Through the Interface

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 received 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Generatively designing a post-COVID world

This post contains a “call to action” for the community and presents an opportunity for people to start using Generative Design in the context of a global pandemic. Please do read (or skip) through to the end! I’ve been really encouraged by the energy people have focused on helping others since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just inside Autodesk there have been a number of COVID-19-related projects proposed and started, and all four of our Technology Centers are cranking out personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. A special shout-out should go to our former Maker-in-Chief, Carl Bass,... Read more →

Sharing from Dasher

Last week I talked about an API that we’ve added to Dasher, allowing it to be controlled via URL parameters. I expect this to be useful when integrating Dasher into other systems – as you can control the initial view of data, such as for a particular sensor during a specific time period – but I also expect it to be helpful for people to collaborate. It’s with this in mind that over the long Easter weekend I started building a “sharing” feature into Dasher. You can think of it as a URL builder, much in the way that... Read more →

Generative Design is now available in Revit 2021

After many months of hard work, the Refinery team has delivered the first official release of their Generative Design feature as part of Revit 2021. Here’s the blog post describing the release. This marks the point at which generative design capabilities are first being made widely available to Revit users, directly from within the product. I know a number of customers have been waiting for this before engaging with the technology, so I’m impatient to see where things go from here. The feature comes with three pre-built sample studies for people to try: Three Box Massing, Workspace Layout and... Read more →

Automating operations inside Dasher

In the last post I neglected to remind people of Kiosk Mode, a great way to see some of Dasher’s features. Simply click on the filmstrip button at the bottom of Dasher’s vertical toolbar and move the cursor off to the side (this just stops the button from staying highlighted when the cursor gets hidden). Then just sit back and see how Dasher works. Here are some posts talking about how this works. Kiosk Mode knows about various Dasher extensions and can automate their usage. There’s a fair amount of complexity in the mechanism, but it works well enough.... Read more →

Come and try the latest Dasher – now with a new timeline!

After many months of effort, we now have an updated version of Project Dasher available on dasher360.com. (The project is still very much active research, so for now you’re able to try it out with the model of the NEST building, accessible via the Demo button on the main page.) The major feature of this update is the new timeline, which was designed by Autodesk Research and developed by our partner CCTech. This component has been under development for over a year, so it’s really exciting to finally get it into people’s hands. Beyond that, you should really give... Read more →

Celebrating at a distance

We’ve just finished celebrating the 20th anniversary of a dear friend and colleague, Clayton Hotson, joining Autodesk. We were in the same team, way back when Clayton joined, both working from our San Rafael office. Over the years we’ve ended up doing other things, but in the last few months have happily found ourselves back together in the Research Engineering team (the awesome group that was responsible for incubating Dreamcatcher…. it’s a serious honour to be working with this team). Anyway, today we got together and had a surprise celebration for Clayton. We dug up some photos of Clayton... Read more →

A significant update to Dasher is on the way

For the last week or so I’ve been busy making sure Dasher works well with multiple themes. You can see the progress across these posts. I’m not quite ready for a full unveiling, but it should go live at some point in the next week, give or take. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main page (you’ll be able to select the theme either as you enter Dasher via the front page or from within the application’s settings UI, which is integrated into the Forge viewer’s). One of the big-ticket items in this coming release will... Read more →

Changing HIG themes at runtime in a Forge application

Despite the unfolding horror of the situation with Covid-19 – and stuff is really starting to hit the fan, here in Switzerland, with schools and non-essential commerces being closed and rumours of an enforced sequestration being considered – I’m at least getting some quality time to work on Dasher. Last week we saw how it was possible to support both dark and light themes from the Autodesk HIG in a Forge viewer application. I mentioned both times my desire to allow Dasher’s theme to be selected by the user at runtime. After searching fruitlessly on the internet for some... Read more →

Using the HIG to implement a light mode in a Forge application

Last time we saw how it’s possible to use Autodesk’s HIG to add different visual themes to a Forge viewer application. When I first started down this path, I thought I’d probably just stop at implementing another dark theme inside Dasher: I suspected it would be a lot of work to implement a light theme. It turns out I was wrong: towards the end of last year I’d spent a few days rationalising our use of styles inside Dasher, by eradicating every use of “hardcoded” colours inside CSS styles and have them stored in SCSS variables. It felt like... Read more →

Supporting multiple visual themes in a Forge application using the Autodesk Human Interface Guidelines

I mentioned in the last post that I’ve been working on integrating a new timeline component into Dasher. By default the component supports a different visual theme than the one we’ve been using in Dasher: in order to make the look & feel consistent, I had to include Autodesk’s HIG toolkit in the Dasher project. HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines, and it’s Autodesk’s effort to increase visual consistency across our products (especially those that are web-based). And the best thing is, it’s open source and available for anyone to integrate in their projects via npm or yarn. And... Read more →

Knowing when operations are complete in the Forge viewer

We have a feature in Dasher called “kiosk mode”. It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer’s progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn’t ever a very good... Read more →

The BAC Mono 2020 and its generatively designed wheels

As I mentioned in my last post, I was due to spend the day today at the Geneva Motor Show. It’s been 6 years since I participated in the event: I was there with Morgan back in 2014 (and then as a guest in 2015). Over the weekend, however, Switzerland’s Federal Council made the (hard, but probably correct) decision to ban events with 1,000 or more attendees. Which of course included the Geneva Motor Show. It’s a very strange feeling to see all these events – including many smaller gatherings – being cancelled due to concerns about Covid-19. I... Read more →

Persisting identifiers for objects in the Forge viewer

In Dasher we have some interesting functionality to isolate parts of the building by level. This is increasingly something you can do via “out of the box” Forge viewer functionality, but we’ve found a couple of reasons to go beyond that basic capability: Not all elements or objects are assigned to the correct level. Some elements – such as those belonging to the building facade or perhaps internal pipes – transcend levels, and so don’t behave well. It’s of course possible to split elements/objects that belong to the second category, but we tend to take the approach of allowing... Read more →

More data from the NEST building now available in Project Dasher

I’ve been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I’m hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we’re not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a “conduit” that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but... Read more →