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What's Next in AutoCAD

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Description

This class will provide a sneak peek into what's coming in future releases of AutoCAD software. We'll explore what the AutoCAD Team is working on and how will it help your teams.

Key Learnings

  • Understand the latest features in AutoCAD
  • Get a sneak peak at upcoming features in AutoCAD
  • Understand AutoCAD product road map

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      Transcript

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Hello. Welcome to What's Next in AutoCAD. This is my colleague Scott Crider, and I'm Dania El Hassan. And we are super excited to tell you a little bit about what we've been working on in AutoCAD and where we see it going in the future.

      SCOTT CRIDER: So I know you've all seen this before, your favorite slide at Autodesk University by now. Thank you for grabbing the NDAs and signing those on your way in. If you missed it, we have some extras at the back. Some of the things we're showing you here today are not yet released to the market, and so as such we can't guarantee they'll be included in a release of AutoCAD or when that release would occur.

      So please don't purchase buying decisions on anything you see here, and please don't take pictures and post them to the AU feed, as fun as that is. But it's still a great opportunity for us to share what we're thinking about, just acknowledging that it may change going forward.

      We're also going to be doing some live feedback during this event. If you've been here before, we've done it in the past and it's really fun. So we're using a tool called Poll Everywhere. So if you have a cell phone, you can text AutoCAD Next to 22333, and then as we ask questions, we can get the feedback up on the screen live. And we use this data when we go back to guide how we think about these features. So your input is really valuable.

      If you don't have a cell phone, you can also go on your computer to pollev.com/autocadnext, and you can also participate from there. I'll give you a minute to get that set up. Great. So let's dive into some intro polling, and as you get set up, you can participate on this first one.

      So let's start with role. What role do you most closely identify with? We can get a sense of who's in the room. CAD Manager, drafter/detailer, BIM engineer, architect. Great. Some people got it hooked up already.

      OK, we've got the horse race, and it looks like CAD Manager is the runaway winner. Give that a couple more seconds as people get online. Great. OK. So CAD Manager is by far the winner. Drafter/detailer, engineer. Kind of a mix. But a lot of CAD managers in the room. That's great. We should have some good stuff for you.

      OK, let's go to the next one. What industry do you most identify with? Architecture/engineering. It looks like infrastructure may take it by a nose in second. Great. Let's keep it moving. So this is how do you currently buy your AutoCAD? If you're a CAD manager and you have many licenses, many seats, are you entirely subscription? Are you entirely perpetual and maintenance? Are you some mixture of the two? Or are you right down the middle? People quick with their thumbs are our subscribers. Makes sense.

      Great. And this is all anonymous. As we say, we don't get any emails or phone numbers out of this, so you can be honest with your answers. There's no public shaming here.

      OK. And now this is our favorite. How many years have you been using AutoCAD? This is always a great poll. If you add up the number of years of AutoCAD experience in this room, be pretty high number. A lot of 20 plus.

      Great. So yeah, there is a ton of experience in this room, and that's what makes it so fun to get to come tell you about where AutoCAD is going, given where it's been.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Great. So AutoCAD has 35 years of history, of continuous innovation. And over this history, we've seen the introduction of AutoCAD for Mac in 1992, in 2010 AutoCAD mobile, and in 2016 the subscription offering for an iPad.

      Throughout this 35 years of history, AutoCAD has become the industry leader. AutoCAD really is everywhere. How do we know? Here's a look at some of our Token Flex usage. So Token Flex is a way that our largest customers can buy access to AutoCAD. They buy a bundle of tokens, and they can access anything in the Autodesk portfolio. So they choose the right tool for the job.

      Here you can see that we have two different cohorts, the heavy users on the top and the lower usage users on the bottom here. And AutoCAD really is in everyone's workflows. 52% of the usage of the heavy users is in AutoCAD, and almost 70% in the lower usage cohort.

