Through the Interface

AI projects at Autodesk Research

There’s a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023’s Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I’m less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All... Read more →

Join us at the last European APS Accelerator of the year in Dublin

The Autodesk Platform Services – formerly known as Forge – team is holding one last Accelerator in Europe before the holiday break. It’s going to be from December 5-9 in Dublin, Ireland. You can register until November 28. As always these events are a fantastic way to kickstart any new project using APS (Forge) or to accelerate feature development of an existing one. It’s basically 5 free days of consulting from Autodesk – all you have to pay for are travel and accommodation. I was already planning a last trip (of the year) to the UK for the following... Read more →

Building the 5m Dar Smart Bridge

Now that my head is briefly back above water following Autodesk University 2022 and some time off with the family, I thought I’d revisit the Dar 5m Smart Bridge project to share some of the things I learned about it during AU in New Orleans. As a reminder, I was not heavily involved in the building of the bridge itself – although I did track it with great interest from a distance – as my role really only came into play in the final stages of the project, when we were looking to get the data from the bridge... Read more →

Join the beta for the AEC Cloud Information Model API

Autodesk Platform Services – the platform formerly known as Forge – has a brand new service that’s soon going into beta: the AEC Cloud Information Model API. This API will allow you to access design parameters in Revit models hosted in the cloud with no need to pass by an instance Revit. The managed beta will give you access to data extracted from a fixed set of Revit sample models that is then hosted in the Autodesk Construction Cloud. It’ll be a great way to understand how the API works and provide feedback to the engineering team to steer... Read more →

Another Autodesk University is over

That’s it for another whirlwind AU! This year’s AU was a very different one for me. Normally I’m delivering a class or two and end up spending several hours in meetings with customers – I almost never get to spend time in the Expo. In contrast I spent almost all of my time at this year’s event in the Expo standing on or talking about a bridge, so I can’t give any meaningful commentary about the broader event, sadly. One thing I will say – beyond whatever takeaways people have related to the change of venue (New Orleans over... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →

Exciting updates on Tandem & seeing them at AU

If you didn’t get the chance to watch last week’s webinar by the Autodesk Tandem team – their September 2022 webinar – then I highly recommend checking out the recording, especially if you’re interested in updates to their work on displaying sensor data. If you liked Project Dasher, you’re going to love the work that’s being done in Tandem. :-) Questions were asked during the webinar about attendees’ interests regarding workflows for heatmaps: If you missed the chance to vote – but have strong opinions on these workflows and would like to provide detailed feedback – then you can... Read more →

A new site dedicated to technology and engineering at Autodesk

There’s a new Autodesk site that many of you will find interesting: tech.autodesk.com has just launched, a showcase for technology and engineering at Autodesk. The site will be a great resource for people interested in learning about the technical work performed by our employees and will also be a way for Autodesk engineering talent to connect with the outside world. I’m really looking forward to seeing what our development teams share through this new mechanism. The site has linked to blogs written by a few of the company’s technologists, including this one. That was very nice to see, I... Read more →

Next week is the Forge Hackathon

Back at the beginning of August I mentioned the upcoming Forge Hackathon which precedes Autodesk University 2022. Well, the upcoming has become the immediate, and next week it’s happening! So if you’ve been debating whether or not to join the event, it’s time to make a decision and (hopefully) register. It’s a great opportunity to showcase your development team’s capabilities, to create something genuinely novel using Forge, or simple to kick back and have some fun. Or ideally all of the above. :-) (See this blog post for a reminder of the prize categories and judging criteria.) Read more →

Autodesk open-sources Aurora, a real-time path tracing renderer for USD

SIGGRAPH 2022 – the pre-eminent computer graphics conference – was held in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and with it came a slew of USD-centric announcements such as this one from NVIDIA about the Metaverse. It’s really impressive to see how computer graphics hardware and software companies are rallying behind this open source initiative. Autodesk is no exception: after having open-sourced a web-based USD viewing implementation, earlier this year, Autodesk’s big USD-centric SIGGRAPH announcement related to the open-sourcing of a real-time path tracing renderer for USD called Aurora. For those who don’t know how path tracing works, here’s... Read more →

