Through the Interface

Ramping up for Autodesk University 2019

The summer is pretty much over (boo) so it’s now time to start thinking about AU (yay). If nothing else it’s a welcome distraction from the craziness of UK politics (which I’m following from Switzerland, making it presumably slightly less intense than it is for most of my fellow Brits). Before getting more into specific AU plans, a quick reminder that registration for AU 2019 – and the Forge DevCon that precedes it – is open. The Monday pre-conference (this year’s is on November 18th) is always chock full of great information: I’m very much looking forward to attending... Read more →

Does Dynamo (and Revit) crash for your projects? We'd love to hear from you!

An interesting post over on the DynamoBIM forum was brought to my attention, and I felt it worth reproducing it here. The Dynamo team have found a way to avoid the need to manually dispose of geometry when creating it from Python or C# – as many package developers do – which they believe will help avoid a whole lot of crashes when working with large geometry sets. If you suspect you’re hitting these issues – due to your own code or a package you use – and can help test this new capability, we’d really appeciate you getting... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Let the Forge team know what you think!

The Forge team has published a feedback survey. Head on over to the Forge blog to find out more. This is a great opportunity to let the team know your likes/dislikes/pet peeves with the existing API set, its documentation and code samples. What more do you need to be able to build your dream product with Forge? Be vocal – this feedback will help steer Autodesk’s Forge development priorities around Forge. It should only take about 10 minutes to fill out, so please do so today; the results will be compiled and shared towards the end of July, so... 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 →

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 →

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 →

Meet my mentees

I mentioned recently that I had the chance to meet with three of my mentees at TechX in New Orleans, two of them for the first time. In this post I’d like to introduce you to my current mentees, and explain why I participate in Autodesk’s mentoring program. I’ve been mentoring – and mentored – since long before Autodesk had a formal program in place. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Kowalski accept me as a mentee, way back when, and I definitely learned a lot from him (as you might expect). Prior to moving into Research, I... 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 →

In New Orleans for TechX 2019

I’m in New Orleans for the first time in 15 years, this week, to attend our annual, Autodesk-internal TechX event. I flew out from Geneva to Heathrow on Sunday night. As there isn’t an onwards flight to New Orleans on Sunday, I took the opportunity to catch up with Simon, an old friend from university. Simon dropped me at Terminal 5 on Monday morning, where I had a meeting with a local architecture and engineering firm to talk about opportunities for using generative design in their workflows. After they left, I went through security and had some lunch before... Read more →

A great video introduction to Project Refinery

Our friend in Munich, Jacqueline Rohrmann, has recorded a fantastic 24-minute introduction to Project Refinery and posted it to her YouTube channel under her That BIM Girl pseudonym: I really like the way Jacqueline steps through how to get started with Refinery, but also “does the math” and validates the results generated by Refinery for a simple example. Very cool. I’m hoping Jacqueline will find the time to take a look at our Space Analysis package for Dynamo and post a video on getting started with it: I’d love to see Jacqueline’s thoughts on the package, delivered in her... Read more →