      And over this 35 years of history, we've had this tradition of 35 years of continuous comparison. And that may not make sense that much anymore. So in the past, you purchased a perpetual license, and you really needed to know what was in that year's subscription. But think of a product like Office 365. When you subscribe to Office, you know that you're getting the latest feature set and you'll continue to get that on an ongoing basis. And AutoCAD is moving in the same direction.

      Over the past few years, since the introduction of subscription, we've had quite a lot of updates, and we continue to release on an ongoing basis. However, we've packed a lot more into each of our service packs and updates. This trend has been highlighted by a few key areas. So over the past couple of years, we've been investing in core experience, which includes 2D and 3D graphics performance, as well as the modernization of the interface, like 4K display.

      We've also invested a lot in new features and functionality. So you remember a bit about PDF import and smarter xrefs. And we'll continue to make those investments in the future. This year we're also investing in some subscription-only features, like AutoCAD web and mobile and shared views.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Great. So let's dive in. Let's take a look at the core AutoCAD experience and some of the work we've been doing there.

      So we've been investing in 3D graphics performance for quite some time. And in the 2018.1 update, we built on that investment, and you should see significant improvements in your 3D graphics performance for your most common and frequently used navigation commands, such as pan, zoom, and orbit, specifically when working in realistic, shaded, and wireframe visual styles.

      Now, as this room knows, given that experience, that DWGs vary widely right in their size, complexity, and composition. So making a blanket statement about performance can be difficult. But we are scientific about it, anyway.

      So what this graph shows is six of our large benchmark drawings that we use for testing, and it shows the frames per second by AutoCAD release from 2016 to 2018.1. You can see the improvements are pretty staggering. They range from 4x to 180x. We use the number 10. We say 10x is average, but really it'll depend on your model. For some of our most complex models, this 180x is huge.

      And actually, the really interesting thing is the AutoCAD 2018.1 update was 37% faster than 2018. So it highlights the importance of consuming these updates outside of the annual release cadence.

      So let's take a look. Let's get into AutoCAD because 10x sounds good, but it's always fun to actually see what that looks like.

      So here we go. Sorry if there's anyone from Atlanta in the room. This may bring up some bad memories. But this is a Super Bowl tower. And you can see here we're in AutoCAD 2016, and as I pan around, there's pretty significant degradation. We miss some geometry. It switches into another visual style to try to keep the frame rate high. I can do a 3D orbit here. And you'll see we miss some more stuff.

      But this is where you'll feel that 180x is when you're trying to work with a really complex model like this. So now we go into pi, which is our code name for some future release. And here we go. I can do my panning. It keeps all the visual fidelity. You don't lose anything. Throw a 3D orbit in.

      AUDIENCE: What's your hardware configuration?

      SCOTT CRIDER: On this one? So we have HQGEOM turned on, which is great. And I didn't actually go into the rest of it. But the auto config, hopefully, is appropriately setting it.

      AUDIENCE: Yeah, workstation.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Oh, on the workstation. So this is a 32 gigabyte power horse. But I don't know the actual setup.

      OK. So let's go to the polls. 3D graphics performance. How much do you agree that 3D graphics performance improvements will help you and your team?

      Great. OK. So we've got a lot of agree and strongly agree. Let's give it one more second. Stragglers. Strongly disagree. Well, I'm glad you chimed in because have we got something for you.

      So we've also been investing a lot in 2D graphics, right? Lots of you, and obviously compared to the poll, some of you only use 2D. We have 10x in 3D, but we've also been doing a lot of work in 2D. Since we moved to subscriptions in 2016, we've introduced a number of features. In 2016 we did high quality geometry, HQGEOM, which calculates the lines, arcs, and circles on the GPU of the computer.

      In 2017 we started caching graphics on the GPU to avoid unnecessary recalculation. In 2018 we moved Hatch under the GPU and introduced multi threading on the CPU. Now, this year, we've added improvements that improve the performance for draw order, raster images, and editing visual properties and large selection sets. So let's take a look.

