Through the Interface

Autodesk is turning 40

As many of you will have heard on social media, Autodesk turns 40 this year. More specifically this coming Monday, January 30th, is the 40th anniversary of the original organizational meeting held at John Walker’s former home in Mill Valley, California. (You can find details in this recent post from John.) The anniversary of Autodesk’s official incorporation and initial stock distribution is on April 26th, but Autodesk as an informal entity already existed from the end of January. Although the company wasn’t called Autodesk at that point, as that wasn’t fixed until some time in April… among the other... Read more →

Speaking at tomorrow’s BIM Fórum Brasil about Digital Twins

I’ve been asked to talk about our work on Digital Twins (or Gêmeos Digitais) at the BIM Fórum Brasil event, on Wednesday of this week (January 26th, 2022). The event starts at 10am in Brasilia, which is 2pm in Central Europe, so the timing should work well for Asia, Europe and early birds on the east coast of North America, too. I’ll be sharing information on our older projects, as usual, but I’m also planning to showcase some of our more recent (previously unseen) projects. So there’s likely to be new information even for people who have seen me... Read more →

A video on using slicing, meshes and Python with VASA

Fancy a nice slice of VASA to finish your week? Luckily Rhys Goldstein is here with Part 4 in his video series introducing VASA features. In this episode, Rhys talks about using slicing functions with voxel models, how to iterate through voxel models using Python, as well as a number of nodes that help you work with meshes inside Dynamo (and VASA). He also covers a couple of techniques that allow you to export voxel models to Dynamo geometry, and even navigates through the shell of an exported voxel model to show you what it looks like from the... Read more →

Draping temperature data from a thermal image across the Forge viewer scene - Part 2

In the last post we looked at how it’s possible to take temperature data from a thermal image and use the Data Visualization Extension to connect that information to locations in a 3D Forge viewer scene. In this post we look at how we can use the events from the same extension to display a simple tooltip showing the temperature when one of these locations is hovered over. Let’s start by looking at what we get from the thermal image. It’s pretty simple: we have colour. As we’re averaging a number of pixels it’s likely to be on a... Read more →

Draping temperature data from a thermal image across the Forge viewer scene - Part 1

I work in the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, a centralised pool of software engineering talent that contributes to research projects across our various industries. Organising this way allows us to explore commonalities (and efficiencies) that would otherwise be hard to achieve. Every year or two we have an internal “Innovation Days” event, which is essentially an internal team hackathon. (Lots of other teams at Autodesk do this, of course, we’re far from being unique in that regard.) Our latest Innovation Days took place on Thursday and Friday of last week, with the theme of sustainability. I met with... Read more →

Floppy Friday #64

Well, this is it. Floppy Fridays – at least for now – have come to an end. For some time I’ve been saying I’d stop at episode 64 – as the main focus of the series is the awesome Commodore 64 – and this episode has come around, finally. And, despite me following basically my usual random approach for selecting games for this episode, it was a really good way to end the series, with a wide range of very interesting games. We kicked off with the classic Turrican II - The Final Fight – a game we’d played... Read more →

A belated Happy New Year

I’ve now been back at work for a few days after an extended holiday break, so my head is back far enough above water for me to write a quick blog post. At Autodesk we were extremely lucky to have an extended holiday shutdown, this festive season, so employees around the world clocked off after work on December 17th. For me this meant a perfect opportunity to hit the slopes ahead of the Christmas rush. My kids were in school until the 23rd, but I managed have a few days hanging out on my own, up in the mountains,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #63

In this week’s episode – the first of 2022 – we take a look at five Commodore 64 games, although we only get to play four of them. We start with Bomb Jack, then (once again!) fail to load Test Drive, before playing Ace, Pitstop II and wrap things up with another Hewson Consultants classic, Eliminator. Here’s the cover art from this week’s selection: Now for a couple of reviews from Zzap! 64 magazine. Here’s one for Bomb Jack from issue 14: And here's a much more positive one for Pitstop II from issue 2: See you next week... Read more →

Floppy Friday #62

So here it is, the last episode of 2021. The first game we attempted to play – Super Huey – in many ways set the scene for the rest of the episode. Here’s a quote about the game from one of its reviews, as per its Wikipedia entry: "For those desiring an 8-bit helicopter flight simulator, Super Huey and its sequels fill the bill. For those desiring excitement as well, it would pay dividends to look elsewhere." Ouch. After not even being able to take off, we moved on to Crystal Fever (which I failed to find a level... Read more →

Floppy Friday #61

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, the breadbins were whirring, without even a mouse. - Unknown It’s the Christmas eve Floppy Friday! In this episode we discover a few interesting – and largely unheard or, I believe – games, as well as a couple we’ve played in prior episodes. I was really surprised/impressed with the Italian motorbike game we started off playing, if nothing else that for the progress bar while loading. Could this be the first example of a game having such a feature? (I’d be very happy to hear it’s not the case,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #60

