What a Mesh

Product Design Suite in Buenos Aires

I'd like to share a great experience done at the Autodesk Design Center in Buenos Aires. First of all, what is the Autodesk Design Center? It's a facility located at the offices of SONDA, Autodesk's distributor for MCO (multi country organization that includes most of Latin America, with the exception of Mexico and Brazil). They created an extremely well designed space where Autodesk's technology is showcased, and where customers can go and get in contact with our products.

Since I was in Buenos Aires for Autodesk's Launch of the 2012 Portfolio at the HIlton Hotel, it sounded like a good idea to do a small workshop in this facility.

First of all, I'd like to thank all of the people involved in this workshop, starting with our guests. Eduardo Chiaramonti and Nicolas Cubitto, who came all the way from Mendoza. They are both engineering students at UTN, probably one of the best universities in the region. It was a honor and a pleasure to have two very curious, talented and committed students in this event. Thanks also to their professor, Nicolas Putignano, who has definitely been an inspiration for them and many more students. Thanks to Uriel Cukirman (Secretary of UTN) and Horacio Pessano (dean at UTN) for sending Eduardo and Nicolas all across Argentina for this event.

On Autodesk's side, very special thanks to Jaime Abella, who made this whole thing happen. Once he knew about the idea, he immediately made all the contacts in order to get UTN excited about this workshop. And obviously, no workshop can be done without the right talent. Sebastian Zaje, the Technical Specialist for MCO also supported this event from the very beginning, and made a great job at setting the right expectations and then also thrived with Alias Design at the workshop itself.

Finally, thanks to Diego Padovani, Tomas Meli and Guillermo Cabello from SONDA, for all their help.

 

So, what did we do? The whole idea was to develop a design from concept to completion using Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate. They brought a dish dryer already created in Inventor and rendered with Inventor Studio. We wanted to explore some design alternatives, and make the best use of all Autodesk products for manufacturing.

We decided that doing some work on the door was the best way to go. The rest of the dryer needs to be quite simple, but we could add some design intent on the front.

So it was the time for doing some sketching. I showed them how to import an image into Autodesk Sketchbook Designer, and create some vector and raster sketching. Vector sketching is extremely powerful, and even more so if you can draw with a stylus over a screen. I used a Wacom Cintiq for this task.

The final result was a mix of vectors and raster content. We exported the vectors as a dwg, so they could be consumed in AutoCAD. Once in AutoCAD, we worked with surface modeling doing some conceptual design. The curves from Sketchbook Designer need to be taken from Paper Space into Model Space, and then it is also important to check the number of control vertices. We showed the CVs, and used the Rebuild command to get more rational curves. The amount of CVs depends on the method used inside Sketchbook Designer, since this application has a nice feature that tries to infer different curves from your stroke. If you try to create a circle, it will suggest a perfect circle. Same with general strokes, which can become splines, arcs or even straight lines.

Now we wanted to create some more complex surfaces, so we decided to import the dwg file into Autodesk Alias Design. Sebastian took it from that point, and worked with Eduardo and Nicolas on getting the best surfaces possible, which could then be made manufacturable inside Inventor.

Sebastian then opened the wire file (Alias' native format) in Autodesk Inventor, and both Eduardo and Nicolas did some work in Inventor in order to replace the existing door with the new one. They also created a constraint that would become a Behavior in Showcase.

Now it was time for creating a presentation and some final renders. We worked in Autodesk Showcase for a very quick presentation that involved some material alternatives and some behaviors. The presentation can then be converted into a video, if necessary. Showcase is a great tool for getting a lot of geometry from different places into an environment optimized for creating a presentation.

I'll talk a lot about Showcase in future postings. For the time being, check out some of the results.

In the image above, I'm working on preparing the dish dryer. The door is hidden right now.

You can see the door in the laptop's screen. We were installing Autodesk Inventor Publisher, which is not part of the Suite, but it's definitely a great tool for creating a publication. You can also access the result from a mobile device.

The image above displays the final result in Showcase. It took around 15 minutes to prepare the file. It does help that Autodesk has consistent materials across applications.

Then we sent all the geometry into Autodesk 3ds Max Design for some rendering. Again, this was an easy task, since all materials come through nicely. We used both the traditional mental ray renderer, and also the screaming fast iRay. With the HP Z800 in the room, this was really fast.

This was a great experience not only for Eduardo and Nicolas, who spent around 8 hours split in two days working with technology new to them, but also for us. We had the chance to try workflows, and validate many of the best practices we talk about.

This blog is about Suites and about the products in them, but I really want to make it about workflows between applications. Getting more products in a package is awesome, but when you realize the value of each of them, and decide which ones make sense in different parts of the design process, then things get really better.

