This section lists all new features and improvements included in Autodesk Showcase 2012 since the release of Autodesk Showcase 2011.
For the list of new features included with Showcase 2011, view the online help for that release from http://www.autodesk.com/showcase-helpdownload-enu.
Autodesk welcomes your suggestions on how to improve these or other features, using the following links:
Templates consist of ready-made scenes containing preset elements such as environments, shots, slides, behaviors, and visual styles. Templates do not contain models; they make it easy to put together a scene quickly and easily using the models you have. See Use templates to import files and create a scene.
Showcase Quick Start Wizards enable you to become familiar with all the features of Showcase while building actual Showcase scenes. If you are new to Showcase, the wizards help you get to know Showcase quickly. If you are an experienced Showcase user, the wizards can guide you toward achieving certain goals faster than if you tried to do them manually. For any user, the wizards expose you to features and workflows that you might not otherwise have discovered. See Quick Start Wizards.
The welcome experience and the Open/Create Scene dialog box
The Open/Create Scene dialog box provides an intuitive way to create scenes, open existing and sample scenes, and access templates. See Use the Open/Create Scene dialog box.
Important links that were previously located in the Showcase 2011 welcome screen can now be accessed directly from the Help menu: Learning Movies, Showcase Community (the Area), and Keyboard Shortcuts.
Showcase now points to its online help on the Web here:
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/showcase2012/en_us/.
You can install the help to your computer at any time from:
http://www.autodesk.com/showcase-helpdownload-enu.
See Switch from Online (Default) to Local Help.
The help has also been reorganized so that there are more top-level topics, making things easier to find.
Showcase also points to its Customization Help on the Web; the URL is:
http://www.autodesk.com/showcase-sdkdoc-2012-enu/.
The help is in HTML format instead of Microsoft Compiled Help format (CHM). At this time only Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari are officially supported. It can also be downloaded as a zip package for local viewing from:
http://www.autodesk.com/me-sdk-docs
In this release there have been a number of enhancements to the Python reference documentation to improve ease of use, and there has been some minor updates to the developer’s guide documentation.
Sample scenes are now available directly from the File menu; select File > Open Sample Scenes.
For more information on interoperability, see: Prepare models for your scene.
Visual Styles and non-photorealistic rendering
The Visual Styles menu is a set of shortcuts that open appearance presets. Use these to quickly change the appearance of your scene. See Use Visual Styles.
This feature includes non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) styles, which are found in the Abstract section of the Styles interface.
You can also turn on ray tracing by selecting its icon in the Realistic section of the Styles interface. Other presets available in Visual Styles include Normals, Ambient Shadows, and Tessellation.
This release includes SteeringWheels, a feature you may be familiar with from other Autodesk applications such as Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Inventor. SteeringWheels, also known as wheels, can save you time by combining navigation tools into a single interface. Wheels are task-specific tools from which you can navigate and orient a model in different views. See Use SteeringWheels.
Use SteeringWheels in combination with the new Walk Zone feature (see the next section) to simulate walking around in your scene.
Use the Walk Zone feature to generate walkable areas in the scene, based on visible objects and the environment floor. This is useful for large, immersive scenes that contain traversable characteristics such as stairs and hallways. Walk Zone works with the SteeringWheels walk mode or the keyboard arrow keys. See Generate a walk zone.
The Snap feature enables you to snap objects to other geometry in the scene. This is useful when you want to quickly move an object to another point or edge in the scene. See Snap objects.
In addition to support for Autodesk Materials (see the previous section, Interoperability), this release includes the following new features:
The Save Movie window now includes a button for creating a movie that you can upload to YouTube. See Create a YouTube movie of one or all shots.
The 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator™ 3D mouse is now supported. See Use a 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator 3D mouse.
