The crayon in question is Crayon Physics Deluxe, —– a cool little program written back in 07 by Petri Purho, that uses artificial physics and virtual crayons to complete levels of an interesting  little game.

I downloaded the original version of the game (pre deluxe) for my four year old daughter back-in-the-day thinking it would be a fun learning tool….but it didn’t take.  I guess four year olds are less interested in physics than I thought……..even if it did involve crayons. Whodathunk?

Maybe it had something to do with the old-school Pink Floydesque soundtrack. One can never be sure….

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It’s been a busy few days filled with computer crashes  & glitches, email interviews, and a huge amount of hectic modeling  behind-the-scenes on a big fat house model.

Thanks to help from Mark Flayler over at IMAGINiT, the big culprit behind all of the crashing I have been experiencing has been traced to the Autodesk Labs 3DA technology preview… which makes sense I guess. Technology previews are not finished work where most of the buggyness like this is ironed out  before it gets added to a program, or —-in some cases just gets discarded. Think of Labs as a place where the programmers can throw their digital spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Sometimes you get smacked right in the face, but safe is for sissy’s

 The Make Components Crash Fix

For those of you that have installed the Inventor 3DA technology preview and are experiencing crashing upon using the Make Components command, just go to Tools>Options>Add-Ins, select Inventor 3DA from the list, then uncheck the Load On Startup and the Loaded/Unloaded checkboxes at the bottom of the dialog as shown below…

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When first using 3D design tools such as Autodesk Inventor, I was surprised by the lack of annotation capability in the modeling environment beyond the ‘Engineers Notebook’…

…and I had planned to begin this article with a description of that very same, somewhat lame, Engineers Notebook …….. and how it (if fixed), the 3DA technology, and the Insert Object tool could be used to form a fairly decent model information system in Inventor —–but the mere act of trying to start Engineers Notebook locks up Inventor 2010 on my machine. Go figure.

Old School 3DA

A few years ago, I was tasked with communicating the more intricate details of some very complex marble designs with a vendor in Italy. The drawings we had given them were 2D AutoCAD and MicroStation drawings, and would typically generate numerous calls and emails for clarification, but even with that, there were typically quite a few costly errors.
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In yesterdays post on Project Photofly, I promised the next post would be on the Shape Extraction tool, and I gave a little teaser about whether the hack for ACAD 2010 worked…

It didn’t. After following the directions, I could get the Point Cloud tab to show up, but the last step, loading the ShapeExtractionApp.arx file would not take. Look at the command line in the image to the right (click) for details. Also notice the clouds with question marks in place of several icons and the missing Density slider on the Point Cloud panel.

It would have been nice if it had worked as 2010 is the version I own, but I do have a Autodesk Assistance Program version of ACAD 2011 that the technology preview  did install correctly on (I think)….

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During the first attempt at testing the Photofly technology preview, I was met with a server glitch, but in the end, all went well

  I thought one of the biggest problems was with the interface itself. I’m not sure if this is present on all systems, but with dual wide screen monitors, the first of the images (Scenes?) began very far to the right of the interface as shown in the image to the right….

  And there were no scroll bars to slide things over. It wasn’t until I started writing this article that I found out that you need to drag the thumbnails using your cursor, and I would be willing to bet via touch screen as well. Cool, but unexpected.

Creating a Scene

To begin with, I took  a bunch of images of a globe (shown in the image above) at about 10° intervals while walking around the thing. I went around three times at different levels, and wound up with 54 images. I then fired up the Photo Scene Editor…

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