Autodesk University

I recently got my hands on a copy of Autodesk Showcase and fell in love with it. As many of you know, I am an Autodesk® Inventor® user at heart, and I really like the effects you can get right out of the box with the Inventor Studio renderer. Autodesk Showcase® takes rendering to a whole new level with its real-time rendering engine. I can't wait until I can learn more about how to use it. I will be taking the Showcase classes at AU for sure.

A Little Trick With File Conversion

One thing I noticed was that when I imported an Inventor Weldment with Machining operations, I didn't quite get the results I expected in every case. One of the items I have always liked about Autodesk software is that you can approach a solution from many different avenues. In this case, I used Inventor's Derive tool to turn the Weldment in question into a single part file. I set the 'Derive Style' to "Keep seems between planer faces". This allowed me to use the model exactly how I wanted to in Showcase and get the results I was looking for. If I had given it a bit more thought, I would have used the Substitute option in Inventor to load in the new Derived Part file.

Results Right Out of the Box

I am excited about the efforts Autodesk is putting into their products to make data-sharing between applications as seamless as possible. It is only a matter of time before we will all have the best Autodesk tools for the job and be able to collaborate using a single dataset. In fact, I believe that time is upon us now. It is only going to continue to improve at an ever increasing rate. After all, that is what Digital Prototyping is all about.

I am pretty happy with the above image. All in all, I spent about 4-6 hours creating it. That includes installing Showcase, learning how to use it (no training, of course after I did it, I went to AU Online and found some great handouts from past AUs), playing with some features, and developing a simple work around for an anomaly I probably created in the first place.

Give me a few more hours with it and I will know enough to be dangerous. I can't wait...

Send me an email if you can guess what that piece of machinery makes.