Through the Interface

Register now for Autodesk University 2020!

It’s been a crazy year, but there’s comfort to be had in certain things going ahead despite the craziness. For me Autodesk University is one of these things: my first AU was back in the year 2000, and I’ve probably only missed a few in the last two decades. This year’s AU experience will be 100% virtual but also 100% free, so I’m really excited that so many more people will be able to experience AU! As of Wednesday, registration is now open for this year’s AU. It’s quick and easy – no need to fill out credit card... Read more →

Get the latest information on Project Dasher at this week’s KEA BIM Café Talk

I’ve been invited to talk about Project Dasher at the KEA BIM Café Talk on Wednesday of this week. Many thanks to Aske Strandberg for organising and moderating this event. It’s being held online (of course) at 4pm CET on Wednesday September 16th. The session is primarily targeted at students from KEA – the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology – but guests are very welcome. If you’d like to join, feel free to sign up here. I’ll be sharing a number of really cool enhancements I’ve been making to Dasher during the pandemic-related travel ban – only some... Read more →

Pinning 2D heatmaps per-level in Project Dasher

So far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, and then adding lots of them inside Project Dasher. I’ve mentioned a few times – and I’ve seen the same commented via LinkedIn – that viewing data from multiple building floors at the same time would be beneficial. As a reminder, here’s what happens when you change floors with the current implementation: The UX to implement some kind of “pinning” mechanism was non-trivial, but possible. The way I ended up thinking about this was as follows: We still want generic panels that will show data... Read more →

Viewing multiple heatmaps inside Project Dasher

In the last couple of posts in this series, we looked at how we’ve been able to include a 2D heatmap view inside Project Dasher and make it resizable via a square, transparent panel. This post is really just to let you know that we’ve now extended the capability to support multiple heatmaps, which is particularly interesting if you want to compare data from different sensor types across the floor of a building. (I often say that the value in a tool like Dasher is in its ability to correlate multiple streams of data – such as occupancy with... Read more →

25 years with Autodesk

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of my joining Autodesk. The years have literally flown by. To bathe in the nostalgia of the event, I decided to go up into the loft and dig through my old photos, to see what I could find. Here’s one of me that was probably taken around the time I joined Autodesk (at a guess, anyway). Yes, I had long hair, although it was usually tied back: it was only this curly just after it had just been washed (so not very often, ahem). If you could travel back in time and tell my... Read more →

Creating a resizable square panel inside the Forge viewer

In this recent post we looked at a new 2D heatmap capability that we’ve added to Project Dasher. In this post we look at what was needed to make this heatmap resizable – but with a fixed aspect ratio – as well as being movable and displayed with a transparent background. Luckily, this previous post shows how to create a transparent, movable window – which we already use to show our surface shading legend – so we were able to use that as a basis for today’s implementation. Firstly, let’s take a look at it working. Note the fact... Read more →

Project Dasher at Kingspan’s IKON building

A nice article was published recently on Redshift regarding Kingspan’s new IKON building. The article focuses particularly on describing how IKON furthers Kingspan’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. In this post I thought we’d look in a bit more detail at how Autodesk Research has been involved in the IKON project, specifically regarding the deployment of sensor and camera technology to help create a digital twin of IKON inside Project Dasher. IKON is Kingspan’s new headquarters and global innovation centre at Kingscourt in County Cavan, Ireland. Here’s an introductory video that talks about this project and shows a couple... Read more →

Displaying a 2D heatmap when surface shading inside Dasher

A week or two ago, I had a meeting with some colleagues to discuss future needs for Project Dasher. One of these requirements related to an exhibit where we’re going to want to ignore all the 3D visualization of sensor data, and focus on the 2D case (I.e. where we shade a 2D floorplan with the sensor values). When this came up I thought to myself “oh, this could be a good driver for us implementing a 2D workflow inside Dasher”, something I’ve chewed on in the past. This time around, I started off thinking about whether to use... Read more →

Dreaming of AU and Forge Accelerators

This has been a strange week, at least in terms of dreams. I mentioned earlier in the week (on Twitter and LinkedIn) that I’d had a dream about Autodesk University where I was only partially present: I was running between meetings while everyone else was having fun attending sessions and hanging out at social events. I also noted this wasn’t so very different from reality (at least the way I perceive it), but that’s just me playing the victim. I love AU even if it’s always a bit hectic. I have a feeling this dream was probably triggered by... Read more →

Exploring minimum and maximum data ranges in Dasher

Last week I posted about how roll-ups in the time-series back-end used by Project Dasher enable some interesting visualization opportunities. When my colleague Hali Larsen saw the post, she made a really interesting suggestion: It would be cool if the user could select whether the heatmap visualizes the Max, Min, or Average of the data for the selected rollup. (Yet another drop down...) The advantage would be that someone looking for a feature in the data would see the "spikes" whereas when you use the rollups as they currently work you lose a lot of the variability of colour... Read more →

Become a resident at an Autodesk Technology Center and get access to a HoloLens 2

Our Technology Centers team has posted an interesting RFP on LinkedIn: they’ve been working with Microsoft to make HoloLens 2 headsets available to Technology Center residents interested in exploring mixed reality workflows for the AEC and Manufacturing industries. It seems pretty straightforward: if you’re interested in developing a mixed reality solution – whether using Unity, Unreal or WebXR – then you need to submit your proposal before August 24th, 2020. If accepted you’ll be invited into our residency program and provided a HoloLens 2 device for 6 months (with the possibility of extending the term, if needed). This seems... Read more →

Data resolutions in Project Dasher

When we started developing Dasher in late 2009 – back then it had a desktop client – one of the main drivers was around providing an interface to explore IoT data (at the time measuring building performance) responsively in a 3D context. To do this we knew that we needed some way to summarize the raw sensor data at different levels of detail: there was no way we could wait around for the client to query years of sensor data in order to visualize a high-level summary, for instance. In our time-series back-end the team developed a mechanism we... Read more →

The first online AEC Hackathon

Since starting up back in 2013, the AEC Hackathon team has organised 43 in-person events in various cities around the world. This year being “special”, they’ve taken the plunge and set up a couple of online events, the first was held from July 6th-26th while the second will be held from October 9th-25th. I was on holiday for the first two weeks of the July event, so could only really participate by presenting a topic during the final week. Here are a couple of screenshots of me – taken from the session recording, which should still be available on-demand... Read more →

Dynamo 2.7 – Migrating MaRS to CPython3

After being teased with some graphics improvements coming in Dynamo, I was excited to find on returning from my recent holiday to find a new release of Dynamo Sandbox was available for testing. There are a number of notable features available in Dynamo 2.7, whether the ability to run CPython3 code – rather than using IronPython, which is based on Python2 – or improved graphics preview performance thanks to an upgrade to Helix. I started by just loading v2 of the MaRS graph, without changing any of the code blocks to use CPython. Straightaway I found that the graphics... Read more →

A Swiss staycation

I’m just back from a proper two-week break from work. I say “proper” because it’s rare that I manage to disconnect completely from meetings and email, but given the increased mental load of being attached to Zoom over the last several months, it really felt like a good time to force the break. It’s been a while since I’ve shared anything travel-related – I did so much more of our big trip of a few years ago, of course – but given the fact many people aren’t travelling much, at the moment, I thought I’d share what we’ve done... Read more →

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 →