Welcome to the new Showcase blog. My name is Alex Fuchs, I am the Technical Product Manager for Showcase. I live in Frankfurt, Germany (this may be the reason for some strange English grammar you may find here :-) and as you may have read in my bio, my whole business life has been about engineering and visualization.

I started my career as an engineer for a company that mainly used 2D to design their products, I soon got the chance to work for Control Data, where I mainly did consulting and convinced people to follow the 3D path. Renderings or animations were not really common those days. But then applications like Alias Power Animator showed up and caught my attention immediately. I was really excited to “bring designs to life”, so I did not hesitate one second when I was asked to join Alias, sometime in the last millennium. Originally I worked as consultant at Alias, with a focus on visualizing 3D content. A little side step to character animation helped build my animation skills and a sense for cinematic quality. But my main focus has always been design visualization.

For those who haven’t heard about Showcase yet, Showcase is a real-time visualization and presentation software, designed to help you telling the story of your design. Showcase is not a new product. We launched it in 2008. Showcase recently moved to Autodesk “Media and Entertainment”, which explains why we are just launching it on the Area today. Showcase is currently used by our top automotive accounts, but we see a significant grow in the consumer products area and more and more adopted in the industrial machinery environment.

I love the close contact I have with customers and you may feel my passion and pride in this Blog. I have seen such amazing visuals from Showcase users over the year. I hope to share these with you in this Blog, along with tips and techniques on how to get the most out of Showcase, and insights on where we are heading. Most of all though, I hope to hear from you, and I hope to use this Blog as a conduit to develop a closer relationship with Showcase users.

As I final note, I want to share a short video I created in 1997 using PowerAnimator. It is not a great character animation, it just shows what I always had in mind when it comes to visualization: humans interacting with design and physics in context. Now it’s time to do that in real-time :-)

This movie also shows one of my private obsessions: speed. My hobbies include motorbikes, skiing and snowboarding, and driving fast cars on German Autobahns. Well, perhaps I should slow down a little bit given the fact that I am married and have an eight year old son… perhaps I will be able to get my speed thrills virtually with Showcase soon :-)

I’m looking forward to getting to know you, and helping you get to know Showcase.

Alex Fuchs