Well, we made it to episode 60! Just four more to go after today’s episode. Today we ended up playing Eagle Empire – a clone of the class arcade game, Phoenix – and then we played an old favourite again: last time it was called Pogo, while this time it went by its more usual name of Nebulus. Then we played a somewhat disappointing Petch before failing to load Dam Busters and finishing up by actually playing the rather good Knight Games. Here’s the cover art for this week’s episode: Here’s the review for Knight Games from Zzap! 64... Read more →

A video on visibility and daylight analysis with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the third part of his video series introducing capabilities of the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package for Dynamo. This part focuses on how VASA can perform visibility and daylighting analyses. Here’s an animation showing some of topics covered: And here’s the video itself: We’re taking a break from this series now until the New Year, when Rhys will be sharing a walkthrough of the remaining VASA samples. Read more →

Daily coding challenges in December with Advent of Code

My old friend Simon Breslav pointed me to Advent of Code a week or more ago, but at first I was hesitant. Where would I find the time to tackle a daily coding challenge that wasn’t related to work? Would I even be up to the challenge, given the fact I’m not coding full-time and may not be up-to-date with the latest techniques? Here’s a speech by the creator of Advent of Code, Eric Wastl, where he talks about the origins of AoC from back in 2015, and how it’s gone from strength to strength since: Anyway, come Friday... Read more →

Floppy Friday #59

In this week’s episode we play five more fun (or less fun) Commodore 64 games, loaded from floppy diskettes. We start with a pro wrestling game called Rock ‘n’ Wrestle, followed by a couple of platform games: Miner 2049er and Mr. Do’s Castle. We then played Eddie Kidd Jump Challenge and wrapped up with an educational game called Quick Thinking! Robot Tables. Here’s some cover art from this episode: Here’s a review of Rock ‘n’ Wrestle from issue 12 of Zzap! 64 magazine: And one last thing… here’s the music video for a song called Computer Games by the... Read more →

VASA 0.1.2 is now available

The first version of VASA we posted to the Dynamo package manager was numbered 0.1.0. Yesterday we posted a new version with some interesting new features, not least of which is the lack of an error when you install it (this one was very much my fault: I’d neglected to mark a couple of DLLs as not being node libraries when I posted it). Here’s a breakdown of the new features in 0.1.2, courtesy of the package’s author, Rhys Goldstein: Added VoxelModel.ToSolid, which converts a voxel model into a Dynamo solid that can be processed using standard Dynamo operations... Read more →

Using VASA via WebAssembly for pathfinding inside FormIt

As a quick recap, here are the posts we’ve seen in recent weeks on this topic: Autodesk FormIt and its JavaScript API Introductory look at FormIt and the Maze Generator plugin. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 1 How VASA can be used within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes (etc.) in 3D. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2 Applying the same principle with urban scenes imported by the 3D Context Creator plugin. In today’s post we look at the fact that VASA can also be used directly from a FormIt JavaScript plugin –... Read more →

Floppy Friday #58

I almost thought today’s episode wasn’t going to happen. I started checking the directory listings for a few floppies, and suddenly things started to fail. I couldn’t read any at all, and ended up trying a series of combinations of different computers, floppy drives and cables, all with similar (bad) results. I went back to cleaning the drive heads (once again – this was the first thing I tried) and eventually things started to work in time for me to record the episode. Totally surreal! I can only blame those nasty gremlins who clearly enjoy haunting 1980s equipment. Anyway,... Read more →

Come work at Autodesk on the Tandem team!

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R13688 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 I’m really happy to see that the Tandem team is hiring. And they’re hiring into a really varied set of roles, so hopefully there’s something in this list for everyone. :-) Customer Adoption Specialist Principal Software Developer Senior Software Developer UX Designer Senior UX Designer Technical Program Manager I’m pretty sure that all these positions are “remote-ready”, although I believe from a timezone perspective the Eastern US is strongly preferred for at least the engineering-centric roles. I may have that wrong, of course, and I’ll be sure to come back and... Read more →

Frustrated by travel restrictions? Join the last virtual Forge Accelerator of 2021!

The subject is basically a perfect description of my own situation, today, but I thought there might be others out there in the same boat (as it were). I have a feeling that more people will end up being stuck at home over the next few weeks, whether they like it or not. From my side I was very much looking forward to a trip to the UK, next week, where I’d have had the chance to catch up with my UK colleagues for the first time in-person in probably 2 years. And to join for the team Christmas... Read more →

Floppy Friday #57

In this week’s episode we mostly played Summer Games II. It’s not exactly how I expected things to turn out, but there you go. It’s also a game I’d already played back in Floppy Friday #32 – I knew it looked familiar! (sigh) – but I chose a different set of disciplines to be awful at. Apart from the javelin, as I seem to love failing at that one. I’m pretty sure I fluffed selecting nationalities in exactly the same way, too, but hey. We did get a little time to play a couple of other games – Commando... Read more →