Through the Interface

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 →

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 →