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Thursday, November 7, 2013

UPDATED: An Industry First: Autodesk Provides Full-fledged 3D Design Software in a Web Browser, Including Revit!

From the Autodesk press release...

"Customers will now be able to access Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max design tools via a web browser. For the first time ever, customers can access full-fledged 3D design, engineering and entertainment work in a browser without sacrificing performance, power or functionality."

This technology preview is available in Autodesk Remote. Remote allows users to drive Autodesk software installed on their primary computer from a remote PC or iPad, utilizing its full power in their 3D design and modeling work regardless of the device. This capability has now been expanded to include access to Autodesk applications hosted in the cloud.

The full press release can be viewed here.

UPDATE:Scott Sheppard wrote an informative post about this new development on the It's Alive in the Lab blog.

UPDATE: Shoon Hurley has written about his hands-on experience with this new technology preview on his Between the Lines blog.

Credit: The REVIT Structure Learning Curve blog.

4 comments:

Peter in Maryland said...

I will ask you the same thing I asked Shackleford: How can this work, unless your data also resides on autodesk servers? Our firm cannot put our clients' confidential (and often secure) design information on an outside server, so let's break it down: We would have to 'dial out' to get access to some software, then thru that program, dial back into our own server to access the files. Is that efficient or forward-thinking?

Tim Grimm said...

Peter: This a technology preview, and I think it's pretty impressive. There will always be security issues with confidential information, so a cloud solution may not be for you.

Peter in Maryland said...

From autodesk's license agreement for 360:

“You hereby grant Autodesk (or warrant that the licensor of such rights has expressly granted) a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, paid-up, worldwide, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) license to store, display, reproduce, modify, use and transmit Your Content, and further waive “moral” rights or other rights with respect to attribution of authorship or integrity of Your Content that You may have under any applicable law and under any legal theory.”

If you have clients who are paying you to design a building for them, why would ANY of them agree to this utter relinquishment of control of their design data? On top of that, autodesk says they are not responsible for the loss of any of your data, should there be any type of technology failure. This cloud idea is solely to help eliminate software piracy - autodesk has no other purpose, they care only about what's good for autodesk.

Your site is outstanding, tho, and is an excellent resource - thank you.

Tim Grimm said...

Geez, that's very Facebook like - but with a lot more expensive/valuable data. It's good for all of us that folks like you pay attention to the details Peter. Thanks!

Thanks for your compliment on my blog too. :)