Through the Interface

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 →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 2

A few posts ago I mentioned some work was needed to migrate our Dasher 360 shaders to the latest version of the Forge viewer (or the one after it). This work is now complete, so I can share a few thoughts and comments on what was needed to make this happen. Before doing that, though, I need to thank Elias Cohenca for his invaluable help during this process: I can honestly say that without his help the migration would either not have happened or would remain a work in progress. Thanks, Elias! Firstly, it’s important to note that even... Read more →

Visiting post-Brexit, pre-AU London

After a couple of interesting days in Berlin, last week – which for now I’m not going to talk about in detail, maybe another time – I’ve come across to the UK. This is my first trip since the UK formally left the EU, even if it’s still part of the customs union for the remainder of the year. I feel very strongly that this is a bad thing for the country – and for the world – but there you go. There’s nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. Yesterday morning I headed to Battersea to visit... Read more →

Visiting NEST with Kingspan

On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa’s Dübendorf campus. I’ve posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it’s 16-screen media... Read more →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 1

An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn’t working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge... Read more →

Visually clustering the contents of models in the Forge viewer

Some of you may already have seen Augusto’s tweet showing the “Visual Clusters" Forge viewer extension that has been developed by the BIM 360 Design team. It really is super-cool: the extension takes the content of the model loaded in the Forge viewer and clusters it spatially based on the value of the various items’ category property. The extension was first published in v7.6 of the Forge viewer, so it’s been around a little while. If you don’t have a Forge viewer application to test it out with, fear not! Petr Broz has added the capability to load extensions... Read more →

Pune

On Sunday morning I booked an Uber to get across to Bangalore airport for my flight to Pune. It was still early, so the only other being in the street was a cow. It was busier when I arrived at Bangalore airport. And more Christmassy, too. I got myself some idli sambar (the breakfast is better at the domestic terminal than the international one, by all accounts), and then waited by the gate for my SpiceJet flight. The flight was slightly delayed, but basically uneventful – it takes a little over an hour to get from Bangalore to Pune.... Read more →

Geometry Systems and the Refinery Primer

I mentioned last time that I was expecting to publish some posts about Autodesk University 2019 material I found particularly compelling (now that I’ve had the chance to consume some). I didn’t get to watch as many recordings as I’d have liked – for now – but I did manage to watch the rest of a class of which I only caught the first few minutes before having to run to another meeting in Las Vegas, my friend Lorenzo Villaggi’s session on Geometry Systems. There are two main pieces to generative design systems – at least in the way... Read more →

My AU 2019 classes

The Autodesk University elves have been working day and night over the last few weeks to prepare 674 AU class recordings for posting to web. Some of my classes were livestreamed, this year, so I have already posted recordings for these. This post is just me gathering the various recordings together in a single post. Before that, though, I did promise a festive photo for each of the coming posts. Here’s one I took this morning, when we woke to find that St Nicholas had passed by the house. The feast of St Nicholas – which is celebrated throughout... Read more →

Reliving AU in Amsterdam

As the festive season is upon us, I’ve decided to start each post with a seasonal photo. Here’s me with a reindeer/dog (reindog?) in the lobby of the hotel we stayed at in Hoofddorp. As mentioned in the last post, Sander Lijbers made the most of my vague suggestion to meet with a customer or two during my visit to the Netherlands by inviting many of the accounts he manages to a one-day event in our Amsterdam office. Everyone accepted – with some even flying in from the UK – so we had a really good, engaged group! Sander... Read more →

Digitalisation workshop at TU Delft

After not being good for very much last week – while recovering from AU in Las Vegas – I headed back across to the Netherlands on Monday afternoon. In Geneva airport there was a large stuffed reindeer just sitting there. A huge thanks to Ben Rand for pointing out the obvious: that Rudolph is probably a big fan of Project Dasher! :-) I took the train from Schipol down to Delft, which was feeling very festive. I love Dutch train stations and the connectivity between multi- and two-wheeled transport. I had a very nice room in a hotel close... Read more →

Wrapping up Autodesk University 2019

Wednesday and Thursday were my busy days at this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. After a breakfast meeting with a colleague from Toronto, I had my first class of AU2019 to deliver. It was a live-streamed class that was focused on advanced visualization (primarily of IoT data) using the Forge viewer. Somewhat unfortunately the class was scheduled at the same time as the AEC mainstage (more on this later), but that basically just meant that the room wasn’t completely full and that most of the attendees were Forge-focused. As it was live-streamed the class recording is already available:... Read more →

An updated model of the NEST building, now live on Dasher 360

A few days ago our friends at BIM Facility AG sent through a new version of the Revit model for the iconic NEST building. This version is much more complete: it has the award-winning Urban Mining and Recycling Unit modelled, as well as having a significant amount of additional detail (furniture, etc.) elsewhere in the building. The DFAB House has also received a makeover, getting more realistic materials, plus the ability to see into its ground floor and robotically-printed supporting wall. Considering all the hard work the BIM Facility team has put into making this version so much better,... Read more →

Not coming to Las Vegas? Watch two of my AU2019 sessions from the comfort of your armchair

Or at your desk, or from the train. Just please don’t watch them while driving. Anyway, the point is that this year two of the three sessions I’m presenting at Autodesk University 2019 are part of the event’s livestream schedule. The first is on Wednesday at 10:30am Pacific: The second is on Thursday at 3pm Pacific (I have a 15-minute segment at some point during the hour timeslot): I’m not sure what’s happening with my third class – which is focused on Project Rediscover – but if that doesn’t end up getting recorded I’ll make sure equivalent material is... Read more →

Project Rediscover - version 2 of the MaRS graph is now available for download

In advance of next week’s AU2019 class entitled “Hands-on with Project Rediscover: generatively designing Autodesk Toronto's office”, I’m happy to announce that version 2 of the MaRS graph is now available for download. (Many thanks to Simon Breslav for all his work on the graph, as well as to both Simon and Rhys Goldstein for their hard work making Space Analysis what it is: a cornerstone of Project Rediscover.) While version 1 was about “getting something out there that works”, the focus for version 2 was to have something that’s more discoverable and understandable. We’ve done a few things... Read more →

Research study at AU on "Generative Design in VR for Structural Engineering"

Colleagues in Autodesk Research are working on some really interesting technology that you can try out at AU2019. There’s an Idea Exchange study entitled “Generative Design in VR for Structural Engineering” being held at these times during the conference: Tuesday November 19th, 12pm–3pm and 3:30pm–6pm Wednesday November 20th, 3:30pm–6pm Those interested just need to swing by the Idea Exchange (it’s a big space on the way to exhibition hall and will be hard to miss) during these timeslots and let the recruiter know they want to participate in the study. It takes about 15 minutes to complete, and will... Read more →

Counting down the days to AU2019

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on my material for Autodesk University 2019. To encourage a few last-minute sign-ups, here are a few teaser GIFs from my classes. The first is from the class on Project Rediscover (which is apparently now full at 109 sign-ups, so in quite a small room). I used Capturefinery to create a GIF of quite a large Refinery study, but this time highlighting the congestion in a more 3D context. The second is from the class on Project Dasher – and using Forge for advanced data visualization – which still has 36 spaces in... Read more →