Through the Interface

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 →

This year's Forge Accelerator in Barcelona

This week I had a quick trip to attend this year’s Barcelona Forge Accelerator. This year the event started on Tuesday – on Monday it was the festival of San Juan – so I arrived “fashionably late” at the end of Tuesday morning. Just in time to pop down to the beach to have lunch with current and former colleagues. For some reason I end up staying in a different hotel every time I come to Barcelona. This time it was the SB Diagonal Zero, which is just across the street from the Princess (where I stayed for OTx).... Read more →

Say what? Acoustics in Space Analysis?

You heard right. Somehow our resident simulation hero, Rhys Goldstein, has found a way to approximate acoustic analysis using the same fundamental data structures he used to implement both pathfinding and visibility. Simon Breslav has built the core C++ library into the Space Analysis package and has posted it to the Dynamo Package Manager as version 0.3.0. Here’s a screenshot of the feature in action: This graph has two point sources, which can be combined by either union or intersection: for most scenarios I’d imagine it would be more useful to use union, which will aggregate multiple sources… we... Read more →

A nice introduction to DynaMaps and Space Analysis by That BIM Girl

The awesome Jacqueline Rohrmann – who you may know as That BIM Girl – has recorded a great “virtual unboxing” video introducing a couple of useful Dynamo packages, DynaMaps (which has it origins from the Dynamo and Generative Design Hackathon held in London in April) and Space Analysis. Jacqueline shared the video with me earlier this week – when we were both at the Dynamo Day in London, and then AU London 2019 – but I hadn’t found the time to watch it until now. She’s done – as ever – an amazing job at presenting things in an... Read more →

AU London 2019

It’s been a crazy (but very cool) few days here in the UK and Ireland. It started with the pre-event (or perhaps the pre-pre-event) of the annual Autodesk football tournament in Dublin. We didn’t win, but we had an absolute blast. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s event in Barcelona! On Sunday a group of us flew from Dublin into Heathrow: the others headed directly into town, while I stopped at a friend’s for dinner in Windsor. Heading into town, later on, I saw a message from Jaime Rosales: the Circle & District lines were completely closed, so... Read more →

Project Rediscover is now available for download

I’m happy to announce that the recreation of Project Discover for Dynamo – what we’ve been referring to as Project Rediscover – is now available for download. I should point out that this is a first cut of the graph, and is definitely going to evolve over time: it’s a complex beast that uses advanced techniques – particularly on the metric calculation side of things – that we know we have to improve over time. But we did want to put this out there as an Alpha (or pre-Alpha) in advance of Autodesk University London 2019 to let people... Read more →

Heading to Dublin and then London

It’s been a relatively busy week, and yet very much “the calm before the storm” of AU London. I’ve been receiving lots of meeting requests over the last few days, filling up my AU London schedule nicely, as well as a request to be part of a “technology trends” panel session on the second day, just after the class Lorenzo and I will be giving. That should be interesting… despite my role, I definitely don’t consider myself a futurist or visionary. But anyway – perhaps that will make for a more interesting discussion… we’ll see! I’ve also iterated a... Read more →

Dynamo and GD events in London and Toronto

There are some very interesting events scheduled for the coming weeks. Just prior to next week’s AU London 2019 – itself an event that will be heavy on content for computational and generative design, this year, including a talk by Lorenzo Villaggi and myself – there’s a Dynamo Day being hosted in London by the UK Dynamo User Group (or #UKDynUG) on Monday June 17th. There are four day-long workshop streams tailored for various needs… Dynamo Intro plus Geometry Dynamo Intro plus Data Dynamo Power Up Dynamo Dev Day … followed by an evening user group session with a... Read more →

Capturefinery is live on the Dynamo Package Manager!

(If you’re asking yourself “what’s Capturefinery?” then I suggest reading these posts first. TL;DR: Capturefinery is a tool for capturing screenshots of the various runs in a Refinery study and compiling them into animated GIFs for sharing via social media or including in customer presentations.) Firstly, a huge thank you to my partner in crime – and the first (so far only?) user of Capturefinery – Simon Breslav. He’s been kicking the tyres and giving very helpful feedback that has steered the development of this package. He very kindly tells me he likes it a lot – I hope... Read more →

Voting for AU 2019 class proposals (including mine)

Now that the dust has settled on the Call for Proposals process for AU 2019 – and its accompanying Forge DevCon – in Las Vegas, you can vote for your favourite sessions. Here’s a blog post on the Forge site explaining how to do so for Forge classes. I’ve submitted two, this year. The first is about how Forge developers can build their own products using components we’re publishing from the Dasher 360 codebase. You can find the class by searching for “Dasher”, even if the class is about more than that. Here’s the text for this first proposal:... Read more →

More Capturefinery enhancements

I’m happy to announce that the Capturefinery package for Dynamo (and Refinery) is finally ready for posting to the package manager! My main misgivings – stopping me from posting it sooner – had been around the basic UX (fixed in the last update) and the fact that the tool requires (or required) the system to basically be dedicated to the capture operation. These have all now been addressed. Here are the enhancements I made today: The graphics are now captured via the Dynamo API, rather than via the OS (i.e. the screen) This means you can keep Dynamo minimised... Read more →

Capturefinery updated to help track down errors

I talked recently about a Dynamo view extension I created to capture presentation graphics (primarily animated GIFs) from the entries in the “hall of fame” of a particular Refinery study. This has been super-useful, internally, but not just for creating fancy graphics. Early on we realised that it was a great way to identify problems in Dynamo graphs: we could see the occasional error state (with the yellow text at the bottom left of the screen) flash past, indicating that a Dynamo run had completed with warnings and/or errors. Presumably the errors haven’t stopped the metrics from being evaluated... Read more →

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 →