Congratulations to Piotr Truszczynski from Motionfront for winning the Autodesk 3ds Max Design Hero competition!
 

His image will be featured on the cover of 3ds max design 2012 and on all related marketing materials. That’s a huge exposure that will definitely lead to many jobs from many high profile clients. What more could one ask for?
 

Congratulations again Piotr for your great achievement!
The images that took 2nd and 3rd place are also great. It was for sure a tough decision for the judges.
You can check them out here.
 

Autodesk has revealed “Gepetto”, one of the new projects that they have been working on. This technology aims to make it an easy task to add crowds to 3ds max scenes, with controled movement of people along predefined paths (such as sidewalks, corridors, etc.)

Although the development of this project is just at an early stage, the results already look more than promissing.

You can check out some demo videos on autodesk “sneak peack” youtube chanel.

http://www.youtube.com/user/3dsMaxSneakPeek

I believe that this will be a great tool for architects, architectural illustrators and 3d artists

The best news is that project Gepetto is just a part of a much broader concept as autodesk states:

“Geppetto is part of a broader concept that we’re researching called "People Power." The basic idea is to try to assemble all the components you’d need to create, manage, and control large crowds of characters. Our research goal is to solve three big problems:

1. Creating believable motion easily (Geppetto)
2. Creating the look of any kind of human population or demographic and allowing for cultural influences (Evolver)
3. Creating an efficient framework for interacting with tens of thousands of such characters”

Read more about project Gepetto on autodesk labs website

So what does it actually do?
The main idea is that you can edit a dwg file without any license or software installed. All you need is a web-browser and the latest flash player from adobe.
This makes it accessible from anywhere and by anyone you share it with.

And speaking of sharing, you can actually co-edit a drawing with a colleague or a client in real time. Everything is done directly online so the files are not actually transferred from one user to another. This means that you can conduct online meetings with unlimited participants, make revision mark-ups, etc.
There is also a widget that let’s you explore all the changes done in a revision meeting so you won’t miss anything.

I see this application particularly useful for cad drafting studios and architecture offices, especially for internal meetings.

However, I don’t see it being used for architectural visualization at the moment… but I am certain the way technology evolves, in the future we will see something similar for 3D models.

In the meantime, you can watch the video bellow to see a more in depth presentation or check out the official site for project butterfly.