Picture: Tobias Horvarth/Flickr

Leading design software company Autodesk has revealed that it will soon be unveiling a range of new cloud-based add-on functionalities which will enable its customers to significantly increase their efficiency and productivity.

The California-headquartered company provides 3D modelling tools for manufacturers, engineers, architects and film makers. With its software forming a staple part of designers’ tool sets, outside of the commercial world it is perhaps most famous for the solutions it provided for 2009’s special effects rich Hollywood blockbuster Avatar.

Andrew Anagnost, the company’s vice president of suites and web services, flew into the UK from the US last week to host a discussion on the new cloud developments. The Cloud Circle joined a small group of trade and press journalists in attendance.

“Essentially,” began Anagnost, “Autodesk has been offering some of the services that we now associate with cloud for years. By this I mean things like mobility – allowing people to work on multiple platforms from remote locations – and Software-as-a-Service based delivery of our programmes. There are already more than 2.5 million users of AutoCad WS [the cloud-based version of Autodesk’s portfolio leading programme] and Autodesk’s Buzzsaw project hosting system has been available for more than a decade.

“Now, we are able to offer businesses a whole new range of functionality through dynamic power and bandwidth.”
Powered by Amazon’s EC2 elastic cloud platform, the new cloud-based services that Autodesk will provide are centred round three areas – simulation, visualisation and online reviewing.

Simulation is perhaps the most exciting of the three. Autodesk will be offering a service whereby users of its modelling software can upload designs and get 20 optimised variations back in return. The benefits are two-fold: the time it takes to produce the extra designs is radically reduced from how long it would take a human to design them, with renderings up to five times faster; and the designs can benefit from material optimisation and minimisation, from a cost, quality or environmental performance perspective.

This is an example of Monte Carlo analysis, which, as Simon May of Microsoft alluded to at last week’s 7th Cloud Circle Forum, is only now available, from a cost and time perspective, with the advent of the cloud.

“It can take someone a day to complete a rendering, but we can give them multiple versions of an entire portfolio in two hours. That’s game changing,” said Anagnost.

Autodesk already delivers some material optimisation services through the cloud – notably through its EcoSystems programme for manufacturers, released earlier this year, which allows designers to swap components in a product design based on information like current cost, associated carbon emissions and end-of-life obligations presented in a cloud-hosted database.

Furthermore, Autodesk has created visualisation tool which provides users with the ability to submit blue prints of designs to Autodesk with the company then responding with digital representations and 360˚ photo views. The company is also expanding its existing range of collaboration functionality which allows users to host, view and sign-off the design files created with its software online, without the program itself.

“All of these things that are near to impossible at the moment will become the standard way of doing things with the cloud,” asserted Anagnost.

Responding to questions over the uptime reliability of the cloud system, Anagnost said a good level of assurance is given as standard. Autodesk has the ability to rollover its server across the Amazon platform regions, offering protection in case one of the servers goes down or is at capacity. It also has a full-time staff commissioned as a direct point of call to ensure system stability. “You’ll never get 100% guarantees,” said Anagnost, “that’s the nature of the cloud. But you get 99.99 as standard and you can pay for extra 9s.”

Not available by general release yet, the new cloud functionality is “coming in the next few weeks”. However, beta versions have been tested by a number of organisations, including Balzer Pacific, a US industrial machinery manufacturer, which has been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to analyse four designs from four days to 90 minutes, and the University of Cincinnati, which is using AutoCAD WS to help document ruins of Pompeii, increasing the number of excavation documents yielded per day, and to visualize and imagine the ancient world in 3D.