Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Vasari and Autodesk Labs goodies

Have you heard about Project Vasari? I sure hope so! I have not posted anything about it here yet, but if you read Revit-related blogs, you have certainly crossed paths.

Project Vasari is a stripped down version of Revit. “Why would I want a stripped down version of Revit”, you might ask? Well, it’s really intended as a conceptual design tool, something extremely powerful yet not so intimidating to those newbies wanting to explore Revit’s way of working (I’m pointing at you, Mr. & Mrs. Designers-that-only-want-to-SketchUp!). So even though a lot of typical Revit functionality is not in it, everything to do with conceptual design (massing, panelization, etc.) is there in all its glory. And then some.

Vasari is also being used as a sort of sand-box to test new features, ideas and possible future functionality (ex: double click to enter edit mode). So if you do a lot of fiddling around with Fully-Fledged Revit, you might want to install this free tool and use that instead. After all, the files are fully compatible and can be utilized downstream in the full licensed version.

So head over to Autodesk Labs and download Project Vasari 1.1 Technology Preview. There are some very exciting new tools and features, such as two new Ecotect plugins, Nucleus form-finding tools and 3d printing. Another exciting thing about Vasari is it’s shiny, brand new community site: ProjectVasari.com. It is integrated with Facebook, Google and Yahoo identities to make it easy for you to get online. You can share comments and feedback, upload images and files and hear from the experts in the field. Who wouldn’t want to be logged in to the same site as Matt Jezyk, Zach Kron and the other bright stars that are behind Revit? (sorry, I wanted to name all of you, but my laptop battery is about dead and I don’t feel like getting up to plug in the adapter!)

Some other exciting projects in the Lab are Project Nucleus (now part of Vasari) and Project Galileo. There are other things you might be interested in, so visit often and poke around. Nucleus sure looks awesome and I can’t wait to play around with it (but I DO have to plug my adapter for that).


Share/Save/Bookmark

0 comments:

Post a Comment