AutoCAD reaches its 25th birthday.

First demonstrated at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas in 1982, its still going strong today.

Take a nostalgia trip at

http://www.autodesk.com/autocad25

Try out the 15 question AutoCAD history trivia quiz at

http://lp.adskhost.com/index.php/1391_trivia.html

The Autodesk File tells the history of Autodesk and its principal product AutoCAD through a collection of documents edited by the Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker.

Tracing the history from the original idea through to 1994, the document is available in various formats from

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

and is available locally as a PDF document

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/uploads/afpdf.zip

Autodesk has announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire substantially all the assets of Skymatter, Inc., the developer of Mudbox 3D modeling software. This acquisition will augment Autodesk’s offering for the film, television and game market segments, while offering additional growth opportunities for other design disciplines. Autodesk anticipates that the transaction will close in the next two months.

Read the Press Release (click here)

Watch a video of Mudbox in action (Click Here) (visualizing concept design in 3D)

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A new (updated) version Project Freewheel is to be made available from August 7 on the Autodesk labs website. (This is not to be confused with the production version of the service at http://freewheel.autodesk.com )

A preview of version 1.0.1 can be found at

http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com

New features appear to include

a “share” option for sharing sessions (collaborative sessions)

an “Impression” option, although not working when I visited, appears to provide some markup functionality,

and a navigation wheel a UI tool that allows users to select options from a floating wheel.

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Noted this option when passing through the features of FreeWheel from Autodesk

Rendering Service (http://dwfit.com/DWFImage.aspx)
This is a raw rendering service that provides no GUI. The service accepts an URL to a DWF, view parameters, and returns a rendered image file. You can build your own interactive or multi-platform viewer from this service. The “dwf.aspx” service above uses this service internally to produce the various views.

The DWF-to-image rendering service takes the same parameters as the interactive serivce, along with the following additions:

• &width = <integer> The width of the image to produce (in pixels).
• &height = <integer> The height the image to produce (in pixels).
• &bg = <integer> Color of background in hexadecimal (bg=ff0000 for red or bg=80808080 for semi-transparent gray) or t (bg=t) for the original color in transparent.

For example, the following URL will render an image small enough to fit on most cell phone screens. It will view the center of page 3 of the Hotel5 zoomed in to a factor of 4 and generate a image that is 200×200 pixels:

http://dwfit.com/dwfImage.aspx?cx=0.5&cy=0.5&scale=4&sec=3&width=200&height=200&path=http://dwfit.com/sample/Hotel5.dwf

and here’s the picture generated from that html.

(Tip: Click on the image to view a dynamically created image at 1000×1000)

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