A special unveiling at AU 2022

The Autodesk Research team is currently printing something very special in our Boston Technology Center with the hope of it being displayed at Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. I expect to be spending quite a bit of time near this object, during the event, and am very much looking forward to it. Even at this early stage it’s already a thing of great beauty. Now for some pre-AU fun and games: if you can guess the object’s function and how much it’ll weigh once finished – within an as-yet-undetermined threshold – then I’ll send you a souvenir from... Read more →

Register today for this year’s Forge Hackathon

Registration for the Forge Hackathon 2022 – being held virtually from September 19th-23rd – is now open. The prize categories are fun: You had me at 3D game Show me the Data! I feel the need, the need for Digital Twin Task automation is a state of mind There’s no place like ACC Do keep in mind the following judging criteria: Innovation Elegance Business problem solved Progress made during the week Depth of Forge use Wow factor (If you feel you need it, more detail on the categories and judging criteria can be found in the above-linked blog post.)... Read more →

Come work on XR technologies at Autodesk!

Earlier this year Autodesk acquired The Wild along with its own recent acquisition, IrisVR, and their Prospect platform for XR collaboration. This was really exciting news for those of us who believe VR/AR/MR to be hugely interesting technologies with significant potential to impact our customers’ workflows. To review, here’s a 10-minute video showing how The Wild works: Of course this isn’t the first time Autodesk has focused serious resources on developing XR solutions: the first was in the late 80s/early 90s, with the Cyberspace Developer Kit, while another was around 5 years ago with our former (VR-capable) game engine,... Read more →

Register now for Autodesk University 2022. I may even see you there!

Registration is now open for this year’s AU: the first time it’s been held in-person since 2019, and in a brand new city (for AU, at least), New Orleans. It’s being held from September 27th to 29th, which will be here really soon! The early-bird pricing of $1,750 is available until July 23rd, at which point it slides upwards to $1,999 until August 12th and then on up to the full price of $2,250 from there. And if you can’t make it in person to the event, there’s still the option to attend virtually for free. Registration for the... Read more →

Some exciting enhancements in Dynamo 2.15

Dynamo 2.15 was released into the wild, last Thursday (at least via Dynamo Core, if not yet Dynamo for Revit), and as Sol Amour says in his blog post, it is “an absolutely epic release”. I’d seen it flash by, but only sat up to take proper notice when Sol pinged me on Twitter to mention that includes capabilities inspired by Warnamo, a package I wrote to help keep track of warnings and errors in Dynamo. So I decided to dig into some of the new features – a great resource for this being the habitually comprehensive Dynamo release... Read more →

3D printing with recycled PET at Autodesk London

I’m in London for a few days this week for some internal meetings and a customer visit. While visiting the Soho office I checked in with my Autodesk Research colleague Allin Groom about a project he and Matt Oosthuizen have undertaken to help reduce the impact of waste in the office. The inspiration for the project was an all too common problem: a lot of waste generated by employees – many of whom buy takeaway lunches at local shops and restaurants – comes in the form of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) containers. While this material is nominally recyclable, Allin and... Read more →

The Autodesk Tandem API is now in Beta

If you’ve visited the Tandem website, this week, you may have seen a little footer saying “Unleash the power of digital twins with Tandem APIs | Now in Beta”. This is interesting news for the many (100+, at the last count) developers using Forge to build digital twins. Those using Revit or IFC as a data-source will most probably find the possibility of building on Tandem to be of significant interest. If you click on the “Learn more about APIs” link to the right of the footer, you’ll end up on a page that describes the API and SDK... Read more →

The Forge Data Day in Munich

Today I’ve been in Munich for the inaugural event in the Forge Data Days tour. As I decided to attend at fairly short notice, I didn’t even look into flights: flying from Geneva or Zurich to Munich is expensive at the best of times (considering the distance), and with less than a week of advance notice it would have been ridiculous. So I took the bus, which cost about $20 each way. It’s an hour and half to get to Zurich from my place, and the direct bus to the centre of Munich took another four hours. Not bad,... Read more →

Come to the Forge Data Day in Munich on Tuesday!

I talked recently about the first in-person event tour that’s been held for Forge developers in at least a few years, this time focused on the new Forge Data offering (including the Data Exchange API that’s now in public beta). At the time I wasn’t sure which event I’d attend: there’s an in-person (finally!) Forge Accelerator next to the Barcelona event, which made that one especially interesting, for instance. In the end the timing for the Munich event worked best. I’ve now booked my hotel and bus ticket, and I’ll be there for the first event in the global... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →