Outside the Lines
Technical Marketing Manager Todd Hunter provides his colorful views, opinions, and expertise on Autodesk Impression, remote controlled helicopters, Triumph motorcycles, and everything in between. Read his blog and chances are you’ll learn more about treble, bass and oil filter maintenance.
Latest Post
- posted 01/30/07 by Todd Hunter Impression Understands You (Unlike Your Parents)
- Trying to create presentation graphics inside of AutoCAD usually involved using hatches and gradients in your DWG to give it a stylistic look. Some people could get pretty nice results like this but there is a limit to how stylistic you can get using AutoCAD hatches and gradients.
Impression feels your pain and wants to help. Impression understands your hatches and knows what you are trying to do with them. When you open your DWG in Impression, the hatches within the DWG are tuned into Styles that can be edited and tweaked. It is a soothing feeling you get when you can adjust the media of the lines within your hatch, or at least it was for me the first time I tried it. You can even add elements to your hatch, like a filled background for example, allowing you to exploit your creative side and go way beyond what you thought a hatch could do for you. Impression is comforting like a close friend that understands your design intent and wants to nurture your ability to easily create beauty from blah CAD lines. Impression will always be there for you, only as far away as your mouse and your monitor.
Your parents, on the other hand, don't have a clue what a hatch is, or why you would need to make an ugly CAD file blossom into a captivating image that stirrs the imagination of people who view it. Oh sure, Mom will do your laundry if you bring it to her but only because it the only time she gets to see you. But does she inspire you like Impression? Does she understand your blocks and sheet size? Only if you separate it from the darks.....
Previous Posts
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Q: How Do I Create Blocks in Impression? A: Like this..
Posted 01/23/07 by Todd Hunter
I did another webcast today. As the word on Impresion gets out, I have more and more people attending the live webcasts. If you have not been able to watch one yet, don't worry, there will be more. Keep your eye on the Comm Center in Impression for future dates.
I always field questions during the webcasts and today there was one in particular that makes me want to clarify some things about Impression blocks and how to work with them.
Creating a block is easy. A block can be created from any gemoetry on the canvas including bitmaps that you have opened or imported. The block palette has to be open first so just hit the F5 key to open it. so you can get to the Create Block icon. With the block palette open, simply select the desired gemetry or bitmap and select the Create Block From Viewport Selection icon.
You will see your block as a swatch thumbnail in the blocks palette list and you will be prompted to name your block. That is it! Your block is ready to be dragged onto the canvas and/or shared with another IRF file.
If you want to create a library of blocks, one way to do it would be to create all of your bloks in one IRF file and to save your IRF in a folder that would represent your library.
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Come and Get It!
Posted 01/18/07 by Todd Hunter
The latest preview version of Impression is avalable on labs.autodesk.com.
This is by far the most mature build of Impression to date and many of the workflows have been streamlined. The first thing you will notice is the dashboard panel on the left side of the UI. This frees up more of the canvas and keeps the most used paletts available. The Style Editor palette is now in the middle of the dashboard and is context sensitive so that based on what you have selected, it displays the apropriate style swatch. You can easily see the style element stack by rolling out the Edit button. Acsess the editable parameters of each element with the fly-out arrows next the element name.
One of my favorites new features is the ability to re-size a style.
Another one of my favorites is the way you can navigate to, and load individual styles from another .IRF file instead of having to load the entire saved style library.
Go ahead and download it and give it a try. You can install it after you uninstall the previous version. All of your current work will open and function transparently in the new version, as one would expect.
As always, we want to hear your comments and ideas.
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Where Has Todd Gone?
Posted 01/11/07 by Todd Hunter
I'M HERE, I'M HERE!
Just been busy with holiday breaks and a slight illness, but nothing a lot of sleep could not cure. Clearly I have not mastered the habbit of posting to my blog but get ready for a flood of info to be posted.......
Anyway, here is a quick tip on using the Freehand Tool in Impression.
TIP - Freehand Tool
Using the freehand tool, you can literally draw any shape just like using a pen or pencil. Give it a try, just remember that you only need to click once for a "pencil down" and start drawing. Click a second time only when you want the "pencil up".
After creating geometry with the freehand tool you can then use Bezier grips to adjust and fine tune the line. Just double click on the line and you will see green control points. Click on a control point and red Besier grips appear adjacent to it. Drag these grips around to adjust and tweak your line to your hearts desire.
For people who are anxiously waiting to see what is next for Impression, you will be happy to know that since the holiday break, wonderfull things have happened to Impression and the next Technolgy Preview to be released will be sporting a new UI as well as some other great new features based directly on feedback from users.