Autodesk University 2004 ~ Day 2

Today started with a Building Solutions Division Subscription breakfast. This was in the form of a Question and Answer session with the BSD exec and ADT/Revit/ABS teams present.

(Photo: AU Foyer)

After that was a session Building Parametric Parts in Autodesk Building Systems (ABS). I met ABS product manager Peter Terwilliger who I have only known by email until now. Meeting many people formerly only known by web/newsgroup/email has been a great part of this trip.

Rebecca Rickus (Product Designer for ABS) led a hand’s on lab session that walked through making a parametric duct using ABS’s content builder. This was one of the things I most wanted to learn from AU and it was a great introduction. The Content Builder is unique to ABS and using it totally different process to normal ADT/AutoCAD content creation. It’s more like the rule based modeling seen in the mechanical solutions (Inventor, MDT) or Revit. Although I still have much to learn at least I now have an idea how to approach the tools and process.

Next was Secrets of Autodesk® Architectural Desktop 2005 Revealed with Reid Addis. He’s a familiar name from the ADT newsgroup. Although I had already found most already I picked up a few more useful tips from this session.

I had a first look around the exhibit hall and was late getting to lunch. As you usually get randomly seated for lunch it’s a great way to meet people from a wide range of backgrounds and industries. Today the seating was more defined as it was the “"Birds of a Feather" lunch. The idea is you meet people with similar industry focus.

As I was late I actually sat with mainly survey & civil users but was interesting to hear that the whole 2d/3d old/new platform battle in common to their industry also. Seems like many are impressed with Civil 3d but face migration & process hurdles to adopt a new platform and methodology. Sounds familiar!

The "Design Analysis with ABS" session demonstrated how ABS data can now be exported to specialist packages to analyze building performance (energy requirements), duct sizing etc and that the results of this analysis can be returned to the ABS objects. Useful but I’m not sure how relevant to NZ as need to see what analysis packages are used here.

From that it was into a session with John Janzen on creating detail content for ADT which taught me enough to decide its complex and probably not that relevant to our use. Still was interesting to see how the various XML, dwg and VBA content works together to create the 2d detail objects in ADT Details.

In the last session for the day Chris Bullen gave an excellent introduction to the Viz Mental Ray render engine in his session “Rendering and Beyond in Autodesk® VIZ 2005”. Mental Ray requires a very different approach to “lighting” a scene as it uses a different method than standard Viz. Unfortunately Chris was victim of a few network hassles, the dreaded “licence server problem” message, but with resourceful use of an attendee laptop presented a really useful session.

The evening event was the BSD Industry Reception, which had a “Mad Lab” theme. Everyone was dressed in hospital gowns and offered test tubes of “reviving substances” as they arrived. This evening included the presentation of the Autodesk BSD Design Awards by Phil Bernstein & Lynn Allen. At the conclusion of this we were all invited to continue on to the GIS bash. They had a great band, Dr Ruth, playing and spent the rest of the evening there. (Photo: Luxor Casino)