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Newsletter – December 2014
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In this issue…
- Autodesk University Wrap-up
- Entourage Workshop Preview
- Year In Review (we were busy this year!)
– Drag & Drop
– License Management
– Viewport for Photoshop
– RPC Creator
– Tag Editor
– Presentation Styles Blog
Autodesk University Wrap-up
We just returned from another great Autodesk University! Our team (Randall, Zach & Shelly) headed out Thanksgiving weekend for the annual Autodesk Developers Conference (DevDays) and hung out with many customers and friends who were attending Autodesk University.
If it’s true that once something happens twice it’s officially a tradition then the ArchVision Bourbon Club is now official!
For the second year in a row we brought the Kentucky Bourbon Trail with us and entertained customers throughout the week at the ArchVision customer appreciation suite. Along with the latest Dashboard improvements and RPC Creator we gave the first public preview of Entourage Workshop for Revit (learn more below)!
Thanks to everyone who dropped by and gave us feedback. We look forward to seeing you at AU again next year (if not sooner!).
Introducing Entourage Workshop!
If you or your colleagues use Revit we’ve got something we think you’ll enjoy. We’ve been working on a new tool called Entourage Workshop that lets you stylize the RPC content in your Revit scenes to better match your personal presentation preferences!
We began noticing a lot of renderings with silhouetted entourage rather than photorealistic textures of people and trees. So we went to work to make it easy for you to customize the style of your RPCs in Revit.
You can create “Styles” that include color, transparency and geometric preferences (including turning off those pesky bases on the RPCs!) and then apply to select RPCs in your scenes. The result is the ability to customize any and all of the RPCs in your Revit scenes to just the right look including any custom ones you make with RPC Creator! 
2014 Year In Review
Easier than ever to get RPCs into your scenes – this year we continued to improve the ability to Drag & Drop RPCs from Dashboard into Revit, 3ds Max and Autocad. Find the RPC you need in Dashboard and then left-click to Drag & Drop into your application of choice. It’s that easy!
Better License Management – we continued to put more emphasis on making it easier for you to manage your license(s) by adding a new License Administration panel directly in Dashboard. If you’re the Owner or Admin for your licenses you should see a License Adminstration menu option when you click on your email address in Dashboard.
New Photoshop Workflow – We know a lot of you like to work with your entourage “in post” in applications such as Photoshop so in August we introduced Viewport for Dashboard. The new Viewport mode in Dashboard lets you see a full preview of your RPC that you can spin around and also includes a Render option that makes it a snap to Drag & Drop views from your RPCs into Photoshop. If you’re using Photoshop CS5 or above the images will come in as a separate layer ready for placement and editing. The new Viewport for Dashboard replaces the old RPC Viewport Plug-in for Photoshop providing you with a much simplified workflow.
Create your own RPCs – Who doesn’t have a bunch of 32-bit, alpha-masked PNG or TIFF images laying around or neatly organized in your company library? Now you can drop any PNG or TIFF image that contains an alpha-channel on the RPC Creator tool that’s integrated with Dashboard and convert them to RPC in seconds!
All you need to do is give each one a name and a real-world height and let RPC Creator take care of the rest. Within seconds we generate a custom icon, preview and compile everything into an RPC ready to drag & drop from Dashboard into your favorite app! If you haven’t made your own RPC, what are you waiting for?
Make your content searchable with Tags – The new Tag Editor feature in Dashboard lets you add tags to your RPCs making them easy to search and get to just the right content.
Learn from others – We started a new section of our blog at blog.archvision.com called Presentation Styles where we profile interesting work we run across. There are already a few posts centered around Revit. Check them out at blog.archvision.com/category/revit/. If you have work and tips/tricks you’d like to share send them to rstevens@archvision.com. 
Happy Holidays and Thanks For A Wonderful 2014!
