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posted 12/12/06 by Lisa Crounse Developer Spotlight - Scott Morrison

Today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Scott Morrison. Scott is a software developer on our team and is lucky enough to work at home in beautiful Oregon. Although he's remote, he does adhere to the Autodesk policy of surrounding oneself with animals (see below).

Scott was kind enough to answer a few questions for me the other day.

Q: Who are you and why are you here?

A: Well, that’s a deep question. It all started 13.6 billion years ago with a singularity...Oh, I guess that’s too much information.

Basically I’m a nerd from way back. I taught myself BASIC in 1974, and I’ve loved to program ever since. I worked for almost 10 years in the math department at IBM Research and moved to Autodesk in 1993. After working on 3ds max for a long time our team was transferred to the Platform Technology Division to work on 3ds viz, and then Impression.

I work out of my house in Portland Oregon, and I’m a very happy guy. I sit all day at home coding cool graphics software. What could be more fun than that?

Q: What parts of the application do you work on?

A: I’m the lead user interface programmer and I implemented the Area Fill tool. I also had a hand in some of the basic software architecture which Impression is built upon.

Q: What has been the most exciting part of working on Impression?

A: Working on the Area Fill tool has been both frustrating and fun. In the early beta version of Impression I tried to use a “perfect” algorithm which computed all the areas in a drawing in a mathematically beautiful way. This was the planar map algorithm. Unfortunately this was slow and very difficult to code. Eventually floating point precision difficulties led to problems which could not be solved. Lots of people said to me “Well other applications can do this.” At first I’d reply that it’s a different problem in some other applications since theay are pixel based, and Impression is vector based. Then I had my “Aha!” moment: Why not compute the fill in pixel space and convert the boundary to vectors? I tossed out 3 months of the hardest programming I’ve ever done and started again from scratch. Now it works fast and reliably, and people love the tool. That’s exciting for a programmer.

Important Stats about Scott and Impression

Cats in Scott's office: 5
Lines of code in Impression: As of 12/12/2006, 787,056. It’s mostly in C# with some C++ and a smattering of C.

Stay tuned as my next entry will have a sneek peek at a new UI element in development for Impression.


Scott at home pondering what he can do next with the Area Fill tool.

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