Thursday, March 25, 2010

Autodesk Announces Features in 2011 Products

I'm in San Francisco today at Autodesk's headquarters to attend the live webcast introducing the company's new 2011 products. I'll be reporting throughout the day on both the Revit products and AutoCAD. For my AutoCAD coverage, visit my other blog at http://cadman-do.blogspot.com/.

The top features announced for the Revit products are:
  • An interactive sunpath tool
  • Large team workflow enhancements
  • New surface rationalization tools
  • Adaptive components

Here's a brief video demonstrating the new interactive sunpath tool. While many of these capabilities were available in previous versions, users now have the ability to visualize the position of the sun within the context of the model.

Within the realm of large team workflow enhancements, users can now control visibility of components across linked projects and tag items such as doors and rooms from in multiple linked project files from within a host file.

Surface rationalization tools and adaptive components enhance the user's ability to model complex components. This brief video shown just now during the webcast shows how adaptive components can be used to model complex curtain walls.