Through the Interface

Wrap-up after TechX 2019 in New Orleans

I only managed to write a single blog post last week, as I spent the week at TechX 2019 attending interesting classes and networking with my Autodesk colleagues. It was an amazing week, so I do feel it’s worth sharing a bit more of its goings-ons. I only really talked about the first day of TechX in my last post, so let’s now see what the rest of the week had in store. Much like the first day, the second day at TechX started with a number of keynotes. The first two were by Autodesk executives, our CHRO (Chief... Read more →

Introducing Capturefinery, a Dynamo package that creates presentation graphics for Refinery studies

A few weeks ago I posted a GIF on Twitter that showed a few images from an earlier version of the Project Rediscover graph. I created this in a very manual, low-tech way: firstly, I selected a number of designs in Refinery, one-by-one, took a screenshot of each and then used GIMP to build an animated GIF. (This used to be very easy to do with previous versions of OS X, by the way: the Preview tool allowed you to drag images across into a GIF file and create new frames, and you could then use GIMP to adjust... Read more →

Parallel operations in Dynamo and Refinery

I’ve mentioned this topic a few times in recent weeks, so it was really time to sit down and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). This one was a lot of fun to dig into, and I think the results will be of interest to people. Parallelism is something that I’ve been tracking since my studies during the 90s: I remember programming transputers using a programming language called occam, way back when. I was really happy when – around a decade ago – Microsoft got serious about tackling asynchrony and concurrency with F#’s Asynchronous Workflows and the... Read more →

Call for Proposals for AU 2019 in Las Vegas (and Germany)

Today the call for proposals opens for AU 2019 – and its accompanying Forge DevCon – in Las Vegas. I was informed of this fact by an email which very creepily contained a photo of me describing something or other with my hands. (Jeremy Tammik speculated that I was once again talking about zombies. :-) As one door opens, another one closes: this is also the last day you can submit classes for AU Germany and the Forge DevCon in Darmstadt. It’s important to note that AU Germany is a German-language event, while its DevCon is in English. Here... Read more →

Showcasing NEST at AU London 2019

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about the work we’re doing with Dynamo and Refinery – especially as it relates to our plan to share a version of the “Project Rediscover” graph at AU London 2019. But there’s more my team is hoping to be able to share in mid-June at Tobacco Dock: we’re working towards having a version of the NEST building – in particular the DFAB House, a showcase for digital fabrication in the building industry – inside Dasher 360. Ideally it’ll be displayed on a large touchscreen for people to interact with. [See below... Read more →

Displaying metrics for the MaRS graph inside Dynamo and Refinery

The last few days have been a lot of fun, as some of you will have noticed on my Twitter or LinkedIn feeds. Since the last post, where I announced the fact we’ve been working on Project Rediscover, I’ve spent quite a bit of time reworking the graph to have more reusable chunks. Here’s a recent snapshot of the graph: In the last post, the subgraph that generates text for the metrics and the radar chart as geometry – both to the right of the image – was hardcoded to the exact metrics we were dealing with. To make... Read more →

Revisiting MaRS for AU London 2019

I’ve talked before about Project Discover: the project where The Living used generative design to explore layout options for the new Autodesk office in the MaRS district of Toronto. As the project was run before Project Refinery was available – and so didn’t make use of a Refinery-compatible graph – we’ve been working on a new iteration of the tool that can be used with the Autodesk GD toolset for AEC workflows (i.e. Dynamo + Refinery). Internally we’re affectionately referring to this project as Project Rediscover. Things are moving along well: thanks largely to the Space Analysis package (and... Read more →

Using Refinery to optimise a Dynamo graph using Space Analysis for pathfinding and visibility

As a follow-up to this recent post, I decided to add a couple of metrics to the previous graph and try it out with Refinery. And here’s the updated graph for you to try for yourselves. The first metric relates to the pathfinding capability, and I’ve called it “Access”. There are a few things going on, here: for sure we want to measure the shortest average path, but also to disqualify (or at least penalise) designs that don’t have paths to all of of our points of interest (i.e. the corners). But I also wanted to weight the results... Read more →

Dynamo Space Analysis and Revit 2020’s Path of Travel

Many of you will have been happy to see the extent of the features announced last week for Revit 2020. It’s great to see Dynamo 2.1 integrated, for instance: It seems the Dynamo version is being tied specifically to Revit, which is an interesting development. I assume this is driven by the need to manage complexity of end-user environment configuration, but I do wonder whether it will impact the ability for users to absorb changes delivered by the Dynamo team. But that’s the trade-off between control and flexibility, I suppose: we’ll see how it works out. In addition, the... Read more →

Using the Space Analysis package for pathfinding and visibility in Dynamo

I’ve been meaning to create a post introducing the use of the Space Analysis package for a few weeks, now, but with various trips it’s been impossible to find the time. Anyway, here it is, at last. You can start by downloading the graph we’ll be walking through in this post. Here’s a picture of the graph, with its graphics generated. The graph is fairly simple: it loads some geometry from an SAT file that we’ll use as the definition of our barriers for the SpaceLattice. I’m using an SAT file we posted with the campus layout example that... Read more →

