What is Autodesk Showcase?

About Autodesk Showcase

Autodesk Showcase provides easy-to-use presentation and design exploration tools that enable architects, designers, and engineers to quickly transform digital designs into interactive walk-throughs and design reviews with:

Visually compelling Hardware rendering and interactive Ray Tracing
Material alternatives, so you can step through a series of predefined materials.
Geometry alternatives, so you can step through and discuss a set of alternative parts.
Positional alternatives, so you can place a model in various scene locations, compare various positions for a model component, or show exploded views of model components.
Accent lights, so you can add controlled illumination and highlighting to your model to enhance presentations.
Cross-sections, to provide internal views of the objects you are presenting.
Environments (also known as Lighting Environments), so you can visualize your work in various high-quality backgrounds with realistic lighting and reflections.
Shots, so you can save camera views and add cinematographic movements. Shots are saved views of the scene (still shots), or saved motions around the scene, like orbit, zoom, or motion between a start and end point.
Behaviors, so you can showcase a model on a turntable or add complex animations. Behaviors are otherwise known as animations; they are similar to shots, but provide more control over movement.
Storyboard slides, so you can assemble your scene elements and tell your story. Storyboard slides are like small movies where you can combine shots and behaviors on a timeline, along with cross-sections, environments, and alternatives. (To include behaviors, they must be contained within shots you add.)
Multi-user collaboration, so you can present your work over a network.

About Autodesk Showcase products

Depending on your needs, you can choose from three Showcase products:

Autodesk Showcase addresses the needs of designers, engineers and marketing professionals, providing tools for interactively exploring design options and creating highly realistic renderings for sales and marketing purposes. Showcase includes support for industry-standard 3D CAD formats, geometry tessellation, photorealistic materials, HDRI environments and lights, easy-to-use camera and object animation, interactive 3D triggers and storyboards with precise timing control, and image, movie, and Flash rendering output.

Autodesk Showcase Professional is designed for specialized display environments involving multiple-screen displays, high-speed ray tracing clusters, stereoscopy, and remote attendees. The software includes all the features of Showcase plus this additional functionality. Autodesk Consulting can help design and implement the right Showcase Professional solution for specific needs.

Note

This document covers all features of all versions of Showcase and Showcase Professional. A statement under the heading of each feature will indicate when features are available only in Autodesk Showcase Professional.

Autodesk Showcase Viewer is a free application, available for download from Autodesk.com, that allows non-Showcase license holders to view and navigate Showcase scenes. For the first 30 days of use, the Showcase Viewer is a fully functional trial of Autodesk Showcase.

About Autodesk DirectConnect

The Autodesk Showcase software automatically installs the latest Autodesk DirectConnect software CAD file translators as part of its installation procedure. These translators enable CAD data to be imported into Autodesk Showcase software, and other Autodesk software

CAD files are first translated by Autodesk DirectConnect into Autodesk Packet (APF) files so that they can be read into the Autodesk Showcase software.

For information about the Autodesk DirectConnect software, select Help > DirectConnect Help or go to the Showcase DirectConnect Web page.