Through the Interface

25 years with Autodesk

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of my joining Autodesk. The years have literally flown by. To bathe in the nostalgia of the event, I decided to go up into the loft and dig through my old photos, to see what I could find. Here’s one of me that was probably taken around the time I joined Autodesk (at a guess, anyway). Yes, I had long hair, although it was usually tied back: it was only this curly just after it had just been washed (so not very often, ahem). If you could travel back in time and tell my... Read more →

Dreaming of AU and Forge Accelerators

This has been a strange week, at least in terms of dreams. I mentioned earlier in the week (on Twitter and LinkedIn) that I’d had a dream about Autodesk University where I was only partially present: I was running between meetings while everyone else was having fun attending sessions and hanging out at social events. I also noted this wasn’t so very different from reality (at least the way I perceive it), but that’s just me playing the victim. I love AU even if it’s always a bit hectic. I have a feeling this dream was probably triggered by... Read more →

The first online AEC Hackathon

Since starting up back in 2013, the AEC Hackathon team has organised 43 in-person events in various cities around the world. This year being “special”, they’ve taken the plunge and set up a couple of online events, the first was held from July 6th-26th while the second will be held from October 9th-25th. I was on holiday for the first two weeks of the July event, so could only really participate by presenting a topic during the final week. Here are a couple of screenshots of me – taken from the session recording, which should still be available on-demand... Read more →

Dynamo 2.7 – Migrating MaRS to CPython3

After being teased with some graphics improvements coming in Dynamo, I was excited to find on returning from my recent holiday to find a new release of Dynamo Sandbox was available for testing. There are a number of notable features available in Dynamo 2.7, whether the ability to run CPython3 code – rather than using IronPython, which is based on Python2 – or improved graphics preview performance thanks to an upgrade to Helix. I started by just loading v2 of the MaRS graph, without changing any of the code blocks to use CPython. Straightaway I found that the graphics... Read more →

Autodesk Research is hiring experienced software developers and designers!

These days I belong to the Research Engineering team at Autodesk, headed by Tony Ruto. (Tony joined Autodesk with the acquisition of Within Technologies, back at the end of 2014, where he was CTO.) Tony’s team is a shared resource for the various “Core Science” and “Industry Futures” teams within Autodesk Research: we help develop prototypes and platform capabilities that are used elsewhere in the organisation, and also have members of our team embedded within these other teams. The team is growing, which is quite exciting: there are a number of open positions that I’d encourage you to share... Read more →

AEC Hackathon, CanBIM recordings & AU class voting

This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: “The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID”. My own session was entitled “Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being”. As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor’s introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant... Read more →

The Autodesk University 2020 proposal deadline is coming fast!

I’ve just realised that time is running out for people to submit their class proposals for AU 2020. The deadline is on June 22nd, which is this coming Monday. From my side I’m almost certainly going to submit a class to discuss the details of the work we’ve been doing on post-COVID return-to-workplace efforts. Essentially digging into how we’ve used the Space Analysis package to implement metrics that make sense for this type of analysis. If you’re thinking of submitting something, but haven’t yet put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard), then I suggest giving it some... Read more →

Attention Digital Twin folks! Autodesk’s Constructwin team is seeking a Product Manager

There’s an exciting job posted for a key role in a new project (product?) team at Autodesk named Constructwin. Here’s some information from the posting: Do you want the opportunity to be part of a startup environment and have a big impact on a brand-new product? Are you looking to be at the forefront of innovative new technology that will ultimately help people imagine, design, and make a better world? If so, come join the Constructwin team at Autodesk! Our mission is to create Digital Twin technology and solutions that will transform how buildings are designed, built, and operated.... Read more →

Minor updates to Warnamo and Capturefinery

I’ve made some minor tweaks to a couple of my Dynamo packages, this week. One was to make sure Capturefinery – a tool that generates screenshots and animated GIFs for Refinery optimisation runs – works with the shipping release of Generative Design for Revit 2021 (it now does, but needed to look in a new directory structure). This is available from Capturefinery 0.9.11. The other was to add a feature to Warnamo – a tool that lists the warnings and errors in your Dynamo graph – to let you export the error list to Excel. This is available from... Read more →

Autodesk University goes fully digital in 2020

Yesterday Lisa Campbell, Autodesk’s Chief Marketing Officer, announced the decision to move all this year’s Autodesk University events to a fully digital platform: this makes a lot of sense given the ongoing uncertainty around the duration and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s going to change the shape of AU for many of us, inevitably, but I’m looking forward to these events, nonetheless. For one thing it means I’m going to be able to attend – or even participate in – more of them, with less impact on my family and the planet. I’m also really curious to see... Read more →

May the Forth be with you!

