Executive Insights
Can you tell us about your role at the Platform Technologies Division? We have divisions focusing on different vertical markets at Autodesk. There is a group focusing on building, serving architects, construction and building engineers; manufacturing group focusing on manufactured products, and infrastructure group focusing on civil engineering and geographical information systems. My group serves customers across all those groups, sells products that we consider horizontal market products. The main ones of which are Autocad and Autocad LT.
Conceptualising
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In an exclusive interview with FDM Asia, Mark Strassman, Vice President, Marketing & Design, Platform Technology Division gives an overview of design development at Autodesk and the conceptual design capabilities of Autocad 2007. By Goh Tz’en Long
Autocad has been around for almost 25 years and still make up about half the company’s revenue. My group is in charge of defining the roadmap, what features are going into the next version and then actually designing the next version of the software.
Can you lead us through the Autodesk: design, visualise, document, share and migrate paradigm? You have probably heard a lot about Autocad, 25 years ago, it was just about drafting. How do you draw and how do you replace a pencil or a drafting pen? Soon enough customers realise, now I can draw the lines, how do I print?
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How do I actually publish this design? Now, customers don’t just want to print a single page, but multiple pages or share it electronically. The presentation and visualisation, going beyond just drafting lines for building something. But how do I present something? Say, I am building a piece of furniture, before I actually build it, I want to sell it to a client, so I create a whole model of it, visualise it, show it in realistic patterns and materials, so that I can actually take orders before I start building. Improving the workflow. The first version of Autocad was one drafter, doing a page at a time. Now you have multinational work forces, multiple offshore firms working on the same
project. How do they hold it all together? Not to produce one sheet at a time but an entire document set, and then customisation. We sell Autocad and then Autocad LT, just the drafting and publishing version. How do we provide heavy customisation in Autocad? Inside Autodesk, we sell about twenty products that are either built on top of Autocad or shipped with Autocad. And there are thousands of commercial products out there that are also built on Autocad. 75 percent of our customers heavily customise Autocad. So drafting, publishing, presentation, visualisation, customisation, that is how we think about Autocad, and Autocad LT is just 2D drafting.
Executive Insights What has been notable about the new releases since 2004? Since 2004, we have been putting out a new release every March. Autocad 2004 focused on visualisation, the ability to be able to show something in a pretty way, not just have plan and elevation. We made the interface easier with tool palettes, the ability for customers to make their own tool palettes and put content in tools into their application. You will be able to build content into the ‘Design Center’ with about 200 drafting features. In Autocad 2005, every different page in the drawing set, our customers produce sheet sets that can be dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages. Each different page is a separate drawing file in Autocad. Imagine you writing out a 10-page document and each page of that document is a separate 'doc' file. That is how our
How do you draw the lines, arcs and circles that are part of the detailed design? There is a whole process that is beyond just documentation. Starting with conceptual design, where if I want to design a glass, what is it going to look like? How is it going to be curved? How tall is it? The design development, you have your first version, you present it to people and see if you can make this taller or make this wider or make this a different colour.
What innovations are there in Autocad 2007? Autodesk has really only focused on the documentation area, conceptual design and design development, haven’t been in Autodesk products, even physical models. When we go and talk to our customers and say, we’ll make the physical model and use third party software to create these shapes and
You want to present these ideas largely in a way that clients want, and often as a movie, so if it is a piece of furniture, you want to show all sides of the chair, instead of just three elevations. customers were working because they didn’t think it is a requirement to arrange all these pages. So moving Autocad to beyond just being a drafting tool, to enhance the workflow, how do you put entire drawing sets together, make sure pages are numbered and references are aligned between pages? So we have something called the Sheet Set Manager, offered tables, table of contents that reference across the sheet sets. Then last year, we had a release that focused on drafting again, the ability to simply and easily use Autocad for common drafting tasks. So traditionally, people thought that Autocad is just for the documented or detailed design.
forms, but then when I want to document it, I got to start in Autocad all over again. What they told us is: “I want to be able to build these with Autocad.” And that is what Autocad 2007 is all about. So the new version of Autocad is really focused on being able to make the design tools that easily create shapes, click, drag, visualise them, add materials or give a sketchy look. And then, take these designs and document them with the Autocad documentation tools. So you can actually show the clients what the design is going to look like. You want to present these ideas largely in a way that clients want, and often as a movie, so if it is a piece of furniture, you want to show all sides of the chair,
instead of just three elevations, view the movie, swoop around it, or show them in a sketchy way, like in hand drawings. Once you have chosen all the materials and know exactly what it is going to look like, you can apply materials to it, apply lights or turn on the sun, put the background into a photorealistic colour. One of the divisions at Autodesk is called the Media And Entertainment division, previously Discreet and Alias. And they have a lot of technology that is used in motion pictures, to create these photorealistic effects. We take some of that technology, put it into Autocad, so that you can see what you are building before you actually build it. FDM
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