Through the Interface

Combining a translucent VASA visibility cone with intersecting Forma geometry

A very quick update on my holiday “fun”. After a bit of work I managed to combine two VASA voxel models - one for the visibility cone and one for its intersection with Forma’s site surroundings, something we saw last time - into a single Forma mesh. You can hopefully see that the performance is very decent, and the translucent, fog-like effect of the cone to be a reasonable visual complement to the intersection area. I ended up going through the extra effort to combine them both into a single mesh - putting the vertices together as well as... Read more →

Intersecting VASA's visibility cones with the surroundings inside Forma

This week I’m up in the mountains with my family. It’s my younger children’s winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some... Read more →

More work on VASA inside Forma

This week I’ve been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the “proposal” being developed. For the Hackathon I’d hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it’s possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data:... Read more →

My VASA demo from this week's Forma Hackathon

I’m now back from Oslo, and decided to record the demo I delivered there at the end of the Forma Hackathon (or something approximating it, as I used twice as much time as we were each allocated on the day). Here’s a photo shared by the event organizers of me talking: Here’s the video I recorded this morning: As I mentioned at the end of the video, the capabilities I’ve demoed inside this Forma extension could also be implemented using Dynamo for Forma. That’s probably something I’ll blog more about, at some point, if there’s enough interest. Read more →

Forma Hackathon in Oslo

On Monday I headed to Zurich airport with our eldest son to hop across to Oslo. He’s between semesters at Uni - waiting for his exam results to trickle in - and it’s great we’re getting the chance to get a change of air for a few days. It’s rare that I sit in a window seat, so I was sure to capture the view as we left Zurich... … and arrived in snowy Oslo. The weather had impacted our trip very slightly - a 30-minute delay to our 2-hour flight - but we were still happy to touch... Read more →

John Walker leaves us

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Autodesk’s founder and first CEO, John Walker, has died. You can find the announcement and brief obituary here. I can’t claim to have known John very well, despite us living less than 15km from each other in Switzerland. I did spend a very memorable evening with him back in September of 2008, which led to this series of posts about Autodesk’s early history: Part 1 - Autodesk's early history Part 2 - AutoCAD's architecture & APIs Part 3 - Autodesk's eco-system and strategy Part 4 - Past and future... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Zurich Edition 2024

As I mentioned last week, on Friday I headed across to this year’s AEC Hackathon Zurich Edition in the city of Winterthur, about 2 hours from my home. The event was held in one of the buildings on the ZHAW campus. The space was fantastic: an old factory that was once used to maintain trains (it’s just next to the train tracks going through Winterthur). I was only able to come for the first evening of the weekend's event, as I had a prior personal commitment during the rest of the weekend. Friday had a number of talks focused... Read more →

Summer internships at Autodesk Research

Photo by Vecteezy My team has a number of internships posted for the coming summer. If you or a family member is interested in working at Autodesk Research - something I can strongly recommend - then an internship is a great way to see whether we're a good fit. Intern, Machine Learning & Computational Design Intern, AI for Architecture, Engineering & Construction Intern, Neuroscience for Architecture There are many more internship positions posted on the Autodesk Careers site, too, both in other parts of Research and the broader company. Be sure to check them out! Read more →

An AEC Hackathon in Zurich this weekend

The awesome AEC Hackathon folks are running an event near Zurich this weekend, February 2-4, 2024. This Hackathon will actually be at the ZHAW campus in Winterthur - which is actually a completely different Swiss city that’s admittedly only 20 minutes away from Zurich by train. So the branding isn’t completely off, in a global sense. :-) We’re in the middle of the snowy season, here in Switzerland, so I’m “committed” to being on the slopes with my family. While I won’t be there for the weekend itself, I will be stopping by Winterthur for the Friday afternoon talks... Read more →