Within two weeks Autodesk will post a pre-release version of Autodesk Impression at the Autodesk Labs website. Autodesk Impression is the non-photorealistic rendering program previously previewed at Autodesk University 2005 and other venues as code-name Vespa.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources inside Autodesk have told AECnews the product will be “somewhere between alpha and beta” when it is made available for free download. The software will be unsupported as long as it is posted at Autodesk Labs, but an email address will be available for users who wish to send comments, bug reports, or general questions. “If somebody answers, the email will come from a developer, not a technical support person,” one source said.
There are four utilities now available for downloading at the Autodesk Labs website; Impression will be the first stand-alone application. The hardware requirements won’t be specified until the product is posted, but sources indicate they will be steep when compared with the requirements for running AutoCAD 2007. In particular, users will need a fairly new graphics card with up-to-date driver software.
Most AutoCAD users who wish to create non-photorealistic renderings from AutoCAD drawings today turn to tools like Adobe Illustrator. Autodesk personnel I have talked to about Impression downplay the “Illustrator killer” idea. Instead, they say Impression will solve important change and iteration workflow issues in the design process. In addition to being a vast improvement over plain AutoCAD for non-photorealistic illustration, changes made in Autodesk Impression are stored in the DWG file and are visible and editable if the illustrated file is reopened in AutoCAD.
The sources who told AECnews about the impending release of Impression would not commit to a specific release date, but were quite firm on the “within two weeks” timeframe.
--RSN