Welcome to the blogging world

Lee Ambrosius (CAD Programmer and HyperPics fame) now has joined the blogging world at Beyond the UI.

Lee is a great person and I cannot say enough positive things about him and the value he has to the cad community. We should all look forward to what Lee has to share through this additional resource. Keep up the great work!!!

happy blogging...

Fatherhood and life

As you may have read recently Shannon and I were waiting for our first little bundle of joy to come join us in our life together. Well that day has now come and we would like to take a moment to share with you:

Dylan Vaughan Cole Turner
Born - March 07, 2004 4:43am
Weight - 8 pounds 4 ounces
Length - 20.5 inches







We hope everything is well with each of you and we appreciate your kind generous words, thoughts and more.

happy parenting...

Favorite AutoCAD 2005 Feature #2

AutoCAD Sheet Set Manager.... For those who have been using ADT 2004 this feature is similar to the Project Navigator. For those who have not had the exposure to this yet, once you start using this feature you will wonder how you ever worked without it.

What exactly are Sheet Sets? Great question, this is a way for your multiple drawing project sheet files to be managed and organized in one location for all users on a "project" to see and use. No need to worry about xrefs, directories/sub-directories, what files go where, etc... To get started with Sheet Sets you can turn this feature on using either Ctrl + 4 or going under Tools>>Sheet Set Manager.

At this point you can either import your existing layout(s) from any drawing into a sheet set as a numbered sheet or use the Create Sheet Set wizard to start generating your Sheet Set from any of several pre-defined templates (Architectural, Civil and Manufacturing both imperial and metric for each) or use your own custom set-ups.

5 things interesting about the Sheet Set Manager:

1. Integration with Fields (in case you have not noticed I love what fields have to offer!!!).

2. Drag and drop your model space views from your resource drawings directly to your sheets without worrying about xref's.

3. Sheet subsets for organization by discipline or other method you choose.

4. Sheet list table. Probably one of the coolest/quickest methods for generating an index listing of all the sheets in your drawing set.

5. The ability to publish your entire drawing set, or subset category, eTransmit and/or archive by right clicking (wait until you use background plotting).

6. Ok, I lied one more item, numbering and sheet naming along with the ability to change these on the fly at any time. Again you can reference information using fields (think about the sheet title, input it once when you create your sheet and have it fill in your titleblock via fields).

I could go on and on about how useful the Sheet Set Manager is but as I was outlining the list of items I wanted to share and discuss, both in this blog and at my lug, it was pretty hard to narrow down the list to just these few items listed above. With so many uses and possibilities for Sheet Sets everyone from the inexperienced to the guru of your office will find this a great feature that will change the way you work.

happy cadding...

Net Rendering blues....

My AutoCAD/ADT 2005 update for this week was interrupted with getting distributed net rendering for VIZ set-up and getting a Brazil distributed bucket rendering for sending out one large single frame image to render on mulitple machines and done on a deadline. Glad that's 90% done, so bear with me tonight/this morning and I will be back-up writing about the 2005 releases soon....

I have to give the Splutterfish guys/gals a thanks as the bucket rendering went smooth once I got the manager/server issue worked out. Only one gripe that I will pass on to tech support for consideration for the duplication of effort in the file naming from common properties to the Brazil file naming. Now as long as everything finishes by morning I will be happy. :)

Now to wind down and get some rest, oh and Kong Phooey have a great time in Japan and try to get out and take plenty of pictures and eat some good sushi. ;)

happy rendering...

Favorite AutoCAD 2005 Feature #1

Fields... though you may not know what this is yet, you will soon enough and you will wonder how you ever worked without them.

It took me a short period of time to understand exactly how fields were going to work for AutoCAD. 10 minutes later I was a superstar. OK, well maybe not a superstar, but if you have ever used RTEXT and wished for more power such as justification and more than plain diesel can give you then you will love this. Fields can be used to show data such as current date, title block information, sheet numbers, sheet names, labels, system variables and of course diesel expressions. If the information changes, regenerate the drawing to automatically update the fields.

