Through the Interface

Coming to a Forge DevCon in the US or Europe? It turns out I’ll be talking at both!

Well, this just happened: after having had three generative design-related classes accepted for AU 2018 (well, really two were accepted and one ended up getting a repeat slot at the Connect & Construct pre-conference), I wasn’t due to talk about anything I’ve been doing lately with the Forge viewer. Which frankly was a shame, because between robots, skeletons and streamlines, as feel as though I’ve got lots of fun stuff to share, at the moment. That was until yesterday, when I got pinged by Stephen Preston (for the US DevCon) and Cyrille Fauvel (for the European one), to ask... Read more →

Generative Design Day in Barcelona

After a crazy (but cool) few days in Amsterdam at the beginning of last week, on Thursday night I hopped across to Barcelona for an event being organised by our Enterprise Priority support team. They had invited our larger customers from all over Europe to come and hear about the use of generative design technologies in the AEC space, both present and future. I woke up early in the hotel opposite Autodesk’s nearly-beachfront office to see the morning light hitting it. The event itself was on the first floor of the office, so we were surrounded by autumn colours.... Read more →

Adding smarts to the MX3D bridge

I’ve spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world’s first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to “the mainland” (it isn’t really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was... Read more →

About Bristlebots

My world seems to be filled with robots, these days, whether seeing how they can be used in architecture and construction, animating them inside Forge, or seeing them 3D print steel bridges (I’m at MX3D again, this week). It makes me think I should probably dust off my HoloLens app for making robots dance in mixed reality: once we’re using data inside the Forge viewer-powered Dasher 360 to show the position of a robot at a particular moment in time, it’s hardly a huge leap to show that in XR. Anyway, I should get to the point… Given this... Read more →

Animating robots in the Forge viewer

The inspiration for this post has come from a variety of sources. (Feel free to skip this preamble where I talk about the history of the project: as much as anything it’s so I remember myself how things happened when I come back to this post at some point in the future. ;-) My colleague, Simon Breslav, worked on an initial implementation in Dasher 360 that animated robots – and even mapped stress information to their surfaces – for a demo shown at AU 2017, back when I was travelling around the world with my family. One of the... Read more →

When in Rome

It’s been a great few days in Rome, at the Forge team’s first ever Roman accelerator. Things kicked off on Monday morning, as we occupied the conference room at Rimond’s office in Rome’s Trastevere district. As is usual at these events, there are a number of companies doing really interesting things: several of them have specifically mentioned Dasher 360 as their inspiration for visualizing additional (even IoT) data in the Forge viewer. Very cool. Yesterday I joined Peter Schlipf to visit Roma Tre University, where we spent some time with Stefano Converso from the Architectural Design department, as well... Read more →

Rob|Arch 2018

I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming... Read more →

Displaying streamlines in the Forge viewer

The integration of the MeshLine library into the Forge viewer – which we’re using for the display of skeleton data, as we saw last time – has opened the door to displaying all kinds of other cool stuff. Back in 2014 colleagues in Autodesk Research published a SimAUD paper entitled “Towards Visualization of Simulated Occupants and their Interactions with Buildings at Multiple Time Scales”. It explored the use of various visualization techniques to display how a building’s simulated occupants interact with it. One of these techniques was called Speedlines (we also use the term Streamline): The original visualizations were... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 3

Right then… now it’s time for the really fun stuff. Looking back over this series of posts, we introduced it then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons and animated skeletons with fixed meshes attached. Today we’ll dig into making our animated skeletons properly visible. Having given up on using a SkinnedMesh, the remaining option was to tweak the underlying display of the SkeletonHelper object. This proved challenging for all sorts of reasons. Back in Chrome 55, it seems the ability to show lines with widths broke in three.js. This was fixed in... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 2

We introduced the series, then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons. Now it’s time to look at approaches for making these skeletons more visible. As mentioned last time, today’s post is a bit of a “non-post”: it talks about adding a SkinnedMesh to be animated alongside an underlying skeleton, which we already know doesn’t currently work inside the Forge viewer. But it’s instructive to see the process in case either the situation changes or someone wants the code for a pure three.js application. Basically it’s possible to add a SkinnedMesh into a... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 1

