Just last week I had the SpaceMouse Pro in hand again. The key item that impresses me every time I use it is the feeling of having the model in one hand, and a knife or scalpel in the other. This follows the analogy described by an old friend who works with 3D mice - the difference between having a 3D mouse and not having a 3D mouse is like trying to peel an apple with one hand.

I always thought not having a 3D mouse as driving with one arm - trying to steer and shift with one hand. The difference is remarkable when working in 3D. You have the model in one hand, the cursor in the other, and function keys at your command. Ready to work.

I recently wrote that 3D mice can really benefit a company when every 3D designer & engineer is working with one.  Well I did find the information of a study done by 3Dconnexion which showed the average productivity increase was 21%.  Now, let's say that >20% productivity sounds like a lot - then make it 10% and start doing the math - Every 2 weeks you gain 1 day of work. That is incredible.  Now, at 249£ for a SpaceMouse Pro, you pay for the mouse very quickly - even with just a 10% improvement in productivity.  So why wouldn't any smart company or 3D designer not take the obvious step and test one of these devices and start working smarter? Well maybe because they have that built-in skepticism which I had. Working for the last 20+ years with a "normal" mouse, we start to think that it is not only good enough, but it blocks us from imagining how we could really work better with something else.

Well, guess what - that old skepticism is based on "habit" - the habit of how we have worked in the past. 

So, perhaps, it is less a question of "how productivity delivers economic payback" - because that is just simple math, but more a question "how do we uncover our built-in biases" to rethink how we work everyday. If we can do the latter, then solutions like a SpaceMouse Pro start to become natural answers to our search for more productivity and more profitability.

Testing the cloud-based 123D Catch shines light on photos for easily generating geometry from real objects.

Having written the first article on using 123D Catch, I found that reflections and monochromatic surfaces can cause issues in creating good geometry.

It makes sense from a “light as the source of geometric information” perspective. In the first case, if you take 30 photographs of a reflective surface from different positions, you will have 30 different reflected surfaces. That is probably going to cause problems for 123D Catch's algorithms.

In the second case, a smooth, monochromatic surface – even if it has a clearly defined curved or sculpted surface – does not provide easily identified reference points. And 123D Catch needs common reference points from multiple pictures in order to produce geometry.

So on reflection, it seems obvious, but when the first model comes back from the Autodesk cloud and it hardly resembles what you photographed, it is still a surprise.

I'll be looking at more tips on improving your photos for 123D Catch soon.

The annual meeting for digital prototyping in Paris provides a good look at the latest technologies used to produce a product before the first unit is manufactured. Of course there is the CAD-modeling aspect, but quickly Autodesk moves to the combination of simulation and visualization – the strong points differentiating the Product Design Suite offering.

But sometimes we don't start with a blank screen and an idea – products already exist, environments already exist, and either we can model them, scan them, or, now thanks to a technology product from Autodesk, take pictures of them.

123D Catch is a client/cloud product in beta from Autodesk. It seems to me that they have not yet decided whether this becomes a stand-alone product or a technology integrated into a suite or subscription service, but for the moment, that doesn't matter. Today the download is free and you can start generating 3D models from photos almost immediately.

The cool aspect of this product is the ability to easily generate 3D geometry from anything that you can take a picture of. You need a plant in a vase for your architecture models, grab your camera and the flowers on the dining room table. You need a 3D environment for the new coffee machine you just designed, grab your camera and start a photo shoot in your kitchen. Photo-textured 3D geometry of anything you can point a camera at is now not just possible, but easy.

That is the joy of 123D Catch – Autodesk, the company that democratizes technologies – has a hit service with 123D Catch – an enabling tool for all of their design and modeling products which is really so much fun to use. If you are like me, you'll find yourself playing with it for far too long.

Check out the video demonstration Autodesk gave to CADplace, and then download the Windows program from the link above. You'll soon have new 3D models - really useful models which are perfectly adapted for your projects.

I just listened to the quarterly earnings report, and AMD reported reasonable numbers. The new CEO Rory Read spoke about execution and recovering from issues on delivering product. In fact, his most important point came back to executing and delivering on promises.

Sounds great. Companies which execute their business well, naturally tend to do well over the long term for a lot of good reasons.  My thoughts on the layoffs, announced just one week after the earnings report, made we wonder "is this the 'new CEO' effect?" and are these layoffs a quick fix by a CEO to make the markets happy?

I'm not answering that question just yet. There needs to be some evidence on how & where the layoffs are done. My inclination, however, is to say this is a market-pleasing maneuver. The CEO just visited all of his major customers worldwide and promised that AMD was going to execute & deliver on promises. First,with this announcement, we can be certain that if all of the layoffs have not already been decided (and often they are already done before the announcement), then 100% of the company will be worried about becoming part of the 10% to be laid-off. A huge distraction like this will not be help AMD execute and deliver on the company's promises. Second, AMD did not strike me as being a company with a lot of fat. The last five years have seen a lot of changes at AMD and the team in Europe has already been "optimized" - several times in fact.

