Through the Interface

Autodesk’s third Soirée de l’Excellence Française in Paris

On Wednesday morning I hopped on the train to Paris, once again, this time to present at Autodesk France’s third “Soirée de l’Excellence Française”, an invitation-only VIP event for AEC customers in France. (I’d have blogged about it beforehand if the event was open to all, of course.) I arrived at la Gare de Lyon, as usual, and found an interesting art exhibit outside. I walked next door to the citizenM – part of the chain of hotels I’ve stayed at for AU London, the last two years. It’s a fun place to stay, although the switch to turn... Read more →

Looking back at the GD for AEC Residency; looking forward to the DBEI Hackathon

The Toronto team has posted a nice video looking back at July’s Generative Design for AEC Residency: It was clearly an interesting event – I do hope I’ll get to attend the next one. Here’s a still I extracted that shows Sol Amour, Dynamo’s Product Manager, hacking away at Python inside Dynamo. The Python node is big enough to be clearly visible on the video (the code itself is not, but I’m sure it’s about to do something cool). I’m starting to think about next Wednesday’s DBEI Hackathon, which has the theme “Generative Design in Practice” and so I’m... Read more →

Talking to VINCI in Paris

After a quick trip to Zurich on Tuesday, on Wednesday I took the train to Paris. I’d booked a hotel that was convenient for our Paris office, and walked there from la Gare de Lyon through le Parc de Bercy. I’d made tentative plans to meet up with friends in the evening, but as they had to cancel (for excellent reasons) I ended up wandering around Bercy Village to get a quick bite to eat. I’m mostly a people person, but I have to admit that having the occasional evening to myself is bit of a treat. (I’ll be... Read more →

The first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland

Yesterday I was back at the NEST building in Dübendorf for Autodesk’s first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland. It was nice to be back there, even if just to see the progress being made on the construction of the HiLo roof. Here’s the view from the ground: I also went up to take a few snaps from the roof. You can clearly see the knitted cabling that will provide support for the structure. There were a few people working on the structure, too. (I took my snaps from an open doorway as I didn’t want to disturb them.)... Read more →

Build your own SoundSystem: Space Analysis now supports multi-source acoustics

After somehow adding support for acoustic analysis to the Space Analysis package, Rhys Goldstein has taken it to the next level by adding support for multiple sound sources. When Rhys first did this he was a little surprised by the results he was seeing. There were some really interesting interference patterns at the boundaries between sound sources: Find this example at %appdata%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2.3\packages\SpaceAnalysis\extra\spaceanalysis-acoustics-06-six-points-voronoi-pattern.dyn. (You may need to change the Dynamo version number.) Rhys dug into the field a little more deeply and came across this interesting blog post that highlights the possibility for sounds of similar frequencies to interfere... Read more →

A major update to Dasher 360; now showing the NEST building

Today’s a big day: Dasher360.com has been updated to let you browse the model and data coming from Empa’s amazing NEST building in Zürich, Switzerland. Head on over and give it a try! Here’s a quick video introducing the new Dasher 360 (you can also access this from the main Dasher 360 page): Expect the model to improve, over time: we want to include a few additional units – such as the Urban Mining & Recycling unit – as well as increase the number of sensors and remove a few visual artifacts. But in all honesty it’s already super-cool,... Read more →

A new release of Refinery with tighter Revit integration and output constraints

A big – and welcome – update has just been dropped by the Refinery team. I’ve been waiting for this one, in particular, as I expected it to work better with the MaRS graph. (I’m happy to say that it does – more on this later.) The big ticket item in the v0.35.0 (still Beta) release is an integration with Revit that doesn’t require users to open Dynamo. It’s at this point that you can probably hear a collective “say what?!?” from existing Refinery users (such as myself, I might add): until now you’ve been very exposed to Dynamo... Read more →

Ramping up for Autodesk University 2019

The summer is pretty much over (boo) so it’s now time to start thinking about AU (yay). If nothing else it’s a welcome distraction from the craziness of UK politics (which I’m following from Switzerland, making it presumably slightly less intense than it is for most of my fellow Brits). Before getting more into specific AU plans, a quick reminder that registration for AU 2019 – and the Forge DevCon that precedes it – is open. The Monday pre-conference (this year’s is on November 18th) is always chock full of great information: I’m very much looking forward to attending... Read more →

Does Dynamo (and Revit) crash for your projects? We'd love to hear from you!

An interesting post over on the DynamoBIM forum was brought to my attention, and I felt it worth reproducing it here. The Dynamo team have found a way to avoid the need to manually dispose of geometry when creating it from Python or C# – as many package developers do – which they believe will help avoid a whole lot of crashes when working with large geometry sets. If you suspect you’re hitting these issues – due to your own code or a package you use – and can help test this new capability, we’d really appeciate you getting... Read more →

NEST and ETH Zurich

At the beginning of this week I headed back across to the fine city of Zürich for a couple of days. My first port of call on Monday morning was to the NEST building on Empa’s Dübendorf campus. (I’ve talked about NEST many times in the past, as we have an ongoing project to host its digital twin using Dasher 360.) Arriving at the building it was exciting to see the building covered with scaffolding, as the work has started to build the HiLo roof. Here’s the breakdown of NEST’s units by floor. HiLo is accessible via the 3rd... Read more →