      So this is back in AutoCAD 2016. This doesn't look like a complex drawing, but there's a lot going on here. There's nearly 50,000 drawing entities. So let's say that we want to select everything and explode it. Say there's some blocks in here. OK, AutoCAD warns me, whoa, this operation may take a long time. Do you want to disregard Draw Order? I don't like to disregard Draw Order, so I'm going to click No and see what happens.

      OK. This may take a while, so let's go over to pi and we'll see how this does. Here's that same drawing. And zoom out a little bit if I can. So I will preface-- so this is a development build, so I take no responsibility for it. Well, let's see what happens. Also, I can close file, Super Bowl.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Our developers told us about a major issue that we had in the daily build yesterday that we were working on for this presentation. So there might be a little bit of hiccups here, but we'll get them sorted out.

      SCOTT CRIDER: OK. Well, I promise you it's significantly faster.

      [LAUGHTER]

      OK. Hopping back in. All right, let's see if we can torture AutoCAD in a different way and how it responds. We'll see. We'll give this one more shot. No. OK. Let's torture in another way. Let's find another drawing.

      So this drawing, you can tell, is complex. It has several raster images referenced in as well as some significant drafting on top of it. If I go into AutoCAD 2016, which has maybe finished its exploding by now-- it hasn't. I should have disregarded Draw Order. OK. This drawing is huge, and in 2016, when you try to zoom and pan, you miss where you're going, it's hard to be precise, and it can lead to significant aggravation if you're trying to get to a specific part of the drawing.

      In pi, there's no lag at all. It may not show the raster image when I'm moving, but it's very easy for me to get where I want to go.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      SCOTT CRIDER: OK. So when the 2D graphics performance are functionally proper, would those be useful to you?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yes.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Great. So yeah, 2D graphics performance is very core. That makes sense. No contrarians going strongly disagree. OK. Great.

      So another piece of the core AutoCAD experience is hardware compatibility. Here you can see, on your left, we have the new Microsoft Surface Book Pro, or Surface Book, and it was just released three weeks ago. It's already certified for AutoCAD. We will always be there to support you with the latest hardware for design and drafting.

      On the right we have the new Surface Studio, which supports touch and pen drafting as well as a gorgeous 4K monitor. We've been working on 4K support for some time. This last year we added 200 more dialogue boxes that will be properly formatted to give you the best visual experience. Let's go in and take a look. Let's do this one.

      So in addition to doing some reformatting of the dialog boxes, we've also refactored our ribbon icons to make them work at multiple DPIs. You'll also notice some changes to the status bar. One of the top five requests in our customer counsel was to make it easier to know when you've selected an item from the status bar. Before it would be a blue highlight and sometimes it was hard to see. So you can see we've changed the status bar where now it'll highlight with this background when you select to make it very apparent what's turned on and what's not.

      These ribbon changes and these icon changes are also being rolled out across all Autodesk products so you can have a consistent experience in your cross-platform workflows or your cross-product workflows. OK. Let's go to the poll. UI improvements, including 4K support. Would these be beneficial to you and your team?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      SCOTT CRIDER: Only ribbon. Command line's gone.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] labels on the status bar?

      SCOTT CRIDER: On hover? No, no labels. No, no text labels, sorry. it's near and dear to your heart, I'm sorry. OK. Neutral and some strongly agree. So as you start adopting these 4K monitors, just know AutoCAD will be ready. You won't have issues with sizing. Great.

      So our favorite part. Let's move into feature enhancements. . What's new in AutoCAD from a feature standpoint? So we invited users to participate in a survey of what was most important to them. What should we be working on? 16,000 people replied, an xref management was one of the big themes. So that's been a theme of ours for the past several years. Last year we made it easier to repair broken xref paths and stop broken xref paths from occurring in the first place.

      This year we're doing work on layer property overrides from xrefs. So in the past, if you had an xref file and you changed some of the layer properties, it can be difficult to keep that in sync with your host drawing. Additionally, when you did overrides, it would be hard to know exactly what you'd overridden and set it back.

