Back on January 1st 2005 "New Years Day", fellow CADBlogger Robin Capper alerted me to the Dilbert's Ultimate House "DUH" project. Dilbert is the comic strip geek legend of mythical head proportions by Scott Adams.

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/house_news.html

Robin suspected that Autodesk products had been used by the firm Heartwood Studios that did the design and 3D visualization work. It did look like a slam dunk especially since some of the images showed Dilbert in front of a computer with Autodesk 3ds Max on the screen. Both Robin and I contacted Heartwood Studios who confirmed AutoCAD and 3ds Max had indeed been used in the production of the project construction documents and renderings.

Now the 2D plans of Dilbert's Ultimate House "DUH" are available in the Autodesk DWF format. I only wish we had the 3D DWF files posted as those were absolutely amazing.

Link to the "DUH" DWF page
You can even download the free trial of DWF Composer to markup the DWF files at http://www.autodesk.com/dwfcomposer

The nice thing is that the Autodesk DWF Viewer is a free download, lightweight, DWF can be viewed and zoomed on a web page, visual fidelity like a plot of the original AutoCAD drawing, and the DWF files do not weigh10Mb per square foot of contract document. There have been over 7 million Autodesk DWF Viewer downloads thus far.

The credits go to Heartwood Studios,  Robin Capper, Scott Adams, United Feature Syndicate, and the Autodesk DWF Team especially Brian Mathews and former Adobe PDF guru Jonathan Knowles.

Cheers,
Shaan
(now back to my vacation and some camping this weekend)