5 things interesting about Fields:

1. Fields can be inserted into any string of text (except tolerances) and used in conjunction with text that is manually input. When the referenced field value is changed/modified the value of the field is updated and displayed.

2. Fields allow you to use any justification available for text.

3. Fields offer a few new variables (fielddisplay, fieldeval). These control the background visibility of the fields (similar to Microsoft Word) and when the referenced field information is updated. The Fieldeval is controlled by a bitcode variable (o, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16).

4. Fields can be associated with hyperlinks and views.

5. When used in conjunction with ADT you have access to AEC Project Information and AEC Keynotes.

Okay, well that's enough for now. When you get your copy of ACAD/ADT 2005 be sure to look at the fields and see just how powerful they can be.

happy cadding...

Software and Art

I was chatting with my buddy Miker the Biker regarding graphic software packages and art the other week. Recently he purchased Corel Painter and was showing me what it can do. I was very impressed with what I saw. While Photoshop is an overwhelming choice of the visualization industry there are many things that it lacks in terms of digital art. So far with my experience of both pieces of software I find that they can compliment each other very well for production work.

For those of you that have a Wacom tablet, make sure you check out the Wacom privileges section as I found a special pricing upgrade for this and other products available as a registered owner. One other piece of software that peeks my interest is Toon Boom Studio, and for those wondering.... I broke down and purchased this product to add to my arsenal of tools.

Set Rantmode = On
I have to give a big thumbs down to/for the Corel Website and lack of response from staff. I had a project that this would have been perfect for this weekend so I ordered Painter 8.1 on Thursday morning (bright and early), paid an extra $15 bucks to have it next day overnighted via the web to be delivered by Friday 10:00am. No follow-up e-mail and no package on Friday. The website is/was difficult to navigate and even harder to find an e-mail address for a live person or group. Finally I called their 1-800 number and got a nice young lady to look into my issue. Somehow my name and information were in the computer, but my order was not. Having never bought a product from Corel before I found this odd. The girl mentioned that the site sometimes has ordering issues and I should try again via the web or place my order by phone. I chose to try via phone this time with a live person, after asking for a FTP option to download to meet my weekend deadline she mentioned this is available for other software but not Painter, with no other options but to wait for mail. She mentioned the shipping options and there were 2 choices 2-3 days or 4-5 days and no overnight. For the 2-3 day service they charge $20. $5 more to order by phone and it is not overnighted. I mentioned that the website option was $15 and overnighted but to no avail.

I also decided to document my experience and see if there was anyway to get a FTP or authcode for my purchase to activate the demo. After trying to login to the website and it not accepting my login name and password I started to give up. An hour later my login name and password worked successfully for once to log in, managed to get an e-mail out to them and documented the experience up to this point (including the login issue). After logging out, I could not log back in since. So far I have not received a response back from their support staff either. Now that's customer service! Give me an Autodesk or Adobe product any day, they understand customer service and the value of a client.
Set Rantmode = Off

I know my post above sounds negative, but what a great weekend otherwise. Beautiful weather, manual labor (heavy yardwork, exterior house cleaning), little rendering, coding and not to mention the upcoming birth of our son. The due date +/- this week.

This week I will be posting my favorite things about AutoCAD 2005 and ADT 2005 for some writing material, if I miss a day or two it means we are in the delivery room.

Cheers and I wish you a great week too...

MXS

I have been diving deeper into MAXScripting over the past few evenings with the help of John Wainwrights MAXscript 101, Maxscript and the SDK for MAX and of course good old fashioned real world need and experience.

While still learning the ins/outs of MXS it has already saved countless hours in repetitive tasks. In many ways it reminds me of a blend of AutoCAD scripting and Lisp/Visual Lisp. Simple enough for anyone to start with and enough power to do most anything (including your own plug-ins).