      We've changed that this year. In 2018.1 update, we made it easier to keep your layer properties up to date, to identify what has been overwritten, and to revert back to the previous version if you'd like. So let's go into AutoCAD.

      Here we have an architectural drawing with an electrical drawing x-referenced into it. If I go into my xref, say that I want to change all of these to-- actually I'll just do it by layers. Let's do cyan. So everything is cyan. We'll save it. hop back into my architectural drawing.

      So you get a bubble, x reference has changed and may need reloading. So let's reload those x references. And you can see the layer properties change come in. I go into my layer properties palette. I can see my extra flairs. I can also override them if I want. So let's say that I do want to override this. I want to make it this pinkish color. When I click off of it, I can turn on here-- this little toggle is new-- and it will identify what you've overridden in your host drawing so that you know what is out of sync with your reference drawing.

      This little background here, you can see it highlights it a little bit just to let you know, hey, you've changed this from your previous drawing. So you can turn that on and off. Additionally, you can then revert those back. If you click on it, there's the option to revert back. You can do it for all the colors or for an individual item.

      Additionally, this gear. We've added new tools to help you manage your xref layer properties. Here you can say I want to retain my overrides, or you can say I want to reload my xref layer properties. So if you have an extra file, you can choose which properties you want to pass through to the host and which ones you want to have the host determine. So here I would say I want color to come in, I want line type and line weight. I want the host to determine everything else.

      So hopefully by combining the ability to bring in changes to layer properties, to identify what you've overridden and set them back as needed, and then control that, this should make it significantly easier for you to keep all this straight.

      So let's go to the polls. Will layer property overrides and these controls help you or your team? A little bit of a mixed bag. OK. So let's take a look at something else. We're also-- in the 2018.1 update we also made it simply easier for you to work with named views and layout viewports in a feature we're calling Smart Views. So in the past, if you wanted to create a layout viewport, you had to create your viewport, go into it, make it model space active, find your view, come out, make paper space active again, size it, lock it, and it was a pretty tedious task.

      In the 2018.1 update, this feature makes that a one-step process. So let's take a look. So here we are. We're back in our simple floor plan. And in the Views panel, this is not new, right? You always had the ability to create new views. Well, let's do that. Let's create a new view. Let's call it garage. You'll notice this dialogue is simplified. And I wanted to define my window. So I'm going to define a window and we'll put it right around the garage. There we go. Just like you're selecting some geometry.

      I'll hit Enter, and I can save this view window and layer state as a named view. I'll hit OK. Now I'll have a list of my views here, and I can return to any of them. So there's the bedroom. I'll check out the garage again. And now we'll go to the bathroom. So you created your named views in model space. Then when you go into layout, you now have the ability to insert these views as viewports.

      So in the layout tab, if I click on Insert View, you'll see a gallery of all the named views you've created. If you want to insert a viewport, you can then just click on it-- let's say we want to bring in the garage-- and drop it into your sheet. Just like that. No making model space active, no going back into paper space. So we're changing the workflow a little bit. But a little work up front of setting up these views then makes it so much easier when you start making your viewports.

      In addition, we added two new grips. So we have a scale lookup grip so that you can change the scale and it will automatically resize it. You don't have to worry about having to mess with the edges. It'll keep your view the same. We also added the move grip, so once you have the size right, I can click on the move grip and just drag that wherever you want.

      So again, you're thinking ahead of time about what views you may want, set them up in model space, and then once you're in paper space, it's drop it in, size it, move it wherever you want. And I'm seeing some smiles and heads nods, so this is good. This poll may be better.

      All right. Smart Views. Will it help you or your team?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: It is worth noting that this was just an idea at last year's AU. So we really do listen to your feedback and act on it as appropriate.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Great. Yeah, that's some pretty positive feedback.

