Paul Aubin in da Haus

This past week I was lucky enough to share my veal pen (well, it's sort of a veal suite really) with renowned author and educator Paul Aubin . His books on Mastering various Revit and Autocad flavors have become the standard texts for Architects and Engineers around the world. Now he's branching out to DVD tutorials too.

It is becoming a tradition here at the Factory that somewhere in the pre-beta phase of the Revit release cycle Paul will come hang with us software analysts and help kick the tires on the upcoming release. Very beneficial for everyone. We get direct feedback from someone who is out in offices and classrooms on a daily basis and Paul gets some deep dive exposure to the new features and functionality before most of the world.

Along with a bunch of fine Revit datasets, Paul had a great little Autocad Architecture file that we sent to the 3d printer.

A capitol from Michelangelo's the Piazza del Campidoglio.

The printer works by laying down a thin layer of gypsum powder, then drawing a horizontal slice of your geometry with a binding agent. It does this repeatedly until it has built up the geometry in the middle of a pond of unglued powder, which gets vacuumed up and recycled. There is always something magical about digging the chunk of virtual-made-solid out of the machine. This time there was a little more magic, as the machine broke down and we couldn't operate the vacuum to suck out all the excess material. So we were up to our elbows in unused powder excavating the artifacts. It felt very classic and archaeological.

Thanks for all the help this week, Paul!