Autodesk University

This past week I was in Las Vegas attending the Autodesk University conference.  I’ve been attending this conference for a number of years and it continues to be a great way to see what is happening in the construction industry and with the software that we all use.  I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the conference.

The conference runs Tuesday through Thursday, usually the week after Thanksgiving.  The conference consists of an opening Keynote, a closing ceremony and party and then open classes that you can sign up for during each day.  The classes run from 60 – 90 minutes.  There is also an exhibit hall for different software and hardware vendors that is open in the evenings and during lunch.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Look Outside”.  As they presented in the keynote, many people come to the conference to improve their toolset.  But the real value of the conference is to change your mindset.  There are so many things happening today and the changes are coming so fast that you have to re-think your approach to things a lot more often.

There are so many great things about this conference.  I feel like it helps me stay current with where our industry is going with regards to technology.  I leaned about infinite computing, computational fluid dynamics, Navisworks, virtualized computers and cloud computing all through this conference and all well before people were doing any of them.

Here is a summary of the classes I attended:

1. Top down modeling tips using Autodesk Inventor:  This class focused on alternative assembly modeling techniques in Inventor that can avoid some of the pitfalls of assembly constraints and circular adaptive references.
2. Recreational Revit for the Craftsman:  This class gave you some great ideas on how to utilize Autodesk Revit to model furniture, toys and dollhouses for your own home projects.
3. Project Dynamo and Autodesk 123D Make for Digital Fabrication:  This class showed you how to use Dynamo inside Revit to help create adaptive designs then move that into 123D make to create digital mock-ups easily.
4. Integrating Leap Motion with Autocad:  If you’ve seen these devices, they are a way to use hand gestures to control your computer.  This class showed you how to use the Software Development Kit to write your own code to control Autocad with gestures.
5. Using Kinect Fusion Inside Autocad:  Again, taking an inexpensive device like Kinect and using the Software Development Kit to write your own programs to integrate that device into Autocad.
6. Fabricate anything between Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Inventor.  This class gave you workflows to transfer information between Revit and Inventor or go from Inventor to Revit.
7. Automated Testing in .net:  This class discussed the idea of creating class structures in such a way as to be able to write test code against them to help you make more stable projects.
8. The 7 technology trends of Design.  This was an overview class of the different trends that are driving our industry and creating some very different paradigms.
9. Kick your Microsoft Excel habit using Autodesk PLM:  An overview of how to create workflows in the PLM software to make what you would normally do in Excel into a much better process.
10. Woodworking and Fabrication – Unique methods and Workflows:  This class shows you how to customize Inventor to make it simple to create your own workflows for the more tedious parts of your job.
11. Advanced iCopy in Autodesk Inventor:  How to use iCopy to create repetitive parts that can adapt to their surroundings in Inventor.

I like to take a mix of classes to give me a better feel for what is happening in our industry and which direction things are heading.