Through the Interface

Autodesk Research is hiring experienced software developers and designers!

These days I belong to the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, headed by Tony Ruto. (Tony joined Autodesk with the acquisition of Within Technologies, back at the end of 2014, where he was CTO.) Tony’s team is a shared resource for the various “Core Science” and “Industry Futures” teams within Autodesk Research: we help develop prototypes and platform capabilities that are used elsewhere in the organisation, and also have members of our team embedded within these other teams. The team is growing, which is quite exciting: there are a number of open positions that I’d encourage you to share... Read more →

AEC Hackathon, CanBIM recordings & AU class voting

This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: “The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID”. My own session was entitled “Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being”. As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor’s introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant... Read more →

Saving data for selected generative designs from Revit 2021

In the last post we saw how the Data.Gate node can be used to send geometry to Revit 2021 when the “Create Revit Elements” button gets pressed from the Explore Outcomes UI for a Generative Design study. Phew. In this post we’re going to dig into how this node can also be used to have other “side effects” such as storing the various input parameters to a text file. For the purpose of this workflow I’ve chosen to hack the standard Three Box Massing.dyn graph (which ships with Revit 2021 as a sample for the Generative Design feature). The... Read more →

Managing data flow to and from Generative Design studies in Revit 2021

I was inspired to write this post by a chat I had with Zachary Kron, earlier in the week. I’d been noodling on how best to support a workflow where users of the Generative Design feature in Revit 2021 can select specific solutions in a study and do something with them. The specific use-case was around some functionality I’d prototyped back during the days of Project Refinery, where while exploring the results created during a generative study you could double-click individual designs – whether in the scatterplot or the design grid – which would add them to a graphical... Read more →

The Autodesk University 2020 proposal deadline is coming fast!

I’ve just realised that time is running out for people to submit their class proposals for AU 2020. The deadline is on June 22nd, which is this coming Monday. From my side I’m almost certainly going to submit a class to discuss the details of the work we’ve been doing on post-COVID return-to-workplace efforts. Essentially digging into how we’ve used the Space Analysis package to implement metrics that make sense for this type of analysis. If you’re thinking of submitting something, but haven’t yet put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard), then I suggest giving it some... Read more →

Attention Digital Twin folks! Autodesk’s Constructwin team is seeking a Product Manager

There’s an exciting job posted for a key role in a new project (product?) team at Autodesk named Constructwin. Here’s some information from the posting: Do you want the opportunity to be part of a startup environment and have a big impact on a brand-new product? Are you looking to be at the forefront of innovative new technology that will ultimately help people imagine, design, and make a better world? If so, come join the Constructwin team at Autodesk! Our mission is to create Digital Twin technology and solutions that will transform how buildings are designed, built, and operated.... Read more →

Give Dasher sharing a try

While I announced the sharing feature – and its corresponding API – some time ago, I still had some work to do before it could go live on the Dasher site: largely around supporting timezones properly when specifying time ranges for data display, but there were some other minor tweaks needed, too. Anyway, the feature is ready enough for people to kick the tyres on it, at least. Here’s a link which will launch the public Dasher demo for you, taking you straight into a “surface shading” view for C02 values on the 1st floor, bringing up the graph... Read more →

Visual clustering is now live in Dasher

I have a quick update to share on Dasher, today: I’ve just pushed live a version to the main Dasher site that enables a core Forge viewer extension to perform visual clustering of model contents. I talked about this back at the beginning of the year, but there was a core change needed to the Forge viewer to make it work for Dasher: specific details are in the blog post I just linked to, but it relates to the fact we rely on the Navisworks format for our models, and these have a different property structure when loaded through... Read more →

Don’t worry – we must have finally reached "peak Kean"

I have the sense that I’m seeing my face too much at the moment (admittedly I’m very attached to it… haha). All I can say, in my defence, is that over the last few weeks I’ve started to receive more requests to participate in virtual activities. And I’ve mostly said yes, as it’s a reasonable alternative to travelling to meet people, given the current circumstances we’re all in. In case you haven’t seen these various pieces of virtual content – and you’re actually interested – here’s a quick round-up of some current and future ones. Getting Simple When my... Read more →

An update on our post-COVID office layout explorations

For the last few weeks I’ve once again been heads-down on Generative Design-related tasks after several months working almost exclusively on Dasher. I like switching context like this but it can certainly be a little disorientating, at first. Anyway, it’s been really interesting working once again with my friends in the AEC Industry Futures team (the rockstars formerly known as The Living), and with Rhys Goldstein – the designer of the algorithms driving the Space Analysis package – on imagining a tool to help with post-COVID office layouts. Something I speculated about a little while ago, although that was... Read more →

