HP Designjet T2300 eMultifunction Printer (eMFP)

One of the things you get to see at Autodesk University is some of the products suppliers have come up with. While I have a popular Civil 3D blog, I tend to be a poor plotter. I usually let the CAD staff print out items to the large format printer. I usually botch it and have it come out the wrong way and need to trim a large amount of paper from the plot. HP has introduced a solution to help fix my printing problem called the HP ePrint & Share platform. The platform provides a preview image of the printout showng the DesignJet plotter with how the sheet will be aligned. This would help me correct my printing problem.

As well as helping me fix my printer problems the platform puts the printout on to an external server farm as a PDF. With this farm the printouts are available to print out in other locations. So you could share the files with others in other locations, letting them print directly to their Designjet plotter, since it works with older Designjet plotters.

I also got the opportunity to check out the HP Designjet T2300 eMFP. The plotter has a sleek look with a touch screen display. Just like the consumer small format printers, the plotter lets you print from a USB stick, so you could print out a visitor’s plot’s without having them to bring the paper files in. I think it would be especially useful for people coming on an airplane trip.

Also available on the plotter is the ability to scan paper drawings. To convert the paper drawings to CAD, a copy of Raster Design is included with the purchase of the plotter.

While I haven’t field tested the plotter, it looks like a promising system. For more information:

www.hp.com/go/eprintandshare, www.hp.com/go/collaborate

Slope Stability Analysis with AutoCAD® Civil 3D

I probably wouldn’t have focused on Peat so much. Peat can be quite deep.

The class is similar to concepts of taking Civil 3D surfaces and convert them into Map data for analysis. The rest of the class is similar to past classes Dana Probert has done on hydrology analysis. Would be a good source for additional information for the Map process.

If you want to automate the process to convert surfaces to shapefiles, check out these posts:

• http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2009/02/split-tin-triangle-elevation-range.html
• http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2009/02/2d-area-of-tin-triangle.html 
• http://blog.civil3dreminders.com/2009/02/slope-ranges.html

The posts don’t provide a complete solution, but provide a way to process the triangles for slopes to create polylines from the surface and then export the polylines into map. Could also add the elevation or object data to the polylines at the time of conversion.

Dang, he came up short on content to fill the whole hour.

Link to Class: http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=event_class&session_id=6919&jid=610991

Delving Deeper: Mastering the Autodesk® Civil Visualization Extension

Deeper Concepts

• Object Library Categories, stored in Resource Kits. The files are stored in there in the appropriate file. The ini is the parameter for the max file to get object settings.
• Resource Kit Manager to add items to a kit or modify them.
• Materials assigned in the file or allow Dynamite to assign materials with material IDs.
• Move the pivot point to the ground level, center of the vehicle.
• In the XZ plane the vehicle needs to be facing you.
• Make sure the transformation is reset to make the current one is normal, Dynamite will ignore any translations, rotations or scaling.
• Negative values make the vehicle go backwards to the direction of the shape to track.
• Exporter configuration file can be changed.
• Textures are assigned by u and v direction, u is normal to the object and v is tangential. (U-Tile, V-Tile)
• U-Tile value of -1 indicates how many times it’s repeated across the link.
• Using subassembly Type it will apply across multiple links.
• ID is the material type.
• Negative ID will flip the materials.

Optimizing Mental Ray

• Think of visualization as a photographer (Set the settings for exposure)
• May need to change the exposure control (EV) from the one Dynamite VSP uses.
• Final gather lets you get indirect illumination.
• Anti-aliasing will give better precision for viewing objects, say in Min 1 to Max 16
• Soft Shadow Precision, blur affect on shadows. Higher values for long shadows, esp. for lots of shadows.
• Glossy Reflection Precision probably isn’t needed for a infrastructure scene, probably use a smaller precision to get quicker rendering (Not all the way down).
• Glossy Refraction Precision, lower it down to get down.
• Look at slides to get the differences in render times. Shows the difference in quality and render time comparison.
• Use difference values for still images and animation.
• For animation render the final gather first and then the objects, not quite clear on this, need to look at the paper for the class.
• Daylight system can add clouds, steps in handout.

Rendered Output for Design Analysis

• Sight Checker, can see how far an object can be seen. More of a test to visually prove the design works. Not really a design tool.

Object Paint in 3ds Max Design

• Tool to add trees to a scene.

Wrap up and 3D Movie

• Can do a 3D movie, need to look on the web for links to create them.

Class Link: http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=event_class&session_id=6734&jid=610990

DV220-3 Join the Revolution: Rendering with iRay

Notes, came in a bit late from the general session and trying to figure out where to go. Forgot to write down class locations.

Used to make photo realization without having to do a lot of set up.

Tries to mimic real life for the rendering. A whole lot of bounces of natural light that happens at the same time, iRay tries to mimic that process.

iRay takes some of the guess work out of the rendering process and makes less sight specific setup required. GPUs have provided better floating point precision to get a better rendering engine to make easier to use.

Lights and materials need to be physically possible, energy conservation is used to make sure the energy goes some where.

Built for people who don’t have a whole lot of experience rendering, people like me.

Hardware requirements: CUDA capable GPUs,

• Use the latest Driver!!!!
• SLI should be off for multi-GPU systems (will slow down the processing)
• ECC should be off for Quadro and Tesla GPUs based on “Fermi” (3ds Max may not open)

Memory Usage

• Entire scene must fit into GPU graphics memory, larger more complicated scenes needs more GPU power.
• Each card needs enough room since the cards don’t add together for the room, use the largest one.
• About 1GB memory per 8 million triangles.

Motherboards

• Gaming may not work well since they aren’t built for continuous computations, may cause early computer failure.

Supported Materials

• mental ray Arch & Design
• Autodesk Materials (except metallic paint)
• Autodesk Material Library
• Some settings are ignored, ambient occlusion, round corners and final gather.
• No programmable shaders, means some of the shipped materials don’t render. Avoid Autodesk wall paint and Autodesk Hardwood (takes up more processing, takes longer)

Use photometric lights (Target Light, Free Light, mr Sky Portal, IES)

Set up materials, setup the lights and then render.

Render Settings

• Four simple settings
• Camera Depth of Field
• Exposure, tone mapping
• Output Resolution
• Render Duration (longer time, better results) Infinite and come back and stop it or a set time like 30 minutes to get to a meeting on time.

I need to beef up on remembering my high school photography class terminology of F-Stop and aperture.

MAXScript Options http://dimensao3.com/al/ (Need to research this some more)

90% transparent window glass, may want to just turn off the glass to increase performance.

Process should get better with manufactures coming out with better GPU with Kepler and Maxwell (16x better) CUDA GPU Roadmap

GPU processing should make things better.

Link to class: http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=event_class&session_id=8919&jid=625417

Custom Bench Subassembly

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