No, that isn’t a typo. As it’s May the Fourth – yes, Star Wars Day – I thought I’d have a little fun and see what I could write using the venerable stack-based programming language, Forth. For those of you who aren’t aware, Forth has a long history with Autodesk and , having been at the core of ATLAST, the Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit. ATLAST had noble intentions: to allow host applications to expose a common API or macro language that executed efficiently and with very low memory overhead. By the time I joined Autodesk it was... Read more →

Virtual Forge Accelerators – coming to an office (very) near you

For two of the last three weeks I’ve been lurking in virtual Forge Accelerators: as I mentioned last time, the Forge team has pivoted to virtual events after this year’s Accelerator in Sydney was forced online due to a COVID-related office closure. (Incidentally I need to get used to the team’s new name: they recently switched from Forge Partner Development to Developer Advocacy and Support. FPD is no more, the future is DAS!) The DAS team has since gone “all in” on these events, holding two during the month of April. The first one was codenamed Metropolis and ran... Read more →

A quick round-up of articles on Generative Design in Revit 2021

This week has been interesting: after speculating last week about how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our design criteria – especially as it might relate to Generative Design – this week I ended up diving into a project related to exactly that. I’ll share more on this in due course. In the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick round-up of some news that has been coming in on the new Generative Design feature (formerly known as Project Refinery) in Revit 2021. To start with, here’s a good article from Autodesk that announces the feature. Next up, here’s a... Read more →

Generatively designing a post-COVID world

This post contains a “call to action” for the community and presents an opportunity for people to start using Generative Design in the context of a global pandemic. Please do read (or skip) through to the end! I’ve been really encouraged by the energy people have focused on helping others since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just inside Autodesk there have been a number of COVID-19-related projects proposed and started, and all four of our Technology Centers are cranking out personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. A special shout-out should go to our former Maker-in-Chief, Carl Bass,... Read more →

Generative Design is now available in Revit 2021

After many months of hard work, the Refinery team has delivered the first official release of their Generative Design feature as part of Revit 2021. Here’s the blog post describing the release. This marks the point at which generative design capabilities are first being made widely available to Revit users, directly from within the product. I know a number of customers have been waiting for this before engaging with the technology, so I’m impatient to see where things go from here. The feature comes with three pre-built sample studies for people to try: Three Box Massing, Workspace Layout and... Read more →

Thoughts on our new situation

I’m sure we’ve all been thinking lots about the developing situation we’re living through at the moment. Between markets crashing, social distancing, school closures and home-working, the world looks very different than it did a few short weeks ago. The below poem came through my inbox, this morning (thanks, Mum!) and it definitely resonated with some hopes I’ve had about the crisis. IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they... Read more →

Grindelwald, the Jungfraujoch and a week off

I was back home on Thursday night with enough time to have dinner with my family before getting an early night (a relatively easy thing to do after a busy week in Soho). I was out of the door at 5:30am on Friday to get across to Grindelwald for the Gümligen Engineering team’s annual ski day. I changed trains in Bern. And yes, there is a suburb of Bern called Wankdorf, which does indeed cause endless amusement to Brits. It was a little before 7am by the time I got to the Gümligen office, meeting Nenad, Martyn and Adrian:... Read more →

The first Forge Accelerator in London

This week I’ve had the pleasure of spending time at the first Forge Accelerator to be held in Autodesk’s Soho office (in central London). On Monday morning I headed to Geneva, and had a minor panic attack when I saw that so many London-bound flights had been cancelled. My own flight was delayed by about an hour, but only due to late arrival of the plane from Zurich. Nothing related to Storm Dennis, which came as a huge relief after having watched the viral Etihad A380 landing video. In fact it was nice and sunny when I finally arrived... 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 →

Join us for DevDays Online

Not everyone can make it to the Forge team’s annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here’s a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn’t work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays... Read more →