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| Everything But the Cheesesteak: Examine Philly’s Facets From Anywhere With NVIDIA GRID Posted: 12 Feb 2015 01:11 PM PST  "Location, location, location" is the real estate mantra. When it comes to building-site selection, city evacuation planning or extracting natural resources, location is critical indeed. To analyze location data, engineers, scientists, planners and developers rely on ArcGIS Pro software, from ESRI. Geographic information system (GIS) software uses large data sets, especially for imagery and elevation features. With help from NVIDIA GRID technology, the ArcGIS Pro application and GIS data stay in the data center. Meanwhile, work crews and other users in the field get a workstation-class experience anywhere on the network, to any connected device. To get a taste of what that's like, anyone, from any location, can now explore high-resolution imagery and buildings in downtown Philadelphia for free with NVIDIA GRID Test Drive.  From 10 feet off the ground to 10,000, you can examine the cityscape in incredible detail. It's a digital recreation, so you set the parameters of your tour: Add and remove a single building—or all of them. Remove all overpasses and bridges. View Philly with or without vegetation. The variety of views and building information gives you tons of flexibility. Exploration to Go, With ArcGIS Pro ESRI is the worldwide leader in desktop GIS software. Schools, governments and businesses create maps, visualize scenarios and share information with ESRI's ArcGIS Pro. It's a comprehensive set of tools that visualize, analyze, compile and share GIS data, in both 2D and 3D environments. For example, Texas-based oil and gas company Legacy Reserves and the City of Waukesha, Wis., rely on ESRI ArcGIS applications and data to ensure their workers have remote access to applications while in the field. Transitioning to a virtual desktop infrastructure with NVIDIA GRID has given their employees needed flexibility, with 24/7 access to data from any location or device. It's also helped simplify their IT infrastructure deployments and maintenance. Each worker no longer needs a dedicated workstation, and help requests don't usually require onsite visits. It wasn't always this way. Displaying and interacting with 3D data in a virtual environment historically has resulted in a poor user experience. That's why we built NVIDIA GRID: virtualized GPUs that deliver rich graphics anywhere, without compromise in performance. ESRI recently upgraded the graphics performance of ArcGIS Pro by embracing DirectX and OpenGL. With this move, ArcGIS Pro unburdens the CPU from graphics rendering and embraces GPUs, which excel at graphics. ESRI demonstrated ArcGIS Pro running on GRID during its keynote presentation at the Federal GIS Conference in Washington on Feb. 9. Anyone wishing to experience how ArcGIS Pro performs virtually can give it a try now that we've added it to NVIDIA GRID Test Drive. With a data set that uses a mix of 2D and 3D features, users anywhere can explore Philadelphia from different perspectives while discovering the visualization performance of GPUs in a virtual environment. Just make sure you've had lunch before you get started. The post Everything But the Cheesesteak: Examine Philly's Facets From Anywhere With NVIDIA GRID appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.    |
| Back to the Drawing Board: Architects Take Stylus From Sketch to 3D Models Posted: 12 Feb 2015 12:38 PM PST  Frank Lloyd Wright. Frank Gehry. Frank, the contractor, working on your remodel. Wright's landmark Fallingwater modernist home, Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao post-modern museum and your modern-ish kitchen upgrade all started out as blueprints. Drawing such plans is just a way of "thinking aloud" for Gehry, the architect renowned for his distinctive curves and swooshing lines. While sketching architectural plans isn't changing, technology is reshaping the tools being used. Mobile technology, particularly tablets, has replaced unfurling giant swathes of graph paper across a draftsman's table to view a model. Digital Drafting Architect Ryan Cameron, of Lincoln, Neb., started using a Tegra NOTE 7 tablet for work a year ago. Then the larger, more powerful SHIELD tablet with DirectStylus 2 technology wowed him. "Literally within 10 seconds, I saw the value of it," he said. "With the 3D software in the tablet I was able to create shapes, and with the stylus it came down to having more control," Ryan said. "You know exactly where you are going to touch the screen. You can stay zoomed out and there is no time wasted using your finger." The tablet's DirectStylus 2 technology opened an opportunity to create and collaborate more quickly. It offers "a higher level of developing ideas more effectively," he said. "Now, other than at my desk, I have the ability to 3D model anywhere. It was a huge step for me." Stylus Control  Powered by our 192-core Tegra K1 processor, DirectStylus 2 allows you to print and trace as accurately and lightly as any draftsman. In hand, the unique angled chisel tip on the stylus mimics the feel of a pencil. "The precision and responsiveness was evident as I began to model," Ryan said. "The angled tip is soft and moves fluidly across the screen, giving the right pressure sensitivity when modeling objects." Like many other architects he knows, Ryan uses Autodesk's FormIt, a powerful architectural modeling app, on his tablet. FormIt helps architects and designers shape ideas in the office or on the job site. Building models are accessible in the cloud via a tablet and on a PC. "There has been a revolution in BIM – building information modeling," said Tom Vollaro, senior product manager for FormIt at Autodesk. "We wanted to offer something for designers when traveling, at job sites, with clients, so we asked them: What if you could sketch in 3D? And what if you could sketch for 10 minutes and have the data saved in the cloud?" With the shift to working on tablets, the technology is helping "bring back the pen," Tom said. "When you design you are separated from your drawing by a mouse, but the stylus brings it back. It's full circle," he said. "The traditional tablets have brought users closer to their designs, but the stylus offers even more precision, layered effects, and things you couldn't have dreamed of doing with pen and paper."  Conceptual model by Ryan Cameron in Autodesk FormIt with Autodesk Revit to photorealistically render to 3D printed model. All on SHIELD tablet with DirectStylus 2. 3D Model Magic With the advent of 3D printing, the SHIELD tablet can hasten the transition from virtual to reality. Building architectural models from foam board can take weeks. With the SHIELD tablet and 3D printers, architects can create schematic forms and then immediately render them in 3D. For Ryan, who collaborates widely and travels regularly, having a SHIELD tablet on hand means he can design when inspired and immediately share his ideas. He likes the tablet so much that he buys jackets with pockets just the right size to hold his SHIELD. Follow these links to learn more about SHIELD tablet, DirectStylus 2 and Autodesk's FormIt.
The post Back to the Drawing Board: Architects Take Stylus From Sketch to 3D Models appeared first on The Official NVIDIA Blog.   |
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