Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM technology will help Autodesk automate the process of creating visualizations for projects made with AutoCAD Civil 3D software. Dynamite VSP offers simple and efficient ways to bring AutoCAD Civil 3D software data into Autodesk 3ds Max Design software.

“We believe that every design has a story to tell. This acquisition will greatly simplify the process of visualizing complex AutoCAD Civil 3D projects with 3ds Max Design,” explained Jay Bhatt, Autodesk senior vice president, Architecture, Engineering and Construction. “It will help civil engineers tell their story in the most compelling way possible – validating their designs in context and showcasing projects for public consultation and approval.”

“With Autodesk’s research and development investment capabilities, this acquisition is expected to benefit our existing users as our technology is taken to the next level,” said Bruce Harfield, director of 3AM Solutions. “We look forward to working with Autodesk to further integrate the technology into the company’s existing software and advance Autodesk’s visualization offerings for civil engineers.”

“This acquisition will help empower users to more rapidly produce high-quality visualizations of civil engineering projects – even those without detailed knowledge of 3ds Max Design,” added Bhatt.

Read the full press release at 3am-solutions.com and autodesk.com.

You will need:

• A Windows 7 or Windows 2008 Server installation DVD
• The WIM2VHD script
• The Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7 (WAIK)

Preparation:

Extract or copy the installation DVD somewhere (e.g. S:\W7INS).

Put imagex.exe and bcdboot.exe (from the WAIK) and the WIM2VHD.WSF in the same location (e.g. S:\AIK). Also put bcdedit.exe in the same location (it can be found in C:\Windows\System32).

The reason for putting bcdboot.exe in the same directory is because I have had one system where the WIM2VHD script failed when it had to call bcdboot.exe which certainly was present in C:\Windows\System32 but not found by the script.

Create the VHD and install the Windows 7 image:

cscript WIM2VHD.WSF /wim:S:\W7INS\sources\install.wim /sku:ultimate
/vhd:S:\MyDisk.vhd /size:50000 /disktype:Fixed

Note that the above should be one single line. I broke it up for page layout reasons. Make sure you keep a space between “ultimate” and “/vhd:” up there.

The VHD will be created as a 50GB fixed size file as S:\MyDisk.vhd. If you wish to use a dynamic VHD you can specify Dynamic instead of Fixed for the disktype, or simply not specify the disktype (and have it default to dynamic). Also, if you do not have to specify the size a 40GB dynamic VHD will be created by default. Check the documentation on WIM2VHD for more information. After a few minutes your VHD will be ready and should contain a nearly completed pre-installation of Windows 7. But now you still need to make it bootable.

Making the VHD bootable:

First we need to get a new GUID for the boot option:

bcdedit /copy {current} /d "My New VHD Installation"

Copy the GUID that is shown and use it as a replacement for {guid} below to create the boot entry. Note that the [brackets] around the drive letter SHOULD BE there!

bcdedit /set {guid} device vhd=[S:]\MyDisk.vhd
bcdedit /set {guid} osdevice vhd=[S:]\MyDisk.vhd
bcdedit /set {guid} detecthal on

After doing all the above you should now have a bootable VHD that you can boot into for final configuration and setup. If you want to check what the boot list looks like, just use bcdedit /v on the command line. If at any time you need to remove the bootable VHD you can simply do the following. First check the boot entries using:

bcdedit /v

Look for the VHD file in the output and copy the GUID that is shown for it. Use it as a replacement for {guid} below:

bcdedit /delete {guid} /cleanup

The quick start outlined above should get your started with VHD’s. But it doesn’t end there. For advanced use you can use VHD differencing disks, mount VHD’s locally on the system, and basically have yourself an abstraction of your storage, the use of which will vary depending on your requirements.

For quick testing and discardable VHD’s I tend to go with the default 40GB dynamic disks but for performance and sustained VHD’s that I use as a more manageable alternative to multi-boot scenarios I tend to use a fixed size VHD, usually something in the range of 35GB to 120GB, depending on my purpose.

Instead of creating disk images for backup and emergency restore purposes I tend to just keep a copy of the VHD’s around and save myself the hassle of having to restore an actual image when all I need to do is copy a VHD back to its original location, if needed by overwriting the existing copy if it has been banged up badly duing some extreme development activities.

One of the benefits of native VHD support is that you can mount a VHD to a drive letter on your system and conduct maintenance and repair without having to boot into the OS on the VHD. I have found this to also be very helpful in testing various critical doomsday scenarios where an OS gets corrupted from the outside. I also use VHD’s as bootable systems on my workstations to deal with beta software that I would not allow to run free on the native system itself and would otherwise not perform too well inside a VM. Since many of these beta things in my case revolve around graphically and computationally intensive software you can understand why I would like to use the full resources of the host system, in particular graphics drivers and all the CPU’s and cores available in the system.

I can hear you thinking, why would I copy entire 100GB VHD files around while at the same time assuming that is why I have so much storage in the home office. Sometimes I do, if I want to be really quick about it. But the way I keep and store copies of VHD’s that were created with a fixed size is by converting the VHD file to a dynamically growing VHD file using Starwind’s free V2V utility. I select the VHD I wish to convert, I select what I want to convert it to, wait around for not too long, and that generates the VHD that I will “shelve” on the server or backup to long term backup storage, ready to be used and taken off the virtual shelf whenever I need it. Likewise, when I take a dynamic VHD off the virtual shelf I will use V2V to expand the VHD to a pre-allocated fixed size, again, to gain the maximum performance.

