During the pandemic lockdown, companies around the globe accelerated digital transformation at an unprecedented rate. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, companies accomplished in weeks what would have otherwise taken years. These changes included increasing remote working and/or collaboration, increasing use of advanced technologies in operations, and increasing migration of assets to the cloud, among others. “In the case of remote working, respondents actually say their companies moved 40 times more quickly than they thought possible before the pandemic.” —McKinsey & Company... READ MORE >

When it comes to visual effects and animation, most of the attention understandably goes to the work artists do in creative platforms like Maya and 3ds Max. But when it comes to getting that creative work onto the screen—and scaling your production pipeline to keep up with growing production demands—the renderer you choose makes a big difference. It’s all about balancing your quality needs against available compute power, rendering time, and human hours. Created by Marcos Fajardo, the rendering software Arnold has long been an industry go-to for achieving both photorealistic and stylized effec... READ MORE >

Great AU classes don’t just happen—they’re carefully conceived, crafted, revised, rehearsed, and presented. The process takes months—from initial submission in the Call for Proposals through mentorship, feedback, and execution. And the action continues even after the presentation, as many speakers continue to respond to comments and questions on their class pages on the AU website. "It can take 30 to 40 hours on average to create the class, including planning learning objectives and creating the class handout and presentation slides,” Autodesk University Content Manager Janice Miller-Kellerman... READ MORE >

Autodesk CTO Raji Arasu (left) and Charlene Li of Altimeter (right) discuss convergence and digital transformation at AU 2021. Digital transformation is hardly new. It’s been around for as long as we’ve had digital technology. Yet the nature of digital transformation changes over time, along with the technology itself. In the 1980s, digital transformation often meant moving from a typewriter to a desktop computer and from the mailbox to the fax machine. For designers, it meant the first widespread adoption of CAD. In the 1990s, it meant adding Internet access and email to the mix, with BIM a... READ MORE >

In 1997, delegates from 192 UN countries, territories, and other parties gathered for the third UN Climate Change Conference. Their aim was to get all participants to officially acknowledge two things: first, that climate change was taking place and, second, that it was caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity. The Conference of Parties (COP) that govern the conference then issued a resolution, the Kyoto Protocol, that set emissions reduction targets and defined other actions for the parties involved. That was COP3. In 2015, at the 21st UN Climate Change Confe... READ MORE >