The first Dynamo Hackathon

What. A. Week. The first day of the world’s UK Dynamo User Group’s first Hackathon was an appropriate way to finish off a hectic but super-rewarding week. [Correction: it seems I misunderstood something… there have been other Dynamo Hackathons, apparently. Sorry about that.] I woke up early, this morning, and took a stroll around Hyde Park. I checked out from my hotel, picking up my cufflinks, on the way. (In a random episode during check-in, the afternoon before, I’d lent them to a fellow hotel guest – who was dressed to the nines for a charity event but had... Read more →

Generative Design for AEC at OTx EMEA

It was a fun (and slightly hectic) 16 hours in Barcelona. After heading back to the hotel from the OTx awards dinner – and whipping out a quick blog post – I got up and enjoyed the view from the 26th floor for a few minutes… … before heading across to the last day of OTX (One Team eXtension) EMEA, and the second day of the Generative Design for AEC track. This second day was the first “mixed” track – meaning both sales- and technically-oriented, as the first day had been purely for technical attendees – so it started... Read more →

Autodesk’s Automotive Innovation Forum 2019

This is “one of those weeks”, with presentations in Munich on Wednesday, Barcelona on Thursday and London on Friday. I haven’t had a week like this since the old DevDays tours. The good old days! I arrived on Tuesday night at Munich Airport. Wednesday’s event was the Automotive Innovation Forum in Munich. It’s the first time I’ve attended this event, and it proved to be very interesting: around 560 automotive customers came to the Hilton at Munich Airport to learn about our automotive-related offerings (primarily Alias and VRED but also our generative design tools). The day opened with various... Read more →

The Living vs. The Dead: using Generative Urban Design to prepare for the zombie apocalypse

Over the last few months I’ve been working with my colleagues in The Living to add important – but still slightly speculative – capabilities into the Generative Urban Design tool we’ve been working on for Van Wijnen. The opportunity presented itself back at Autodesk University 2018, when Lorenzo Villaggi and I were discussing the state of the world over a few beers. It seemed absolutely clear, from our perspective, that given where we are today – thinking about global politics, the climate and civil liberties – it seems inevitable that the next thing to hit will be the zombie... Read more →

Generative Design workshop for Sweco in Stockholm

On Wednesday morning I headed up to Stockholm to participate in a Generative Design workshop for Sweco. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Sweden, so it was a fun coincidence that I already had a little taste of the country as I took my train to Zurich airport from Neuchatel. IKEA Switzerland has a special vending machine moving between the larger Swiss railway stations as part of a promotional event. It was a bit of a shame the machine was out of order, but these things do happen. The flight to Stockholm Arlanda was uneventful, and... Read more →

Daily Dynamo Sandbox builds and Refinery v0.4.44

There’s a lot happening this week in the world of Generative Design for AEC at Autodesk. Aside from the Space Analysis package we announced, there’s interesting news from both the Dynamo and Refinery teams. The Dynamo team has kicked off their daily build process once again, this time focusing on Dynamo Sandbox builds. This is very interesting news for me, and probably for other people working on GD projects outside of Revit: I use Dynamo Sandbox to do the majority of my GD-related studies – usually by starting the executable found at %programfiles%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2\DynamoSandbox.exe that’s installed with Dynamo for... Read more →

The Space Analysis package for Dynamo and Refinery is now available!

As promised last week, Autodesk Research has now posted v0.2 of our Space Analysis package to the Dynamo Package Manager. This version contains nodes for pathfinding as well as for visibility analysis. Both implementations work via a common SpaceLattice object – basically a 2D grid with diagonal connections – that can be used to drive both algorithms. In reality you may end up having multiple lattices – as pathfinding may be working with “barriers” that don’t affect visibility – but the node you need to use is the same. We had posted a previous version with just pathfinding, but... Read more →

Sneak peek at pathfinding

A quick update before a larger unveiling next week… We’ve made solid progress with implementing the grid-based capabilities of the SpaceAnalysis package. All being well we should have an “official” version available early next week. This release will contain pathfinding – based on Djikstra’s shortest path algorithm, working on a grid with the size and resolution of your choice – as well as the ability to test visibility – using the same grid for an Isovist-like analysis. We have a version already posted via the Dynamo Package Manager (ssshhhh!), but we’ve gone through and rationalised a bunch of the... Read more →

At the Forge Accelerator in Dublin

After having spent a great few days with the Toronto team, I headed home on Friday afternoon. I did have a little bit of “fun” getting home, though: firstly the UPExpress going from Union Station to Pearson Airport stopped – ostensibly waiting for the right signal – for about 30 minutes. It wasn’t a big deal for me, thankfully: I’d left some buffer in my schedule, so still had a little time to wait at the airport. While I did so, for some reason I checked my downloaded Netflix content… none of it played: I kept getting an obscure... Read more →

Visiting MaRS

I seem to spend quite a bit of time, these days, talking about the new Autodesk office in Toronto. I did visit one part of the office when I came through in July 2017 – on our world tour – but people hadn’t, at that point, fully moved across from the former 210 King St East office. So this week was – somewhat surprisingly – the first time I’d actually seen the generatively-designed office space first-hand. Crazy. I’ve been staying in the Chelsea Hotel – apparently the largest hotel in Canada, with about a thousand rooms – which is... Read more →