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…
.
.
(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.”
With Inventor 2011’s dramatic improvements in graphics, the line between Inventor’s intended purpose and its potential use has been blurred considerably.
Although Inventor can’t do everything by itself —and likely never will, the 2011 version can definitely be used as an integral part of a small suite of programs for those graphic designers wishing to create a realistic three dimensional graphics. The image to the right (what will be the new archives widget to replace the hopelessly ugly one there now) was modeled in Inventor in less than two minutes….. throw in another minute for adjusting the shadows, and voila!, a new archives thingamagadget is born!
From there I just took a screen shot to get the image into PaintShop Pro where the text and drop shadows were added. I could have done almost everything in Inventor, but it would have taken too long to match the drop shadows to the existing ones on this site. A rendered version from Inventor Studio would have been higher quality, but to what extent I cannot say as I felt there was no need to waste the time. For all intents and purposes, the real-time version right there on screen was plenty good.
This could be the elusive purpose for Inventor LT, which has always seemed like a car sold without an engine to cut costs. Sure, the price is attractive….but you can’t go anywhere with it. We tried hard to figure out a use for LT at the shipyard I used to work for, but it was quite the anemic little sucker, and was found to be of no real use.
If the 2011 version is equipped with the new graphics, has multi solid bodies, and still costs about a grand, it may have crossed over into the useful column. I am downloading the trial version as I write this, and will post an update after I take a look-see.
As a final thought, if they were to strip away the drawing environment, AEC Exchange, and the rest of the engineering stuff and sell a graphics modeling version at sub $250.00, they may have a hot product on their hands. This new product would also act as a learning tool for eventual up-graders to the design products. At the very least, they would pull in money while gaining name recognition for Inventor –without having to resort to calling Inventor the pathetic ‘AutoCAD Inventor’. Continue reading
In my previous post on Project Butterfly Cloud Computing, I stated “I sent two invitation emails to one of my other email addresses which never came”. Well I was wrong. They did come, but they were sent to the junk email folder –probably because the email message below…
Project Butterfly is an Autodesk service that lets you edit and collaborate on design data over the Web.
Sent to you by Autodesk Project Butterfly.
AEC Plan Elev Sample.dwg <http://butterfly.autodesk.com/app/message?link=ZZ[aj7eSgBT314e&attid=10178>
…has too many links. In practice, a person would need to be informed of this possibility and to check their junk email folder –possibly by sending two emails the first time, one with, and one without the links. The one without the links could tell the person to expect the second email, and check their junk folder if it does not arrive momentarily. The receiver would then need to add the sender to a safe sender list to avoid the problem in the future.
Having said all of that, this would be a great collaboration tool! I would use it right now if there were Inventor and/or Revit versions. More later…
This morning I checked out the Butterfly Project, and I must say it appears as though something along these lines may be very useful to current AutoCAD users or those of us who have to deal with legacy files. The right click context menu was annoying in that it did not behave as expected for AutoCAD (Flash related stuff only), but it is still a technology preview where things such as this are discovered and fixed. Also……I sent two invitation emails to one of my other email addresses which never came, so I never got to try out that functionality, and the multi selection (window select) is limited to 30 objects at this time, but again, it’s a preview.
One thing that definitely needs to be changed is the size being fixed at what looks to be an optimized size for a 1200 x 1600 resolution monitor. Engineers and Designers who are the target audience of this product (service?) are likely to have larger, wide screen monitors, so there is a lot of wasted space as you can see in the image above. If the interface re-sized to fill the usable screen, it would help. Especially when working in garish AutoCAD files 
Continue reading
New at Autodesk Labs(a kind of skunk-works for new software ideas), is Project Butterfly, a technology preview of cloud computing that enables AutoCAD users to edit and collaborate on AutoCAD drawings through a Web browser. Something along these lines would definitely speed up the collaborative process on projects with widely dispersed team members.
When I was the Senior Architectural Modeler/Applications Engineer at a large yacht maker, a typical design cycle would have us collaborating with designers and engineers in the Netherlands, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Italy as well as vendors scattered across North America. Having something like this back then would have helped greatly with AutoCAD files.
Loading ...