      All right. Oh, got a couple more. Let's move on.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Awesome. So one of the other things that we hear a lot about is that it's really hard for you to manage changes in your work, particularly when you're dealing with multiple revisions from external collaborators and you're not sure if you've missed something. The impact can be really severe.

      So we did take a look at other tools that are available on the market to see if there were things that we could do to partner or incorporate those technologies into AutoCAD. But none of them really had the performance, the accuracy, and the experience that we know that you expect out of AutoCAD. And so we built a brand new Drawing Compare engine from scratch. Let's take a look at how this might look.

      So let's say I'm looking at the architecture drawing and I get another revision from the architect. I can go and get, from the Drawing Utilities, the Drawing Compare tool or access it from the Collaborate tab, the new Collaborate tab. You'll see that when I launch this, I actually have auto completed the path of the first drawing because it knows that it's open. I can also go in and select the modified drawing here and change the colors. Let's change it to blue.

      So I'll launch the comparison. And you tell that instantly, you'll see the changes highlighted in your drawing. The first drawing is shown in blue, all the geometry that's only in the first drawing. The geometry that's only in the second drawing shows up in red, and in gray, everything that's common to both. We've included a couple of visibility tools to help you toggle between, let's say, draw order so that you can see the information a little bit more clearly. You can change the colors here again if you like.

      You can turn drawings on or off, get more information about what these drawings are, what they're called, who last touched them and when. You can use the text and hatch toggles to turn those types of edits off. Let's zoom in here and look at this a little bit, so turn those off. Or the hatch toggles. These are all to make it easier for you to understand what's changed in the drawing. Let's turn a couple of these off.

      In addition, you may want to group these changes into relevant components that were relevant for your work. So let's say you wanted to update your drawings, and a bunch of changes happened in a certain area. So we actually take a step to auto group these for you. And you'll see that revision cloud around the group here in the canvas. You can change the tolerance of this grouping by selecting the margin, making those larger or smaller as you see fit. Or you can turn the revision clouds off if you like.

      Using your navigation tools, you can zoom in on each one of these changes so you can see really what's changed in each of these areas. Awesome. At this point, you can save the drawing as a comparison that you then archive for record. You could share it with someone else to show what's changed. Or you can xref it into your own drawing so you can update your drawings based on those changes.

      So we hope you see some benefit in this feature and that you continue to provide us feedback so that we can invest further in this key theme.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: That sounds like feedback that we'd like to hear.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: So it seems like there's some good response so far. But can you tell me how Drawing Compare will help you or your team? I like to see that.

      AUDIENCE: Are they going to have individual control over each [INAUDIBLE] or would you have to have them globally resized?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Right now they are globally resized by a parameter, by the one parameter. But it's feedback that we're welcome to hear.

      All right. So we talked a little bit about this new area, subscription only value. So this year we're investing in a few key areas that really help you take advantage of your desktop subscription. So you may have heard about the web and mobile apps in the past but now we're running AutoCAD core engine on the browser and in the mobile device to help you really get your AutoCAD that you trust and expect.

      We also are making improvements to the Shared Views feature, which you may recognize from last year as Design Share, and that's something that's being rolled out across the company. So it will be familiar to you when you go from AutoCAD to Revit or Inventor.

      Let's start a little bit about desktop web and mobile. So as you're doing your drawings get more complex and your projects get more complex, you expect your AutoCAD to follow you wherever you go. We know that you have different needs as you go home and you are accessing it from your laptop or from the browser, or in the field on a mobile device.

      And so we don't want to replicate the exact same feature set of AutoCAD in all of these locations, but we do want to focus on a few key workflows that help you get the most out of your desktop subscription. Let's take a look at what that might look like.

      I'm going to the same drawing that Scott was using. So let's say that we wanted to do a residential remodel. We get it all set up in desktop AutoCAD in the office where I have access to everything that I need. I've got my multiple monitors, I've got my heavy duty computer. Everything's there for me so that I can get access and kind of set up that drawing from there.

