Autodesk’s President and CEO, Andrew Anagnost, kicks off AU 2017 with a unique perspective on automation and the Future of Work. Passionate about the topic, Andrew gives you the confidence to embrace this new future, and guest speakers share insights to help you thrive in this new world of working. You are left informed and excited about this future.

SPEAKERS

ANDREW ANAGNOST

Although I’m not much of a fan for Las Vegas per se, I do enjoy attending Autodesk’s annual spectacle that attracts at least 10,000 attendees to Sin City — Autodesk University.

This year’s event was markedly different than ones in the recent past. Different because:

• This was the first AU presided over by Autodesk’s new President and CEO, Andrew Anagnost
• The attention the Forge development platform received
• AEC and construction seemed to take center stage for much of the event and the exhibit floor
• Generative design and Fusion 360 were emphasized on the manufacturing side of the business
• The Internet of Things (IoT) is getting a lot of attention fro Autodesk and will be coming out of the shadows very soon
• The “cloud” was everywhere, including the addition of AnyCAD into Fusion 360

I’ll briefly discuss each of these bulleted items, but will cover each of them in more detail in coming weeks

Words From The New CEO

An interesting numerical comparison he made that back in the day there were approximately 300,000 drafters in design, manufacturing, and architecture. Compare that to today’s approximately 10,000,000 design software users and you appreciate how things have changed by the sheer number of people involved on the creative design side.

This week Autodesk also announced that it has formed a new partnership with Village Capital to fund the creation of their workforce development and transition initiative, focused on entrepreneurship, job training, and upskilling in a world of automation. The company is also teaming up with LinkedIn Learning to offer free access to more than 40 courses in multiple languages, relevant to the architecture, infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing industries.

Technology can accelerate solutions to our most pressing problems, such as anticipated global population growth of 30 percent by 2050, but only if people are prepared work with machines in new ways. These are the latest moves in Autodesk’s efforts to prepare the workforce to thrive in a future that will require people to make and build more, do it better, and with less negative impact on the world.

New enhancements to 3D Interconnect in SOLIDWORKS 2018 allow for the import of custom properties and materials of third-party CAD Files. For those that don’t know, 3D Interconnect is an awesome tool added in SOLIDWORKS 2017 which makes it possible to work directly with third-party CAD files, rather than using the standard import and translation methods. 3D Interconnect allows SOLIDWORKS to directly read these parts and assemblies without translation, removing the possibility of translation errors that Import Diagnostics would need to fix. It also creates a parametric link to the original part or assembly file, allowing it to update if the file is changed in its third-party CAD software. Finally, 3D Interconnect maintains face and edge IDs so that when the file is updated, any mates or additional features added inside of SOLIDWORKS are preserved. File types that currently work with 3D Interconnect are:

• ACIS*
• Autodesk® Inventor: .ipt for V6 – V2016, .iam for V11 – V2016
• CATIA® V5: .CATPart, .CATProduct for V5R8 – 5–6R2016
• IGES*
• JT*
• NX™ software: .prt for UG 11 – NX 10
• PTC® Creo: .prt, .prt.*, .asm, .asm.* for Pro/ENGINEER® 16 – Creo 3.0
• Solid Edge®: .par, .asm, .psm for V18 – ST8
• STEP*

*File types now supported in SOLIDWORKS 2018