A visit to Geneva with Brunet Saunier Architecture

On Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting with Jacques Levy-Bencheton and Antoine Kersse from Paris-based Brunet Saunier Architecture in Geneva. Back in July I’d been asked by Jacques and Jerome Brunet to participate in a project they were working on relating to architecture for hospitals: they’re creating a book based on a series of interviews – and their Phylum H work, which Jacques presented at AU 2018, do check out the recording – that will look at architecture of hospitals, both retrospectively and prospectively. My role would be to participate in an interview alongside Jacques – run by... Read more →

Using a view cone for targeted visibility in Dynamo with Space Analysis

I feel as though I’ve been neglecting this blog: I’ve barely managed a post a week for several weeks, now: partly because of family holidays, but also because I’ve been heads-down on Dasher 360, working on a number of cool new features as well as shoring up some of our older code. Anyway, the kids are now back at school and I expect to have a lot more to talk about during the remaining months leading up to AU 2019. For now I wanted to share some information about the Space Analysis package. Today’s post takes a look at... Read more →

Registration is open for the Forge DevCon and AU 2019

Yesterday the registration for the Forge DevCon and Autodesk University 2019 in Las Vegas opened. It’s also the time speakers can find out when their classes our scheduled: it’s always with a little apprehension that I find myself checking the schedule. I’m pretty happy with the slots I have, this year, though: As you can see my sessions are both at 10:30am, one on Wednesday November 20th and the other on Thursday November 21st. Which means I should largely be over my jetlag by the time I have to present, which is always good. Although I may well be... Read more →

A Residency, a Hackathon and some time off

If I’d been anywhere else over the last few weeks, it would certainly have been the fine city of Toronto. The first GD for AEC Intensive Residency hosted there wrapped up, with a number of interesting outcomes generated. One has been shared by Isaac Seah on LinkedIn, and it’s well worth looking into the details of how they used Generative Design via Refinery and Dynamo to explore increasing resilience of coastal cities in the face of climate change. It’s very interesting stuff. Then there was another GD and Dynamo Hackathon held there, once again with the support of Radu... Read more →

Back in Amsterdam

On Tuesday I flew across to Schipol airport for another Generative Design-heavy few days in Amsterdam: I’d been asked to deliver a keynote as part of a multi-day meeting between Autodesk’s account team and Arup’s strategic sourcing team. The focus of the presentation was primarily Generative Design with additional information regarding Digital Twins (and specifically MX3D). It was a very nice day, flying out of Zurich. I had a window seat (with a clean window!) for once, so took some photos on take-off and landing. There was lots of farmland at both ends of the trip: the big difference... Read more →

Week 1 of the Generative Design for AEC Intensive Residency in Toronto

While I was having fun in Paris, the participants at our first Generative Design for AEC Intensive Residency were having their own fun in Toronto. Here’s a quick recap of the rest of the first week… Tuesday was all about Dynamo and Refinery. Our Product Managers for each presented their technologies and dug into some specifics on how to use them. First up was Sol Amour, PM for Dynamo. Next was Lilli Smith, PM for Refinery. Simon Breslav then dove more deeply into Project Rediscover (something I’ll myself be talking about at AU 2019 in Las Vegas, so I’ll... Read more →

Generatively Paris

Yesterday I hopped on the TGV Lyria in Bern to head across to Paris for a meeting with a large customer who was interested in learning more about generative design. It was nice to be heading back across to Paris – especially just before the summer break – as I have very fond memories of my year studying just south of the city. On arrival at Gare de Lyon I decided to walk for a couple of kilometres to stretch my legs after five hours in the train, to see part of the city I didn’t know but also... Read more →

Upgrading to Forge viewer v7.0

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d spent some of my time at the Forge Accelerator in Barcelona migrating the Dasher 360 codebase to work with v7.0 of the Forge viewer. This version of the viewer does have breaking changes – all of which should be documented in Jaime’s blog post – but I thought it worth listing the changes that affected us in a post of my own. The first big change we had to deal with – and this one was pervasive, albeit easy to handle – was the promotion of GuiViewer3D from the Private namespace... Read more →

The Generative Design for AEC Intensive Residency kicks off in Toronto

Yesterday marked the first day of a very special 2-week event being held in the spiritual home of Generative Design for AEC – at least from Autodesk’s perspective – our new office in the MaRS district of Toronto. (In fairness the spiritual home is probably where The Living work in New York, but the MaRS office is at the very least an important temple. ;-) Over the next fortnight 7 teams from 3 continents – from both industry and academia – will be using Dynamo and Refinery to implement generative workflows at various architectural scales. We’re expecting the participants... Read more →

A quick update on various projects

Things are heating up in the Systems Research team (and not just because it’s summertime). I’ve been digging into the Dasher 360 codebase, this week, to add better support for “equipment” sensors – which have multiple sensors and data feeds coming off them for a single unit – particularly with respect to tooltips. As an example, here’s a ubertooltip summarising recent data coming off a Mazak 5-axis mill in our Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Birmingham. There are devices in the AMF that have more sensors – up to 60, in fact – but those feeds were less visually interesting... Read more →