      But let's say I have a meeting in the morning, and I need to go and make some changes before that meeting. I get an email while I'm at home and I need access to my AutoCAD so that I can make those changes. You might want to do this from AutoCAD web. So let's take a look at the AutoCAD web beta right now.

      You can see you'll get your model and layouts, xrefs and common settings here. This email that came in for me from the client was asking about electrical outlets. So let's create a new layer here for the electrical. I can change that color to yellow, as is common with some electrical. And I can add an outlet here.

      Many of the same tools that you're familiar with on desktop will come through in the web as well.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Also sounds like good feedback.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Sorry?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: This is used as an example. But maybe you were drawing new things from scratch. So let's take a look at what that might look like on mobile. I'll switch over to my iPad. Did that come through?

      So I get to that meeting on site.

      SCOTT CRIDER: You're not on yet.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Nope. I get to that meeting on site, and I'm using my iPad to show off everything that I'm working on. And everything that can go wrong will go wrong, I found out. Can you see that now? All right. So that outlet that I drew is there, and while I'm on site, I realize I probably want to add a few more. So I'm going to copy this over and maybe add some annotations here just to talk about those new outlets that were added.

      All right. So I know that when I'm accessing my AutoCAD from AutoCAD on the web, on mobile, or on desktop, I'll have access to those in the office when I go back. So I have access to my AutoCAD wherever I go.

      Great. So let me switch this back over. Go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yeah. We're actively investing in this area right now of how you might work across multiple users. But the intention here is that you, as an AutoCAD subscriber, get access to your drawings wherever you go, whether on desktop, web, or on mobile. I think in the future we'll expect to see some more investments in sharing and collaborative-type workflows, but we're starting with the single user.

      All right. Let's take a poll.

      SCOTT CRIDER: You're still [INAUDIBLE].

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Oh, I'm still on the iPad.

      SCOTT CRIDER: There you go.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: That work?

      SCOTT CRIDER: Yeah.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Great. Lot of variety of response here. That's interesting.

      All right. One other area that we hear a lot of feedback about is about the ability to share with external collaborators. So maybe a little to your comment here. You want to be able to share with those people, but not necessarily lose the security of your IP and your DWG. And so you want a way to share with external collaborators without necessarily giving that away.

      So you may have heard about the Design Share feature in the past, and we made some active investments in this this year. Let's see how that looks.

      Oh, I forgot. This was one of those issues that we could not solve this morning with the build. So I'm going to show you a brief video that shows you how the Shared Views feature might work. So here I am in desktop AutoCAD, and I have access to a Shared Views button that's in the Collaborate tab next to Drawing Compare.

      So here I can create a new shared view and edit some of the parameters of the view. You'll see I have more controls than I did last year. And I have the ability to view it in the browser to be able to see what the collaborator is going to see. Let's say I make some comments just to highlight some of the areas that I expect them to go look at and send that URL to my external collaborator.

      I can see, when I'm back in desktop AutoCAD, all of those comments and even a snapshot of the view come back into the desktop environment. That way I can respond to feedback and update my drawings right from the desktop. Again, this feature is something that's going to be rolled out across the portfolio of Autodesk products, desktop products. And so it'll be familiar to you when you access it from AutoCAD, Inventor, and other products.

      So wow, you guys are fast. You knew what I was going to ask. All right. Great.

      So that is a look at what we're working on. We made some key investments in a few areas like 2D and 3D performance and 4K display under the core experience enhancements. We also talked a little bit about some of the new features and enhancements that we're working on and some of the subscription-only benefits that we're offering this year.

      So we hope that you'll come to the AutoCAD web beta. You should have a card somewhere around on your seat, or there are some on the table outside. Check it out. Please get engaged with us, provide your feedback. We really listen to that. And help us create the future of AutoCAD together.

