In the CAD industry as much as we believe that digital documents are the way of the future we still can't seem to wean ourselves from the use of paper for our day to day design tasks and presentation purposes. We should all be familiar with a little company named HP who seems to have the world-wide market cornered for large format CAD plotters and printers. And how many of you have passed by their exhibit booths at an event? All of us right? And how does a vendor get people interested in his products? By demonstrating them of course with beautiful breath taking images printed with the best inks on the finest paper right? Do you think those folks really care what the subject matter is they are printing? Of course not they just need to be printing pretty much during the whole event.
I finally figured this out a few months ago and have leveraged the position to my advantage and I am sharing this tip with you so that you will take advantage of this next time you go to an event. Well if they don't really care what they are printing why not have them print something that is of value to you? At an event in Holland a few months back I fished out my memory stick and walked over to the HP guys with the best pics from our recent family vacations. I came home from that European trip with more than 5 full size posters of some of the best family pics, for absolutely nothing! Its a win-win they want to print and I happened to have some great subject matter. Yes, I still had to pay to have the posters mounted and framed but you would not believe how much excitement there was when Dad arrived home with such splendid images. May I suggest that the next time you attend a CAD conference that you load up your memory stick with the best of the best images and bring something home that the whole family can appreciate.
Photo: my daughter Gilad's first scuba experience
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( 3.1 / 54 )Last Saturday I had the wonderful opportunity to take the kids and see my partner Omer Nir-Hod (CEO of the DataSafe group) participate in Israel's fledgling motorsport community races. After 3 rounds of qualifying Omer made it to the finals and came in 3rd overall in a field of over 20 participants. Omer raced his souped-up Peugeout 306 in the open category. What does all this have to do with RDV you may ask? Well not much really except for the fact that RDV is one of the proud sponsors of the racecar and this is a great opportunity to show you all a pic of my 6 year old son proudly perched on the company dragster. He even got to ride in the backseat for a "victory" lap with the driver.
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( 3 / 87 )Whew --- we have finished the first round of unveiling the Rapid Road Safety Analyzer and I am proud to say that we have had really good feedback both from our current customers, state and local governments and the academic world as well. With the launching of this product we are really taking 3D modeling and design visualization to a new plateau in terms of analysis. The majority of our customers are very happy already gaining a competitive advantage by being able to visualize and present their projects in a way that would have seemed like science-fiction just a few years ago, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. The real value of RDV Systems and our products will become clearer as we enable more advanced and indeed important critical analyses based on 3D models. If you haven't had the opportunity yet to see the Rapid Road Safety analyzer I would encourage you to sign up and attend one of our free webinars to see how much more you can get out of an RDV 3D model.
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( 3.1 / 64 )So I had the opportunity last week to get around a bit in Europe. We started off with Autodesk's EMEA Techcamp in Salzburg Austria. Salzburg is famous for things like Mozart (he was born there), The Sound of Music was filmed there and even RedBull according to Bart DeLethower originates from Salzburg. I even won a prize at the event for knowing the width of the narrowest building in Salzburg (2.5 meters) - I still don't know what to actually do with my new MotoRazor phone, but its always fun to win something. From there we got to Germany, France, Belgium and Holland (actually the last 3 countries we hit in one day's travelling) and finished up in Italy before returning home. On the last day of our journey we had the opportunity to visit with some faculty at the University of Rome engineering school. Thanks so very much to Dr. Guido Bonin and Dr. Giuseppe Loprencipe for receiving us, and of course to Marco Martens from Autodesk for helping us put the meeting together. They have some students doing research projects using Civil 3D for roadway modelling and have been using RDV as part of their research. We had the opportunity to sit down to show them some of the new features in the latest version. Of particular interest in the academic world is how 3D visualization can be used to better evaluate safety issues such as stopping sight distance. Because we are able to include all visual aspects of the roadway environment RDV provides a much more thorough analysis than was previously available. There was some difference of opinion as to what should be the default value for driver's eye height. We set up the metric version to default to 1.2 meters - as per the national standards here in Israel. However, the Italian professors told me that they use 1.1 meters. I guess when your typical driver is cruising in his Maserati or Ferrari they are closer to the ground than we are used to here at home :-).
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( 2.9 / 120 )Just a little anecdote about importing Google Earth info into Civil 3D. I think the guys at Autodesk did a great job of helping Civil 3D users get their hands easily on imagery and elevation data from Google Earth. Hey it certainly helps us out for filling out the horizon on visualization projects. But here's an interesting snag that we discovered. It seems that Google Earth doesn't support elevations below 0! Now that may not be too much of a problem for most of you around the world but here in Israel and I think only in Israel (but I may be wrong) we have surface elevations going down to beyond 400 meters below sea level. The Dead sea located in the Jordan river valley is the lowest point on earth with elevations getting down to about -420 meters. As well, the sea of Galillee - what we call the Kinerret and the stomping grounds of Jesus gets down into the -200's. So here we are working on a project and wanted to bring in some elevation and imagery from Google Earth to help round out the detailed survey data we already had from the project developers and were shocked to find out when we tried to import from Google that there just weren't any elevations below zero. Please beware that I haven't really researched this in depth and possibly we have got it wrong, but for the few minutes we had to investigate we came to the conclusion that the guys at Google Earth probably just didn't think about it. As always - I've got to throw in something about aviation here - so here goes. Well if Google Earth doesn't support negative elevations what about the altimeter on an airplane? Again, most airplane instrument manufacturers assume that a typical airplane will be flying at least somewhere at or above ground level... right? So the alitmeter has its lowest elevation set at 0! Now consider you are flying a fighter jet down the Jordan rift valley just off the deck to avoid radar and of course get the full sense of speed - what is your altimeter reading? Friends of mine in the aerospace industry told me that we had to modify the altimeters to work below sea level - hold your breath... blub blub blub.
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