Project Miller retires from Autodesk Labs

Project Miller was our free technology preview that allowed you to optimize and validate your design before you built it. Project Miller helped you improve results with 3D printing. Is my model geometry printable? What changes can be made to improve it? What will the printed part look like? Like the ultimate Print Preview, Miller enabled you to inspect your model, visualize how it will print, and identify problems in advance. Project Miller has ended.

When a technology preview ends, one of three things can happen:

• Another technology preview can spring up to allow the team to continue to get feedback.
• The technology can graduate from Autodesk Labs and appear in another form such as a bonafide product or beta.
• The technology preview can retire. It is not necessarily dead. It is just not available at the moment. The technology may resurface at a later date, perhaps in another form.

Such is the case with Project Miller. It is in retirement at this time. The 3D print preview technology is being considered for inclusion in other forms, but as a stand-alone application, Project Miller is riding off into the sunset. Thanks to everyone who participated in the project.

Technology previews are not intended for production use. After all, they're still in the early preview stage. They are in their infancy and are not fully baked. We are realists and recognize that some customers use them at their own risk. Technology previews are like taste tests at malls. We let people take a sip of Pepsi and a sip of Coke and tell us which one they like better. Regardless of which one they prefer, we are not necessarily promising to deliver a lifetime supply of soda. Sometimes people hate the taste of both!

We make technology previews available via Autodesk Labs so people can give us feedback. Most customers try them on test projects. If the technology preview works for them — great. If it does not work for them, no harm/no foul, since the customers are only playing with the technology on test projects. Since technology previews have an end date that is published at the onset of the technology preview, customers try them on projects that end before the technology preview ends. Technology previews have a specific end date so no one confuses them with perpetual functionality that is associated with a product offering or subscription service. In fact, technology previews are offered for free to Subscription customers, non-Subscription customers, and educational users alike. When the previews end, I don't have a way to re-activate them. It's not part of the Labs process.

A retirement party is alive in the lab.