Online lectures from ITA and IAAC

As a follow-up to the last post which talked about SimAUD and it’s going online, today I wanted to mention some other online resources that might also be of interest to people during these times. The Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich is one of many institutions that have moved their public lectures online and have made them available for anyone to watch. So far I’ve watched a couple of them live, the second one being by my friend and former colleague, Matt Jezyk, who is now spearheading Tesla’s efforts to streamline gigafactory design using techniques... Read more →

Attend SimAUD 2020 online next week for only $50 ($20 for students)

Next week is the annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD, pronounced Sim-Odd). This conference was started a decade ago by my former manager Azam Khan, along with Gabriel Wainer and Ramtin Attar. I’ve only had the pleasure of attending one SimAUD event – the 2018 edition was held in the Netherlands at TUDelft – but I was hoping/planning to attend this year’s in Vienna: a paper submitted by Rhys Goldstein – with Simon Breslav , myself and Azam as co-presenters – was accepted for the conference. Here’s a quick photo from a dinner we had... Read more →

Minor updates to Warnamo and Capturefinery

I’ve made some minor tweaks to a couple of my Dynamo packages, this week. One was to make sure Capturefinery – a tool that generates screenshots and animated GIFs for Refinery optimisation runs – works with the shipping release of Generative Design for Revit 2021 (it now does, but needed to look in a new directory structure). This is available from Capturefinery 0.9.11. The other was to add a feature to Warnamo – a tool that lists the warnings and errors in your Dynamo graph – to let you export the error list to Excel. This is available from... Read more →

Autodesk University goes fully digital in 2020

Yesterday Lisa Campbell, Autodesk’s Chief Marketing Officer, announced the decision to move all this year’s Autodesk University events to a fully digital platform: this makes a lot of sense given the ongoing uncertainty around the duration and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s going to change the shape of AU for many of us, inevitably, but I’m looking forward to these events, nonetheless. For one thing it means I’m going to be able to attend – or even participate in – more of them, with less impact on my family and the planet. I’m also really curious to see... Read more →

Dynamo 2.6

I’ve been banging pretty hard on Dynamo 2.6 – via Dynamo Sandbox – for the last few days, and I have to say I’ve been very impressed. Node renaming labels, code numbering, much improved PolyCurve performance… the combination of these various features have really helped with a project I’m working on right now (more on this next week). Congratulations to the Dynamo and Matterlab teams for this compelling update. So far it’s really making a big difference. Check out Sol’s blog post and head on over to DynamoBuilds.com to get the Sandbox build to try out! Read more →

May the Forth be with you!

No, that isn’t a typo. As it’s May the Fourth – yes, Star Wars Day – I thought I’d have a little fun and see what I could write using the venerable stack-based programming language, Forth. For those of you who aren’t aware, Forth has a long history with Autodesk and , having been at the core of ATLAST, the Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit. ATLAST had noble intentions: to allow host applications to expose a common API or macro language that executed efficiently and with very low memory overhead. By the time I joined Autodesk it was... Read more →

Getting better-looking text in your Dynamo graph output

One of my pet peeves with Dynamo – as I typically use it standalone from Revit – is the quality of the text you can generate as graphics: the Dynamo Text package will generate curves (actually lots of little lines) that represent the outline of your characters, but they often look quite lame depending on your zoom level. Actually scratch that – they look lame irrespective of the zoom level. Sigh. Anyway – today I finally dug into what I needed to do to create better-looking text as output from your Dynamo graphs. My first attempt was to create... Read more →

Virtual Forge Accelerators – coming to an office (very) near you

For two of the last three weeks I’ve been lurking in virtual Forge Accelerators: as I mentioned last time, the Forge team has pivoted to virtual events after this year’s Accelerator in Sydney was forced online due to a COVID-related office closure. (Incidentally I need to get used to the team’s new name: they recently switched from Forge Partner Development to Developer Advocacy and Support. FPD is no more, the future is DAS!) The DAS team has since gone “all in” on these events, holding two during the month of April. The first one was codenamed Metropolis and ran... Read more →

A quick round-up of articles on Generative Design in Revit 2021

This week has been interesting: after speculating last week about how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our design criteria – especially as it might relate to Generative Design – this week I ended up diving into a project related to exactly that. I’ll share more on this in due course. In the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick round-up of some news that has been coming in on the new Generative Design feature (formerly known as Project Refinery) in Revit 2021. To start with, here’s a good article from Autodesk that announces the feature. Next up, here’s a... Read more →

An article in the RuMoer on Space Analysis and SyDEVS

Late last week I received the news that an article co-written by Rhys Goldstein, Divyae Mittal and myself has been published in the RuMoer, TU Delft’s periodical for the building technologist. Divyae – who is wrapping up his Master’s degree at TU Delft, in spite of the CORVID-19 pandemic – reached out as his thesis project makes use of both SyDEVS – a discrete event simulation framework Rhys has written and open sourced – and the Space Analysis Dynamo package. Divyae thought it worth covering both packages and his thesis in the RuMoer, and we wholeheartedly agreed! While my... Read more →