Starwind V2V is an extremely useful tool for anyone who frequently shares disk images between VMware and Windows 7 or Windows 2008 Server, Virtual PC, or the 2008 Hyper-V. It can convert VMDK (VMware) images to VHD and vice-versa, either as pre-allocated fixed size files or dynamically growing files, including support for VMware ESX Server and Starwind’s own IMG format that is used by their Starwind Server and Enterprise Server SAN solutions (but more about those next week, in another place).

Another thing that V2V will not help you with, but that should go without saying (even though I’ll make a note of it here anyway) is to share installed operating systems between VMware and Virtual-PC and/or Hyper-V. If you wish to share operating system virtual disks you should go the full route and use sysprep and properly administer the deployment process. This, however, goes a little beyond the scope of what I was writing about here.

A few resources to help you on your way, as they did help me:

• A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell by Ryan Paul
• The PowerScripting Podcast by Jonathan Walz
• The Windows PowerShell Team Blog
• The Wikipedia page on PowerShell (with more resources)
• The online PowerShell Owners Manual
• The PowerShell Guy (Marc van Orsouw)

Two days ago a friend of mine alerted me to a video he saw on a web portal of an ISP that had started a video service for its customers that is similar to YouTube and Google Video. One of the videos there, uploaded by a user that goes by the name of “bmhelli” (according to this and his website, Bernard Marius Hellinga a.k.a. Bernard Helli. from a town called Ermelo in The Netherlands) contained two TV commercials that were appended together. One introducing some kind of big hamburger, the other commercial being of a topless woman acting out stereotypical male behavior.

While the commercials were funny, the creator that appended them decided to also append a few pictures at the end with a scrolling text (in Dutch, “Onze Werkplek”) which means “Our Workplace” or “Our Office”. Those images, as you can see here and probably would have guessed since I’m writing about it, were of course not of “their workspace” but rather, mine!

In a way it’s amusing that someone would take some seemingly popular (if I judge it by the numbers of visitors to my site and the e-mails I receive about it) images from the internet and label them as “our workplace”. But it’s also not a very clever thing to do. Photographers usually don’t like their pictures being used by others that would take credit for it and are certainly less amused when the person or company doing so claims or implies that it is theirs or claims to be the author or copyright holder. The latter is also the case with Bernard Hellinga aka “bmhelli” since the upload details he entered were “Autheursrecht: BMH” (that’s “Copyright: BMH”). It is unclear what Bernard M. tried to accomplish with this. Either to pretend that my home office was his workspace or whether he wanted to imply that those commercials preceeding the images were those of the producer of these commercials (which, I certainly am not even though I did produce several TV commercials back in the 80’s and 90’s).

The ISP that owns and runs that video website had recently come up with their own version of “the DMCA” (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) which is a system for receiving and handling Take Down and Cease and Desist notices. A system I would strongly encourage for all ISP’s in order to distance themselves from any claims or association with copyright infringement by their customers. Needless to say, that new system deserved a closer look and a bit of a test. Within two days I received notice from the ISP that the user had taken down the infringing content. A good example of how an ISP can deal with these things without having to defend themselves over the actions of a customer. Very nice, and my compliments go out to XS4ALL for being a progressive ISP.

The same goes for Microsoft. When I was notified that Mr. Hellinga had also used the same photographs on his livespaces site/blog a DMCA Take Down C&D (Cease and Desist) went out. It took two days but the photographs were removed. This shows that a proper DMCA complaint will be handled in a proper and timely fashion.

Now the really funny thing is that this was the SECOND time my friend found something that infringed on a copyright that I held. Back in 1996 (it might have been 1997) he came by after picking up a book called “The 3D Studio MAX Design Guide”, published by Coriolis, Inc. Since I used to work on 3ds max I flipped through the book and within seconds my eyes fell on a chapter entitled “Battlemech”. To my surprise the 3D model used for that chapter was a 3D model I had created back in 1993, which was copyrighted (and clearly mentioned in the enclosed text file), and where one of the authors of the chapter claimed they had designed and created the model. On top of that the model itself was provided on the CD-ROM included with the book.

That level of commercial use of course required a slightly different approach and after getting in touch with Coriolis and having my attorney stand by to file a temporary injunction to halt all sales of the book we got to discuss the issue. I’ll save you the long story but in the end Coriolis admitted their “mistake” and we settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. Several months later I was contacted by Don Simpson, a cartoonist, who also had his material used in the very same book. In 1997, Ron Every wrote about this situation in the magazine he wrote for. You can find the article here (sorry about the quality, it’s an old PDF).

The bottom line, of course, is, that if you use material from any site on the internet that has copyright notices and details such as “without prior written permission” and “all rights reserved” you should never use the material without permission unless you wish to open yourself up to the less amusing side effects it can result in. If the material is not labeled and just found, stumbled upon, or provided in any random fashion and it is not clear who the author or copyright holder is and you are therefore unable to obtain permission, it is sensible to not use the material because you could end up being liable for using it. Regarding the “Fair Use” clause in copyright laws, claiming copyright without permission is never allowed under the “Fair Use” clause.