After introducing the series and seeing how we can add simple vertex and edge geometry to a scene, today we’re going to start digging into the guts of the problem of how to display skeletons in the Forge viewer. This proved to be a really interesting process: I ended up learning a lot about how the Forge viewer and the three.js library it uses both work. I don’t recall the full history of the Forge viewer’s use of three.js, but recent releases have all depended on r71. This can present challenges, largely because three.js is (at the time of... Read more →

Adding 3D geometry to a scene in the Forge viewer

In the last post I introduced the series where I’ll be talking about the journey I’ve been going through to add skeletion data inside Dasher 360 (which is, of course, based on the Forge viewer). The first step I took along this path was to find a way to add simple 3D geometry into an existing scene inside the viewer. This is something we do in a limited way inside Dasher – we use point clouds to represent the locations of sensors, for instance – but I wanted to work out the right approach for doing this for data... Read more →

Forge skeletons and disappearing signs

It’s been a strange few days. It’s the very last week anyone will be working from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. This really hit home when the Autodesk name and logo were removed from the building, last Friday. Photo credit: Estelle Ormrod I salvaged an A (the were signs on the front and back of the building, so this wasn’t the only one) for my daughter’s bedroom. It’ll be some kind of reminder of the wonderful years we’ve all spent here. The staff departures have been staggered, over the last 6 months or so: there have been leaving aperos for people... Read more →

BrickBot – an Autodesk Research project exploring the future of manufacturing

Last month Fast Company published an article about an interesting project Autodesk Research has been working on for a number of years: internally the project was known as LEGOBot, but now that it’s being talked about publicly it has understandably been renamed to BrickBot. BrickBot is a really cool project that’s built on two core ideas: robots are stupid and engineering is expensive. Robots need a lot of help to be told what to do, but telling them what to do is neither straightforward (today) nor flexible: you need to code for specific conditions, and if those conditions change... Read more →

Introducing Warnamo, a Dynamo package for managing warnings and errors

One of the highlights of last weekend’s AEC Hackathon in Berlin was getting to meet Michael and Keith from the Dynamo team. They’d delivered a pre-event workshop on the Friday and stayed on to tutor the many Dynamo-centric teams participating in the weekend’s Hackathon. On afternoon on Saturday Keith and Michael presented an additional session that briefly mentioned Refinery (the optimization engine for Dynamo that’s currently in Beta) but focused mainly on the API infrastructure that enabled its integration into Dynamo: the View Extension API. It was really helpful for me to see how it’s possible to extend Dynamo... Read more →

My AU 2018 classes… all about Generative Design for AEC

I’ve seen a few of these postings via LinkedIn, and thought it was time to post something of my own. As mentioned previously, I submitted three class proposals for this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. Two out of three have been accepted: the ones focused on Generative Design for AEC. I’m really excited about the first one, in particular, and it seems like it may also be featured in one of the pre-conference events (more on this once things get confirmed). I think it’ll be really cool to look at the project we’ve been working on with Van... Read more →

A visit to the MTC

On Sunday night I hopped back across to Birmingham airport in the UK in order to visit the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry on Monday. The weather has been gorgeous in the UK for the last month or more, so everything was a little parched. That, in combination with the fact England was still in the running for the World Cup, meant the country seemed imbued with optimism: seemingly welcome respite from the Brexit-related anguish the UK has been suffering since the EU referendum. After a nice dinner with old friends and a quick sleep at a hotel,... Read more →

Voting for Autodesk University class proposals

The call for proposals for Autodesk University 2018 has ended and people have the opportunity for vote for their favourite classes. Head on over to this page and start voting for the classes you’d like to see at AU 2018. From my side, I’ve submitted three different class proposals for AU 2018. I don’t expect (or want!) them all to make the cut, but I’d be happy to receive your votes for the ones that interest you most. My favourite proposal is actually a class that would have 3 speakers, two from Autodesk and one from Van Wijnen. The... Read more →

AU classes and Forge events

I’m on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there’s a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted... Read more →

SimAUD 2018

On Monday afternoon I flew back across to the Netherlands, this time from Bern airport. My main purpose for this trip was to attend the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, or SimAUD, in Delft. I’ve been staying at an Airbnb a little way out of the centre of town, the advantage being I’m just across from a really pretty park. Delft is a university town and is a bit like a smaller, easier version of Amsterdam. There are canals everywhere… … and almost everyone seems to travel around by bike: I rented a bike from a... Read more →