Hopefully Steven and I can get some more scripts and tutorials written over the next few weeks to get the VIZ community aware of how powerful this can be.

While on the subject of MXS and coding, I need to give a big thanks to Dave Espinosa-Aguilar (Autodesk and Toxic Frog Multimedia) for the great class at this past Autodesk University and the push to get into MAXScripting. Speaking of Toxic Frog it looks like the new website is coming soon with plenty of links for visitors and more.....

happy coding...

Welcome fellow blogger....

Chris Yanchar (ADT Product Designer and notable Brain Dump host) now has his new web presence up and running here.

I look forward to what Chris has to offer and share with everyone through this resource. Keep up the great work!!!

happy blogging...

New Releases

Well is's official AutoCAD LT 2005, AutoCAD 2005 and Architectural Desktop 2005 are on the way. I will leave it to the great responses and posts of others to explain some of the many benefits.

Shaan Hurley, Lee Ambrosius, Terry Dotson and many others on the way.....

happy cadding...

Render me Red

Happy Valentines Day all.

Recently we moved the EVAUG website to a new host and are now with Frank Zander at Corbimite. The move make it possible for info to be updated most anytime by our web authors. The new e-mail addresses have been updated and now the site cleaning begins. Stayed up way to late updating the site contents and publishing the first few sections for a partial site change. This will tie into the interface change we are planning, for now this is just a face lift.

Based on a response from Frank, I played around with FrontPage 2003 for the first time since release 2000 last night, but I still prefer Dreamweaver. Though the interface is simple, there are just some tools in DW that I prefer for production work, not to mention interfacing with Fireworks and Flash.

Now back to getting some rendering and a coding tutorial done for MXS.

happy valentines day...

Highs and Lows

Its amazing that some days can seem to be a drudge then a series of events happen that instead of getting you down actually make you laugh and appreciate what you have. Today was one of them for me. I will not share the whole crazy ordeal with you but I can say that I have a large smile on my face before bed thanks to good friends and of course my beautiful wife. :)

Currently testing a Linux distro called Knoppix that has me impressed so far. I have always used windows for my production and private work, but the UNIX concept and customization intrigues me. A good friend once said that Linux is like AutoCAD in that it is customizable. As much as I like to use, customize, enhance, tweak, code and more with AutoCAD/ADT I look forward to seeing what can be done with this.

Code wise between last night and earlier this evening I got the latest .vbs admin routine working with some help from Jimmy B. There are quite a few items on his site for AutoCAD 2004 users that you should check out, not to mention the JTB FlexReport tool.

Well thats just the tip of the iceberg of things to come soon.

stay happy and keep up the great work....

Resources

I was updating my own personal links to sites and resources that I find especially useful to share and ran across a CG resource from Neil Blevins that you may wish to review as well.

I have to give big props to the ADT development team as they continue to advance ADT to a useful product both in construction documents and as a modeling tool. One item that I find especially useful and love to share with others is property set definitions (PSD's), scheduling and formulas. Okay that's three items but they are heavily related to each other.

Starting with ADT2004 the use of formula's and VBScript snippets allow most anything to be done and reported with schedules. If you have not reviewed the use of scheduling you should spend some time in the help/tutorial files. Also be sure to check out the Property Data Enhancement from Scott Arvin (with Autodesk) and the Scheduling FAQ from William Fitzpatrick (with Autodesk) for a more indepth understanding.

happy cadding....

Sharp like a pencil

No its the Dullest Blog in the World.

This is by far one of the funniest sites I have seen in a while. Thanks Kurt.

happy blogging...

He Lives.....

What a busy week, after a security issue on the local home network we are now fully back up. After having been quiet for the past few weeks due to some personal/professional obligations my writing time is back and for those wondering the snowboarding trip a few days ago was great!

