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Autodesk Announces ReCap Connect Partnership Program

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With its new ReCap Connect Partnership Program, Autodesk will open up Autodesk ReCap – its reality capture platform – to third party developers and partners, allowing them to extend ReCap’s functionality.

“Autodesk has a long history of opening our platforms to support innovation and extension,” said Robert Shear, senior director, Reality Solutions, Autodesk. “With the ReCap Connect Partnership Program, we’ll be allowing a talented pool of partners to expand what our reality capture software can do. As a result, customers will have even more ways to start their designs with accurate dimensions and full photo-quality context rather than a blank screen.”

There are many ways for partners to connect to the ReCap pipeline, which encompasses both laser-based and photo-based workflows.  Partners can write their own import plug-in to bring structured point cloud data into ReCap and ReCap Pro using the Capture Codec Kit that is available as part of the new ReCap desktop version. DotProduct – a maker of handheld, self-contained 3D scanners – is the first partner to take advantage of this capability.

“Autodesk’s ReCap Connect program will enable a 50x data transfer performance boost for DotProduct customers — real time 3D workflows on tablets just got a whole lot faster. Our lean color point clouds will feed reality capture pipelines without eating precious schedule and bandwidth.” Tom Greaves, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, DotProduct LLC.

Alternately, partners can take advantage of the new Embedded ReCap OEM program to send Reality Capture Scan (RCS) data exports from their point cloud processing software directly to Autodesk design products, which all support this new point cloud engine, or to ReCap and ReCap Pro. The first signed partners in the Embedded ReCap OEM program are: Faro, for their Faro Scenesoftware; Z+F for their LaserControl software; CSA for their PanoMap software, LFM for their LFM software products; and Kubit for their VirtuSurv software.  All these partners’ software will feature this RCS export in their coming releases.

“Partnering with Autodesk and participating in the ReCap Connect program helps FARO to ensure a fluent workflow for customers who work with Autodesk products. Making 3D documentation and the use of the captured reality as easy as possible is one of FARO’s foremost goals when developing our products. Therefore, integrating with Autodesk products suits very well to our overall product strategy.” – Oliver Bürkler, Senior Product Manager, 3D Documentation Software & Innovation, FARO

As a third option, partners can build their own application on top of the Autodesk photo-to-3D cloud service by using the ReCap Photo Web API. More than 10 companies – serving markets ranging from medical and civil engineering, to video games and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – have started developing specific applications that leverage this capability, or have started integrating this capability right into their existing apps. Some of the first partners to use the ReCap Photo Web API include Soundfit, SkyCatch and Twnkls.

“Autodesk’s cloud based ReCap is an important part of the SoundFit’s 3D SugarCube Scanning Service.  Autodesk’s ReCap service has enabled SoundFit to keep the per scan cost of its service very low, opening new markets, such as scans for hearing aids, custom fit communications headsets, musicians monitors and industrial hearing protection. ReCap allows SoundFit to export 3D models in a wide variety of popular 3D formats, so SoundFit customers and manufacturers can import them into Autodesk CAD packages from AutoCAD to 123D Design, or send them directly to any 3D printer or 3D printing service bureau.” – Ben Simon-Thomas, CEO & Co-Founder

For more information about the ReCap Connect Partnership Program, contact Dominique Pouliquen at Email Contact.

Additional Partner Supporting Quotes

“ReCap Connect gives our PointSense and PhoToPlan users smart and fully integrated access to powerful ReCap utilities directly within their familiar AutoCAD design environments. The result is a more simple and efficient overall workflow. ReCap Photo 360 image calibration eliminates the slowest part of a kubit user’s design process resulting in significant time savings per project.” – Matthias Koksch, CEO, kubit

“ReCap, integrated with CSA’s PanoMap Server, provides a powerful functionality to transfer laser scan point cloud data from large-scale 3D laser scan databases to Autodesk products.  Using the interface, the user can select any plant area by a variety of selection criteria and transfer the laser scan points to the design environment in which they are working. The laser scan 3D database of the plant can have thousands of laser scans.” – Amadeus Burger, President, CSA Laser Scanning

“Autodesk’s industry leading Recap photogrammetry technology will be instrumental in introducing BuildIT’s 3D Metrology solution to a broader audience by significantly reducing data capture complexity and cost.” – Vito Marone, Director Sales & Marketing, BuildIT Software & Solutions

“I am very pleased with the ReCap Photo API performance and its usefulness in fulfilling our 3D personalization needs. I believe the ReCap Photo API is the only product that is available in the market today that meets our needs.” – Dr. Masuma, PhD., Founder of iCrea8

 

Angela Costa Simoes

Senior PR Manager

DIRECT  +1 415 547 2388

MOBILE  +1 415 302 2934

@ASimoes76

Autodesk, Inc.