Eduardo and Nicolas left with those concepts really clear. I hope that the enthusiasm they showed during these two days will be contagious among their peers at UTN. I definitely think that this experience is worth replicating many more times.

If you are based in South America and are curious about the Autodesk Design Center in Buenos Aires, feel free to contact the Autodesk office in Buenos Aires, and you can get more information.

Thanks again to UTN, SONDA and Autodesk (Seba and Jaime) for this awesome experience.

 

Video about vector sketching

This is a video of the workflow I explained in last post.

 

Vector editing and sketching between AutoCAD and Sketchbook Designer 2012

Sketchbook Designer is a great value added to some of the new Suites. You will find it in the three tiers of Autodesk Design Suite, Product Design Suite and Building Design Suite.

Sketchbook Designer installs a standalone version and also a plug in for AutoCAD. It is a phenomenal application for sketching and illustration, and I hope to do some justice to it in a series of examples around its use.

If you have ever used the previous version, called Alias Sketch, you will notice some changes. Most of the editing was moved into the standalone version, leaving very few features inside AutoCAD. They replaced this with a very powerful one click workflow.

The first example I want to show is around the use of 2d data from AutoCAD. We’ll do some edits inside Sketchbook Designer. In later posts I’ll get a little more creative with a bigger example, but this is simply for explaining some key concepts.

We’ll start with a simple detail: a balcony with a lighting fixture, where we’ll try to change the curve appeal. Let’s say that we want to use a solution that allows for freehand sketching, but we also want to reuse this information as efficiently as possible. If you are in Suites, you then have the best of both worlds. Let’s draft in AutoCAD and sketch in Sketchbook Designer, and reuse the data from one application into the other. The solution is a simple one click workflow.

Once you isolate the detail you want to sketch on top of, we’ll create a canvas. This is a simple operation that is done from the Sketchbook Designer tab in the Ribbon.

Select New Canvas and you’ll get a window with some grips in order to create your canvas. The Canvas will define the area where the plug in will operate. There are options for Fixed and Free, and the first one constrains the aspect ratio. If you want to have more freedom, you probably want to change into Free. Now, let me share a tip. Sometimes, you will see that Free is displayed by default, but the canvas behaves like Fixed. Simply go back to Fixed and change again to Free, and all will be good.

With your canvas done, you now want to let Sketchbook Designer know what to do with the AutoCAD layers. By selecting Create Vector Underlay On, the layers will be transferred, and will then be able to be converted into raster or vector layers inside Sketchbook Designer. Preserve layers ensures that you will see all layers, and they won’t be merged into a single vector layer. If you only want to operate with the lines inside a couple of specific layers, Preserve Layers is the right thing to do.

Once you finished, you can Apply the changes and then click on the Sketchbook Designer button in the Ribbon, which will start the one click workflow. The standalone application will start, and you will see the same canvas you had in AutoCAD. Note that the limits of the canvas in AutoCAD are the limits to any work you can do in Sketchbook, so keep this in mind when creating the limits of your canvas.

Also note that when Sketchbook Designer is linked to AutoCAD, you won’t be able to work in AutoCAD. If you don’t know this, you may think that AutoCAD has frozen.

You can see how your AutoCAD layers are now Sketchbook Designer layers. Simply select one of them, and you will see the option to convert it into a raster or a vector layer. Right now we want vectors, so as to use the cool and really sophisticated features from Sketchbook Designer.

Select the line, and see how you can create a curve by simply adding knots to the spline. There are other very useful commands, but I’ll only mention one more. Restroke Curve allows you to simply stroke next to the spline, and the curve will readjust to those strokes. If you have a tablet, this is a great way of getting closer to what you really want, as opposed to simply adding or removing knots. This is much closer to the kind of design intent that you can apply when hand sketching.

With the curves already with the shape you wanted, you can now export them as a dwg into AutoCAD. You can export a selection, if you simply want a couple of splines and not the whole set of curves. Once you do this, it’s time to go back to AutoCAD.

As soon as you close Sketchbook Designer, AutoCAD will be back to life, and you will see your edits. But wait a minute. Those edits are on the canvas and not real dwg vectors. Open the dwg file created in Sketchbook Designer and you will see your curves in Paper Space. Cut them and paste them into the drawing. You will probably have a different scale, but that’s easy to fix.

As you can see, in a couple of clicks, you could go from AutoCAD into Sketchbook Designer, and edit a detail, adding some design intent with tools more appropriate for this. As I said before, this particular example is really simple, and some may argue that they could have done this in AutoCAD alone. Sure. But the point was to show the concept around the one click workflow.

In following postings, after presenting some other features, we’ll move into more complex examples.