On the bright side, AMD just released the new FirePro V4900 professional graphics card which will give those of us using professional CAD tools a boost in graphics performance without taking a big bite out of our wallets.  I'm looking forward to seeing more of this new product and will share that with you soon.

Having financially healthy technology partners is a benefit for all of us. You'll see more here as this restructuring unfolds over the next 3 months.

The NVIDIA Professional Solutions Business grew in revenu by 4.2 % last quarter thanks to an increase in enterprise spending.

Sales for professional graphics were up in the second quarter because more of you were spending again. Enterprise spending grew modestly, and the increase improved the financial results for the graphics specialist, NVIDIA.

 Total revenue for the quarter just exceeded the 1 billion dollar mark and more than 1/5 of that came from sales of professional solutions. Although NVIDIA does not disclose the margin contribution from the Quadro products, the professional market provides margins much higher than the corporate average, and the corporate gross margins were 51% last quarter. This is good news for CAD professionals. The high margins are important to NVIDIA which drives the company to defend its dominant market share. To defend its market share, NVIDIA invests strategically in R&D to develop solutions to really hard problems that CAD and other graphics professionals face.

The fortunes of NVIDIA stock prices tend to rise and fall based on the expectations of its mobile processor business outlook, but its bread and butter profits continue to be driven by its professional Quadro and Tesla GPU business. That is good news for CAD professionals.

 In summary, total revenues in the second quarter were $1.017 billion, gross margins were 51.7%, and GAAP earnings per share were $0.25. Professional solutions at NVIDIA contributed $210.3 million to the earnings, an increase quarter on quarter of 4.2%.

The value in a professional graphics workstation is higher than you might realize.

When most of us look for the “right” workstation for our CAD and design needs, we shop for excellent performance, the right level of storage capacity, stability and reliability, and software certifications and support. Being smart shoppers, we judge the value of each system and the value of the key technology inside.

I suspect that one place many of us economize to our own detriment is by selecting a less expensive consumer graphics solution over a comparable professional solution. Being realistic, there are times when you can do that, but besides the issue of reliability, testing, and support for your applications – and the disastrous impact to your projects, profits, and productivity when something goes wrong with a workstation – many professionals will be bypassing significant performance gains as well.

In todays professional applications, the computing environment is moving to a heterogenous computing system. Application developers are creating products that use both GPUs and CPUs for computing. This is a recognition that a GPU is a super-computer-on-a-chip inside a professional workstation. A couple of examples in the CAD and design domain include CATIA V6 from Dassault Systèmes and THEIA RT from optical simulation specialists, Optis.

In the first case, CATIA Shape has integrated iRay from Mental Images – the benefit for industrial designers around the world is simple – interactive ray-traced images of your design. Critical for design productivity, the designer makes a change and interactively visualizes the design with ray-traced quality. How this is possible is due simply to the intelligence of the Mental Images developers. Ray-tracing, although a graphics-specific algorithm for rendering physically accurate images, is a highly intensive computational problem. It has nothing at all to do with the more common, albeit amazing, images generated in real-time using the hardware-implemented graphics pipeline of the GPU. Ray-tracing needs a computing processor, not a GPU, and until recently, ray-tracing was anything but interactive.

So inside CATIA Shape, the Mental Images developers leverage the extreme computing horse-power of the Quadro GPU (or GPUs) in the workstation – a massively parallel-processing GPU – to do the heavy-lifting for the ray-tracing algorithm.

A French specialist in optical simulation, Optis, has been going far beyond the realism of ray-tracing for more than 20 years. Optis is not specialized in creating amazingly realistic looking images, they are specialized in creating amazingly accurate images. The difference is that Optis solutions are optical simulations of the light and its interaction with the entire environment – materials, lighting, natural lighting, reflections, etc. In brief, Optis software is highly regarded by its customers, for example in the automotive, aerospace, and luxury goods industries, where the simulation of light and lighting is critical to the product.

Like so many hard problems in simulation, real-time and interactive were adjectives rarely found – even in the most simple scenarios. When Optis partnered with the GPU experts at AMD, the collaboration resulted in a product Optis calls THEIA RT, permitting exactly that which had not been possible before – interactive visual simulation of complex industrial designs. As in the previous solution, Optis developers leveraged the massively parallel-processing capabilities of the GPU. In this case, by teaming with AMD and using the OpenCL environment to access the GPU's power.

And AMD themselves are uniquely positioned and, I suspect, highly motivated to push this platform to new capabilities. Just a short time ago, I spoke with AMD about the development of their Fusion heterogenous computing environment. As CAD professionals, we don't need to care about this, but the people developing our applications do care a great deal about this platform. We all know that so many problems today take huge computational resources – FEA, CFD, almost any area of engineering, design, or architectural simulation – and when the developers of your applications have an easy way to access the super-computer hidden inside your workstation, they are going to make it possible for you to do thing tomorrow which you don't even consider today. All of which will help you and your company to be more productive, more creative, and more competitive.

So remember, when you are looking at your new workstation requirements, do some checking to see if you can unlock a graphics super-computer. Because in the examples above, and more and more new examples, the results are stunning. And if you are not looking, then the fact that your workstation leverages professional GPU-computing is invisible to you.