Recently received MaxScript 101 by John Wainwright. This is one of the best multi-media presentations I have seen to date. Well put together, well throught out and its from the guy who created the MaxScript language. I have been putting my head down and learning MaxScripting with a focus for VIZ and this is a great tool to complete your resource programming kit.

happy scripting...

Rendering without digital input

While I am waiting to get some work/updates completed on the rendering stations I have been working with Airbrushing and paintbrushes to get a better feel for how these non-digital techniques work. Airbrushing is going to take some more time... I knew I liked digital for a reason. :)

More tutorials, cadding, modeling and photography updates on the way soon.

Make sure you have your firewall and anti-virus software updated....

Down South

I have been in Tampa for the past few days for work and the more time I spend in this town the more I enjoy it. My favorite spot over the past few trips has been YBOR City. I always end up in this area during each trip, plenty of good food, entertainment and more.

Special thanks to Patrick for helping to make each trip a joy.

Tomorrow it's back to freezing temperatures....

happy rendering...

Reading is fundamental

I love books and reading, I admit that they are my downfall. Our house has many bookshelves, even my fishtank stands were designed to double as bookshelves. :)

My most recent purchase is The Complete Animation course by Chris Patmore. This book is more of a highlight of the many different practices for animation that are out there. It is a very simple read and has spurred a few ideas for me to try and think about to better my stills and animations.

One thing I am trying to work into my next animation project is the use of an oversized background, similar to how Disney (and others) used to do it with cel animation. This makes for a cool combination because you get a full "scene" that you can move your camera around in but with no worries of polygon face counts. I just need the right project looking for this style of work.

I was having a conversation with Miker the Biker about setting up a storyline in Architectural animations. I see it far too often that people just consider the software output to be good enough and give little to no thought about the camera angle, speed and what they are trying to show. I am not saying that you need to do full storyboards but you do need to consider why you are doing this animation. Is it being done to fill time and make it look like you have done more than you really have? Often times less is more.

Take for example the recent Mars trip, the animations that were done for this were top notch (check out MER entry). Good camera angles and often times the main character (the rocket ship) was in and out of the shot. That is my point of pushing the architectural stale look of animations further.

CAD and Customization

After a distressed e-mail from an old friend who needed to make many changes to a set of drawings I whipped up a small visual lisp routine for him to use and he remarked how many hours this has saved him just in these couple of drawings. This led into a good discussion of the many different ways to customize CAD to save you time.

One of my favorite things about AutoCAD is that you can customize it, other times my least favorite thing about AutoCAD is that you can customize it. :) Some of the many ways you can customize it are button macros, script files, lisp, visual lisp, VB, VBA and more. If you work with AutoCAD daily you should really look into learning ways to save you time. What the future holds for programming languages and AutoCAD is anyone's guess at this point, but I expect to see more .net. This would be good for you to know as this can then interface with many other programs to share and exchange information.

My wishlist for customization? I have been learning MAXScripting for VIZ/MAX and love the recorder. I have used this type of feature in other programs that basically give you the code for what you just did. Real programmers would never use this you say? For me I am not a daily programmer so this would give me the code start I need so I can focus on tweaking this into exactly what I need. Many times my coding is used to save time by doing repetitive tasks, other times it is done to create a command or tool that does not exist. That is what I love about this, many ways to do any task and many possible solutions when you add programming to your bag of tricks.

happy coding...

Tadah....

Back from behind the disappearing curtain. Where have I been and why no updates? Sick, working and diving into MAXScripting and MAX 6.

Just finished up a new tutorial on MAXScripting that will be available at the VIZDepot in the next few hours. In my spare time I have offered my time to Steven to help make this great resource even better. If you get the chance stop by and visit the site.

happy rendering...

VIZ Resource

With the New Year bringing many changes the same goes for the VIZDepot which has a new look, content and more. Be sure to visit. Keep up the great work Steve!

Happy Rendering...