      So at this point, we'd love to take some questions from the audience. Go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: On the new Smart View, I need to be able to set the scale when I make a view. Then I wouldn't have to set the scale when I put it on the--

      SCOTT CRIDER: Actually when you drag it in. Gotcha. Makes sense.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Cool. Go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: When you drag the views in, can you make it so that it comes in on a [? 0-VP ?] layer?

      SCOTT CRIDER: So no, it currently does not give you layer control. But that's also something good that we can--

      AUDIENCE: Yeah, because [INAUDIBLE] presentation where when you bring in the xref, it comes in with the xref layer. [INAUDIBLE] So that would be something nice, too.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Yeah, thanks. I think someone in the back is ready.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yeah, go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Backwards compatibility is going to be the same as it has been in past years. So we continue to support a couple of versions back. And you can get access to those in the accounts portal. Is that what you're talking about?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Oh, file format. With 2019, the pi release? That's right. So that 2018 did have a file format change. That's right.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Sorry?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      Yeah,

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yeah, sorry. I misspoke. Good catch. Other questions? All the way the back there?

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      SCOTT CRIDER: So it works just like in AutoCAD viewport today. There weren't any change to that functionality. It's just improving the way that you make them and your ability to size them and move them.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Chip.

      AUDIENCE: The shared views. How does that tie into, like, design feed or does it interact with that in any way?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: It's sort of similar in the interface. But it's actually a brand new API that we've used to create that, and so it'll look consistent across all of the Autodesk products. You'll see a couple of improvements like the thumbnails and the ability to bring it back into the desktop in a more kind of friendly way. And we're continuing to make some adjustments to that in the future.

      AUDIENCE: As a developer working in 2010 all the way up to 2018, [INAUDIBLE] I'm wondering about the images for the buttons. Is that yet another format, because I've got to deal with [INAUDIBLE].

      DANIA EL HASSAN: The images of what?

      SCOTT CRIDER: The icons.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Is that another format? No.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: No. So it's just replacing the graphics for those icons.

      AUDIENCE: All right, that's good.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yeah. Go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] changes to the object arts API, where the developers get [INAUDIBLE]?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so, not at this time. Go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: The Smart View [INAUDIBLE]?

      SCOTT CRIDER: Project Navigator?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Oh, I see.

      SCOTT CRIDER: So this recreates a little bit of that, right? But it works with sheets the same way that you can-- yeah? No, keep it going.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Smart View question. Can you make non-square ones?

      SCOTT CRIDER: So non-- like circular clipping?

      AUDIENCE: Polygonal.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Or polygonal. I don't believe that that's supported in this initial release. But I can check and make sure for you.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yeah. We got that feedback before. More questions? Yeah, go ahead.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] xref layer [INAUDIBLE]. Is there any way to disable that [INAUDIBLE]?

      DANIA EL HASSAN: The ability to override?

      AUDIENCE: Well, because it looks like you're augmenting Visretain.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: Yep. So Visretain now has three modes, and it's one of the modes. So you can set the [INAUDIBLE] to whatever you like.

      AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

      DANIA EL HASSAN: OK. More questions?

      AUDIENCE: So when can we expect it?

      SCOTT CRIDER: That's a great question.

      DANIA EL HASSAN: You know I can't answer that.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Well, web. You can expect web today. And the interesting thing about your blocks question, right, of well, why don't we make blocks, is that since it's not desktop software, it's constantly evolving, right? So blocks is not in web today. But things happen much more quickly there. So I would encourage you, if you check it today, check back again in a couple of months, and keep checking in on it. And we'll communicate out, but it evolves much more rapidly.

      AUDIENCE: You all had something very similar back in the days [INAUDIBLE] with the [INAUDIBLE] file because we could take the blocks and convert them and import those as their own blocks. I mean, that's certainly something you all could do.

      SCOTT CRIDER: Yeah, I mean, we know everyone uses blocks. It's definitely on the road map. It's just since it's a new product, we start simple and we build on it.

      Great. Thank you all very much. If you have other questions, we'll be around.

      [APPLAUSE]