Donated Design Software Helps Engineer on Inspirational Reality TV Show “Breakthrough with Tony Robbins” Start Transforming His Life

SAN RAFAEL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Engineer Frank Alioto is using 3D design software from Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) to steadily recover following an accident that left him with limited mobility. Autodesk donated the software in partnership with the NBC reality TV series “Breakthrough with Tony Robbins” produced by Reveille. In “Breakthrough with Tony Robbins,” Tony Robbins helps people to make new starts and transform their lives. Together, Autodesk and “Breakthrough with Tony Robbins” are helping Alioto help overcome obstacles, change his life and redesign his future.

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  It’s been 24 hours, and neither of the files sent to the Project Photofly servers have been returned. Either their server is overloaded with requests, there is a bug in the system, or possibly, I gave them the wrong email address to send the results to. If it were to be an incorrect email, it would have had to have happened twice, and that’s not likely.

 I posted in the Project Photofly discussion group, and with any luck I’ll get an answer today. I can say that from some of the posts there, some of the people are sending over 100 images, which may be overloading what is likely a smallish test system.

 Whatever the case may be, stay tuned, I’ll post an update when I have it.

 I spent most of this morning playing around with the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly with nothing to show for my time –so-far.

Early this morning I downloaded and installed the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly from the Autodesk Labs website. The program is very small, and the download and install were quick and painless.

I had seen a video by Donnie Gladfelter over at thecadgeek yesterday, and decided to re-watch it as a primer before delving into the program myself…

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(BUSINESS WIRE)–Autodesk announces the availability of Project Photofly, a technology preview of a web service that allows users to easily create 3D models from photographs using the cloud. Project Photofly is currently available for free* on Autodesk Labs.

The Autodesk Project Photofly technology preview enables architecture, design, media & entertainment and manufacturing firms to easily create 3D models from a series of photographs.

Photofly breaks the barrier to entry to image-based modeling because of its automatic calibration process. The manual calibration of photographs enabled by other technologies is complex and requires a strong expertise to get a good result. Project Photofly utilizes an automatic calibration engine, called “Camera Factory,” which is made available as a web service through a Windows-based client called “Photo Scene Editor.” Customers connect to the Camera Factory through the Photo Scene Editor, and then use their favorite Autodesk 3D modeling software (AutoCAD, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max, etc.) to consume the data in DWG format to model on top of the images.

“Reality capture gives designers and engineers the ability to better measure, analyze, document and plan for projects.”

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This is it. The last of the reverse engineering of the composting toilet series. All that remains are the four knobs on the lower drawer of the humanure maker.

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The exact profile of the knobs is somewhat shady, but with a bit of educated guesswork, they’ll come out great for all intents and purposes. In the image below, you can see that I started by creating a sketch on the lower front face, then placing and centering a point on what I would call the right hand stile of the poo drawer.  The next step is to create a plane 90° to the face using the construction line that was used to center the point horizontally.

The only difference between this plane created on a line and the others in this series is that I selected the line, then instead of one of the Origin planes, I selected the face that the line sits on. The angle was left at the default 90°…   Read the rest of this entry →