The Autodesk Informer

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

In 2005, The Autodesk Informer will continue to be a source of product and industry news as well as provide a collection of useful tips and tricks.

For a laugh, check this out - evidence on the existence of Santa Claus for the scientifically-minded: http://www.physlink.com/Fun/IsThereSanta.cfm

Autodesk Inventor Certification Website

A new website located at http://www.inventor-certified.com provides information on certification programs for Autodesk Inventor:

• Autodesk Inventor Certified Application Program
• Autodesk Inventor Certified Hardware Program
• Autodesk Inventor Certified Expert Program

Autodesk Inventor Tip: Controlling Layers of Parts in a Drawing

With the introduction of layers into Autodesk Inventor 9, one common scenario is to move an entire part, or collection of parts onto different layers within an IDW.  By following the steps here, this is an easy process:

1. To allow you to select an entire part, change your selection priority to "Part Priority".  This can by done by either accessing the selection priority dropdown located just to the right of the undo/redo buttons on the toolbar or by using the SHIFT+RIGHT-CLICK key combination.
2. Click to select the part(s) that you want to change layers.
3. With the parts selected, you will notice that they layer dialog dropdown is disabled.  No problem, simply right-click over the part and from the context menu choose "Select as edges".
4. From the layer drop-down, select the appropriate layer from the list.
5. Once you have finished manipulating layers, change the selection priority back to "Edge priority" or you'll be frustrated why you can't detail your drawing :)  Been there, done that!

Service Pack 2 (SP2) For Autodesk Inventor Series

Autodesk Inventor Series Service Pack 2 (Sp2) is now available.  To download the service pack and view the readme file, go to http://autodesk.com/inventor-updates/.

I would suspect that Service Pack 2 for Autodesk Inventor Professional will be released within a couple weeks.

Stitch Multiple Rendered Still Images into an Animation

Any 3D graphics artist will tell you that you NEVER render direct to video; instead, ALWAYS render to sequential still images instead.  There are numerous reasons for this:

• Should your computer crash while rendering, you will need to re-render the entire video
• If you detect that there are problems with the video (perhaps incorrect lighting, materials, etc.) again, you will need to re-render the entire video
• If your utilizing network rendering in 3D Studio MAX to speed up your render times, you MUST render to sequential still images
• Rendering to sequential stills allows you to easily encode the video to multiple file formats and compressions

When you render to sequential still images, 3D Studio MAX will name each frame by appending the frame number to the end of the filename.  This will give you the following filenames as an example:

teapot_100.jpg, teapot_101.jpg, teapot_102.jpg ..... teapot_xxxx.jpg where each frame of the animation is a seperate file.

Now that you have these series of still images, the question becomes "how do I stitch them together into a single animation?"  For that, I use a GREAT piece of free software called Rad Video Tools.

From within Rad Video Tools, simply select the first still image in the series and click the button labelled "Convert a file".

Rad Video Tools will present a dialog box asking if you would like to treat the series of images as a single animation since it will automatically detect that there are multiple images with the same name; say "yes" to this prompt.  After this, you will be presented with a new dialog box from which you can specify the filename of the video including a multitude of output settings (frame rate, scaling, etc.) and then hit the "Convert" button to produce an AVI file of your video.

Not only do the Rad Video Tools have a multitude of options for creating your video file, but you can also do batch conversion, convert video files back into a series of still images (the reverse of this tutorial) and a number of other things.

One other aspect of the Rad Video Tools that is really useful is the ability to create an EXE file of your video. This guarantees that your video will playback on any Microsoft Windows machine since both your video and the player are embedded into a single executable file. To do this, you need to encode your video using the Bink codec (a proprietary codec developed by the creators of Rad Video Tools) which you can do by choosing the "Bink it" button, rather than the "Convert a file" option mentioned previously. After creating the Bink video, you can select it from in the application and choose "Advanced Play" from which you can create an EXE file.

*Click the screenshot images to see a larger version*

Cloth Extension for 3ds max coming in January

Discreet has announced that customers on the subscription program for 3D Studio MAX software will receive a software extension (plugin) in January for cloth simulation:

The Cloth Extension to 3ds max 7 delivers a sophisticated cloth simulation system that gives artists the creative tools to build realistic, film-quality clothing for 3D characters in Film, Television, Advertising and Games projects. With this powerful new tool in your 3ds max 7 arsenal, you can:

• Build clothing that behaves just like it would in the real world
• Create cloth that reflects both fabric type and clothing pattern and can be tailored to fit any model.
• Save and share your cloth types to boost productivity among artists.

More information