Autodesk University 2016 Summary

By Clint Brown

I was fortunate enough to attend Autodesk University in Las Vegas this year and I have to say that this year was the best one yet.

The Cadline team arrived in Las Vegas on the Saturday afternoon. We decided to go on an Infrastructure road trip on the Sunday and visited the Hoover Dam. The dam is unbelievable, it really is an amazing feat of engineering.

Day 0:  The day before the conference kicked off officially was filled up with meetings, both with some of our customers that were out at AU, and with Autodesk staff and product managers.

In the evening, I attended the Autodesk Fusion 360 meet up, which was fun. I met up with some friends at Autodesk that I have known for years and also a few new faces.

Day 1: The official start of proceedings kicked off with a class at 08h00 on Fusion Lifecycle (formerly PLM360) followed by the opening Keynote.

The keynote session started with a live DJ, followed by a rapper and beat boxer! Unlike recent years, there were no specific product launches at the keynote, but it was revealed that Dreamcatcher will become a commercially available product early next year. See the article below for more details on the keynote 

Day one finished off with a Fusion Configure class, where I caught up with some of the team behind the product.

I attended an awesome class on Textile integration with Fusion 360, hosted by Mike Aubrey and Bill Dieter. The premise of the class was to use a digital mannequin in Fusion 360, and to then use surfaces to create clothing panels. The next part was to use 3rd party software called Exact Flat to flatten out the panels for textile design. 

Blogger Social

The blogger social was pretty cool this year, there were some pretty big names from Autodesk in attendance, including Shan Hurley, Lynn Allen, Jeff Kowalski and Kean Walmsley. Check out Shan's blog post on the event by clicking on the image below. It's always fun to catch up with the other bloggers and tweeters and "nerding out" at these gatherings. 

 Day 2 Proper 

Product Innovation Keynote 

All I can say is WOW! Autodesk made some huge announcements. 3 key areas have had some significant investment, the M&E (Visual effects) folks have a host of new cloud enabled tools that allow for easy collaboration and sharing. BIM 360 Docs has been updated with 58 updates this year, the product is starting to mature and is now the perfect Common Data Environment for all of your BIM needs.

Fusion 360 updates were announced by Steve Hooper of Autodesk. My 2 favourite new features that were shared, are Browser based modelling, which will mean that we should be able to design products anywhere and on practically any device, and the new generative design tools. The ability to create not only optimised geometry like we can in Inventor's shape generator, but the ability to create optimised lattice structures (Project Dreamcatcher) in the internal voids of the model.

I was chatting to Rob Cohee the day before, and he showed me this really cool part, which was designed in Fusion 360 using this new technology (see the images below). Turns out, that I had been holding the very part that was on the main stage presentation the next morning!

The images below are from the Autodesk blog post on what was announced at the keynote.

We finished up the 2nd day with a couple of meetings and then the big AU party. 

This year it was a street party, which was fun, the Cadline team met up with some customers who had made the journey over, and even a few Autodesk employees. I have shared a few snaps of the party below.

Day 3:

The 3rd day started with the closing keynote. This years keynote was a lot of fun, it was co-hosted by comedian Rob Corddry. Below is the recording of the closing Keynote, please note that Rob Corddry uses some colourful language.

After the keynote I attended the Inventor Futures session. Unfortunately I am unable to share too much about this session, but what I would suggest, is that if you are interested in finding out more about Inventor 2018, then sign up for the Inventor BETA, to do this, visit https://beta.autodesk.com 

Some of my other highlights from AU2016, which I shared on my twitter feed were: