and Akira Kudo, along with myself presented the coming API changes for 3ds Max and Maya. In all three cities, we had had a good turn-out. We also had DevLab events in Beijing and Shanghai. Naiqi Weng, just returning to our team from leave, was also present to help us.
I was in Shanghai in 2007 and they were building like crazy. Below is a current picture of the most recent skyscraper going up from this year’s visit. When I was there in 2007, the World Financial Center (far right with opening on top), was under construction. Now only six years later, a third one is going up next door! There is a model of this new building, the Shanghai Tower, in the Autodesk Shanghai office. 3ds Max, and also Autodesk Revit are being used along with other tools. See here for more Autodesk Shanghai Tower info.
Only two weeks after the M&E ADN DevDay APAC tour, we headed to Las Vegas.
During Las Vegas DevDay we had the pleasure to welcome the new 3ds Max product manager, Eddie Perlberg. He has a new blog here: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max/welcome-to-the-max-makers-blog. Eddy gave a nice presentation about 3ds Max future, so I encourage you to stay tuned with his blog.
Traditionally Autodesk University is CAD oriented (ie. AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, etc.) But this year they spent a good amount of time talking about the Autodesk Cloud and Mobile initiatives that are now maturing in the Autodesk portfolio. We also had some discussion at the DevDay event about where the M&E division is heading for the cloud-side initiatives. Two M&E related projects that you can access today are on the Autodesk labs:
- Project Khan is an experimental 3D asset optimization service running on the Autodesk 360 cloud that uses the popular game pipeline technology, Simplygon, from Donya Labs. Note that this currently works with a Maya plugin. Even if you are mainly working with 3ds Max, it might be worth checking out because it is also being planned for 3ds Max. Find Project Khan on Autodesk labs here: http://bit.ly/18Y0NCu. Donya labs/Simplygon is here:http://bit.ly/1c6WnPb
- Project Pinocchio is also on labs. This has been there for a few months already, but recently received an update. This one will work with 3ds Max. See here: http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/pinocchio
During the AU keynote Carl Bass mentioned the “Bot & Dolly” company who used Maya and specialized industrial robots to create a new way of filming. They integrated with Maya to allow precise animation and this technique was used to make the “Gravity” film. Pretty neat. I do not know all the details, but they indicate on their website that they have integration with Maya, and clearly used the API to make it work. Yes, this was Maya-specific, but there is no reason similar ideas could not be implemented using 3ds Max. :-)
Another company that was highlighted several times throughout AU was Moon Express. During the closing session they were given the opportunity to speak about their initiative to return to the moon as a commercial venture. Here they unveiled their “MX-1” Commercial Lunar Lander. As a space nerd myself, this was an exciting presentation (I had to leave AU the day before, but watched the video later. See closing session resource below).
Oh, and by-the-way, Penn and Teller were guest presenters in both the keynote, and the closing presentation. See below resources that include their performances.
AU 2013 Resources:
AU Keynote: http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/live-stream/keynote-address
AU Closing (note Moon Express starts @ ~20 minutes in): http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/live-stream/closing-session
3ds Max Design: http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/live-stream/working-with-large-datasets-meeting-deadlines-with-autodesk-3ds-max-design (unfortunately this one was canceled for live streaming, but it says the class will be posted later. Plus the posted handout is interesting. :-) )
ReCap: http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/live-stream/new-reality
ReCap using Kinect Fusion: http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/live-stream/reality-capture-inside-autocad-using-kinect-fusion (yeah, it’s using AutoCAD, but same ideas could be applied to 3ds Max…)
Of course many of the classes that were recorded will eventually become available, too. Stay tuned to the http://au.autodesk.com site for updates.
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