The Landmark @ One Market, 5th Floor

San Francisco, CA 94105

www.autodesk.com

Massive Software announces Massive 6.0 crowd simulation software

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Massive 6.0

New look, new GUI

Massive has a completely new graphic user interface. With graphic design by Lost in Space the new interface not only looks stylish and modern but provides a much smoother interactive user experience. Dialog windows and editors now turn up in the new side panel, keeping the workspace clear and tidy. The main window now hosts multiple panels that can be configured to suit the users needs, and the configurations can be recalled for later use. Since any panel can be a viewport it’s now possible to have up to 5 viewports open at once, each using a different camera.

Massive

 

3D placement

The existing placement tools in Massive have been extended to work in 3 dimensions, independently of the terrain. The point generator can be placed anywhere in space, the circle generator becomes a sphere, the polygon generator gains depth, the spline generator becomes tubular. There’s also a new generator called the geometry generator, which takes a wavefront .obj file and fills the polygonal volume with agents.

 

Auto action import

Building complex agents with hundreds of actions can be a time consuming process, but it doesn’t have to be anymore. In Massive 6.0 the action importing process can be completely automated, reducing what could be months of work to a few minutes. Also, all of the import settings for all of the actions can be saved to a file so that revisions of source motion can be imported in seconds using the same settings as earlier revisions.

Massive

Bullet dynamics

To effortlessly build a mountain of zombies it would be useful to have extremely stable rigid body dynamics. Massive 6.0 supports bullet dynamics, significantly increasing dynamics stability. Just for fun we had 1000 mayhem agents throw themselves off a cliff into a pile on the ground below. Without tweaking of parameters we easily created an impressive zombie shot, demonstrating the stability and ease of use of bullet dynamics.

No typing required

While it is possible to create almost any kind of behaviour using the brain nodes in Massive, it has always required a little typing to specify inputs and outputs of the brain. This is no longer necessary with the new channel menu which allows the user to very quickly construct any possible input or output channel string with a few mouse clicks.

These are just some of the new features of Massive 6.0, which is scheduled for release in September.

 

Massive for Maya

 

Massive has always been a standalone system, and now there’s the choice to use Massive standalone as Massive Prime and Massive Jet, or in Maya as Massive for Maya.

 

Set up and run simulations in Maya

Massive for Maya facilitates the creation of Massive silmuations directly in Maya. All of the Massive scene setup tools such as flow field, lanes, paint and placement editors have been seamlessly reconstructed inside Maya. The simulation workflow has been integrated into Maya to allow for intuitive running, recording and playback of simulations. To achieve this a record button has been added next to the transport controls and a special status indicator has been included in the Massive shelf. Scrubbing of simulations of thousands of agents in Maya is now as simple and efficient as scrubbing the animation of a single character.

Massive Software 3D imaging for crowd placement and simulation

Set up lighting in Maya

The Massive agents automatically appear in preview renders as well as batch renders alongside any other objects in the scene. Rendering in Maya works for Pixar’s RenderMan, Air, 3Delight, Mental Ray and V-Ray. This allows for lighting scenes using the familiar Maya lighting tools, without requiring any special effort to integrate Massive elements into the scene. Furthermore, all of this has been achieved without losing any of the efficiency and scalability of Massive.

 

Edit simulations in Maya graph editor

Any of the agents in a simulation can be made editable in the Maya graph editor. This allows for immediate editing of simulations without leaving the Maya environment. Any changes made to the animation in the graph editor automatically feed back to the Massive agents, so the tweaked agents will appear in the render even though the user sees a Maya character for editing purposes in the viewport. The editing process can even be used with complex animation control rigs, allowing animators and motion editors complete freedom to work however they want to.

 

 

Massive Software 3D imaging for crowd placement and simulationDirectable characters

A major advantage of Massive for Maya is the ability to bring Massive’s famous brains to character animation, providing another vital tool for creating the illusion of life. While animation studios have integrated Massive into their pipeline to do exactly this for years, the ability to create directable characters has not been within easy reach for those using off-the-shelf solutions. With Massive for Maya it’s now possible to create characters using a handful of base cycles, takes and expressions that can handle such tasks as keeping alive, responding to the the focus of the shot, responding to simple direction, or simply walking along a path, thus reducing the amount of work required to fill out a scene with characters which are not currently the focus of the shot. For example, in a scene in which two characters are talking with eachotherand a third character, say a mouse, is reacting, the mouse could be driven by it’s Massive counterpart. The talking characters would drive their Massive counterparts thereby being visible to the mouse. Using attributes in the talking characters, their Massive counterparts could change colour to convey their emotional states to the mouse agent. The mouse agent then performs appropriately, using it’s animation cycles, blend shape animations etc in response to the performance of the talking characters, and looking at whichever character is talking. Once the agents for a project have been created, setting up a shot for this technique requires only a few mouse clicks and the results happen in real-time. Any edits to the timing of the shot will simply flow through to the mouse performance.

SCANable offers on-site 3D imaging of real-world people/characters to populate your 3D crowd asset library in Massive’s crowd placement and simulation software. Contact us today for a free quote.