Through the Interface

Autodesk's 40th anniversary celebration

As I mentioned last week, Autodesk turned 40 yesterday. In anticipation of this milestone, Shaan Hurley and the Autodesk Community team organised a fun online get-together on Friday for people to join and get nostalgic about the good old days. Shaan asked me to prepare something Floppy Friday-related, so I went and created a Floppy Friday Zoom background that I used during the event. Here’s a GIF version, in case you’re interested. At its peak there were around 70 people in the call. It was so nice to reconnect with people after such a long time. It would have... Read more →

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 →