More Autodesk Acquisitions!

At Nex Gen VizTod Stephens has noted the following Autodesk press release:

Friday, October 24, 2008

Autodesk Acquiring Softimage

Autodesk announced yesterday that they are acquiring Softimage.


It's becoming easier this year to see where the conspiracy theorists get their ideas from. Those who would claim that Autodesk is buying up companies so their direct competition do not would point to this as another in the long line of defensive acquisitions. Personally I am not sure, but this is a major buying spree!

I note on the same web site from August 20, 2008:

Autodesk Announces ImageModeler 2009Autodesk announced the release of ImageModeler 2009 at SIGGRAPH last week. This is the first Autodesk release of the software since they purchased it from REALVIZ. ImageModeler is used to create photorealistic 3D objects from photographs, including accurate 3D measurements.


RealViz was one of my favourite non-Autodesk tools that had lots of potential but an apparently small following - and the French developers seemed to have a great web site but no marketing smarts. Until last year when Autodesk bought it. I was starting to wonder what had happened to it. I investigated upgrading our classroom set earlier this year and despite the Autodesk front page to the web site got the usual slow runaround ...

Now, this looks like much better news. Presence with fanfare at Siggraph..

However, on another note, I am working my way through the Max Daylighting tool and wanted to compare its output to Radiance. The best way looked to be to use the 'new' Windows executables available from Francesco Anselmo's MinGW-Radiance distribution with the Radiance Control Panel from Ecotect. I have the RCP from v5.6. However, it is no longer downloadable from 'Autodesk Ecotect' web site... Pity. It was one of the more thorough and robust windows front ends to Radiance. No apparent reason for Autodesk to take it off the list of free software?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The world of Art has more money than the world of Building Research!

Check this out!

In Building research we try to get a budget to put some instrumentation into a building someone else is already planning to pay for... Temporarily. With this approach we work with the designers to improve what the owner is prepared to pay for - or if we are REALLy lucky - we get a small part of the research budget to add a detail (solar water heater? fancy smart glazing?) to the design.

It seems the Chicago based Museum of Science and Industry  has a different budget!

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New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp

Mac 3D: New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp -- UK-based developer has new LightUp SketchUp Plugin for Photo-Realistic Rendering and it works on the Mac!The news on the interweb at present - more and more and more plugins for SketchUp. Photorealistic = pretty or realistic or REAL? $64k question

read more | digg story

Planning a Semantic Web site

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear.

For the first time, in many years of following this stuff - since timbl first started writing his web from 50,000ft missives - the very readability of this article gives me hope I might be a participant, not just a user...

read more | digg story

Experimental REFERENCE (from the article): Semantic Web

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?

And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.

Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.

Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."