Happy New Year to everyone reading this blog. I hope that those of you who had time off enjoyed it to the max: I certainly did. Mixing metaphors gratuitously, I’m now back in the saddle and trying hard to get my head back in the game.
Here’s a fun topic to get the year started: Håvard Høiby from the Forma team has posted about an event that’s coming up in Oslo from February 13-14, 2024. It’s called an Extendathon: a public Hackathon (although if you want to treat it like an APS Accelerator and work on your own company’s project, you can) for people to come and build Extensions for Forma. I’ll be flying across to Oslo to join, too - my first time in the city in over 25 years!
In a follow-up post, Carl Christensen has given some additional context about the event, including specifics on “who should come” and an agenda for the two days. The more I hear about it, the more I’m looking forward to it.
Any builder with an open mindset and an interest in Autodesk Forma is welcome! We especially encourage Software Developers, Designers, and Computational Designers to join us. You do not have to be an existing user or customer of Autodesk Forma to join the hackathon.
In his blog post, Håvard talks about some extensions the Forma team built in a recent internal Extendathon, which sounds like it was a lot of fun. Here’s a quick animation showing some of them in action - for more detailed videos and descriptions I suggest heading over to Håvard’s post.
What’s really cool is that the team has published several of these extensions on GitHub for anyone to clone and extend (maybe during an Extend2athon, haha).
As I know readers of this blog love sample code (what’s not to like, after all?) here are the repos:
I’m very intrigued by the Pathmaker project: it’s really exciting to see multi-agent simulation surfacing in Forma… very inspiring!
I talked a little about our own work to prototype a Forma Extension using VASA here (we haven't yet published any code, however):
Depending on how the event goes - and whether I end up joining a team or not - I may look at ways to progress the initial prototype integration of VASA into Forma, especially with respect to visibility:
For some more background into building Forma Extensions, I recommend watching this recent webinar that goes into the details:
There’s still a relatively small set of extensions that have been posted to the Autodesk App Store. I’m very happy to see that Veras for Forma is available there, as well as a Forma extension from my old friends at Plex-Earth. In any case, now is a great time to build your own extension for Forma, as the store will without doubt be filling up over the coming months.
If you’re interested in taking advantage of this unique opportunity to extend Forma alongside its developers, join the waitlist today. Hopefully I’ll see you in Oslo!