Through the Interface

Learn about Autodesk Construction Cloud and its API

There’s a great opportunity coming up in March to learn about building software that works with Autodesk Construction Cloud: the ACS Integration Partner Summit 2022 is being held on St Patrick’s Day, March 17th. Here’s some information on what to expect from this event: Autodesk Construction Overview Hear about Autodesk's construction platform vision, including recent business updates and a technical overview of the breadth of supported construction workflows. Autodesk Construction Cloud Platform, product, and Forge API updates A large focus will be on Forge APIs. We will discuss recently released APIs that allow you to deliver new features and... Read more →

Building the 2m Dar Smart Bridge

Colleagues in Autodesk Research have been working with Dar Al-Handasah on a project to 3D print a series of footbridges with integrated sensors. It’s similar in some ways to MX3D’s Smart Bridge Amsterdam, but printing with plastic rather than steel. I’ve talked about the bridge at a couple of events, now, so I thought it was time to share some more information about this fascinating project. My role in the project is, once again, fairly minor: I’ve been helping with the visualization of sensor data from the bridge inside Dasher (more on that later on), but it’s been fun... Read more →

The NEST exhibit at the new Autodesk Gallery

Last week this announcement was made that included a video showing off the sparkling new Autodesk Gallery at our 1 Market Street office in San Francisco. There’s a lot of inspiring content in the new Gallery – for instance it showcases the results of Autodesk Research’s collaboration with NASA JPL, the generatively designed interplanetary lander, and the scanning robot from Forge partner Scaled Robotics – but I wanted to highlight a project that I’ve participated in quite a bit, over the years, and I’m super-happy to see has a place in the stunning new Gallery: there’s a scale model... Read more →

The recording of last week's BIM Fórum Brasil event

Our friends at BIM Fórum Brasil have now posted the recording of last week’s event on Digital Twins. (If the last link says "We Couldn't Find This Page", just click on the Brazilian flag in the page header.) A big chunk of the session is in Portuguese, but my piece was in English. If you only understand English, I suggest skipping forward to the 20-minute mark. If you’ve heard me talk about this topic before, you might still want to check out the section on the Dar Smart Bridge project at the 35-minute mark. (Be ready to crank up... Read more →

Autodesk's 40th anniversary celebration

As I mentioned last week, Autodesk turned 40 yesterday. In anticipation of this milestone, Shaan Hurley and the Autodesk Community team organised a fun online get-together on Friday for people to join and get nostalgic about the good old days. Shaan asked me to prepare something Floppy Friday-related, so I went and created a Floppy Friday Zoom background that I used during the event. Here’s a GIF version, in case you’re interested. At its peak there were around 70 people in the call. It was so nice to reconnect with people after such a long time. It would have... Read more →

Autodesk is turning 40

As many of you will have heard on social media, Autodesk turns 40 this year. More specifically this coming Monday, January 30th, is the 40th anniversary of the original organizational meeting held at John Walker’s former home in Mill Valley, California. (You can find details in this recent post from John.) The anniversary of Autodesk’s official incorporation and initial stock distribution is on April 26th, but Autodesk as an informal entity already existed from the end of January. Although the company wasn’t called Autodesk at that point, as that wasn’t fixed until some time in April… among the other... Read more →

Speaking at tomorrow’s BIM Fórum Brasil about Digital Twins

I’ve been asked to talk about our work on Digital Twins (or Gêmeos Digitais) at the BIM Fórum Brasil event, on Wednesday of this week (January 26th, 2022). The event starts at 10am in Brasilia, which is 2pm in Central Europe, so the timing should work well for Asia, Europe and early birds on the east coast of North America, too. I’ll be sharing information on our older projects, as usual, but I’m also planning to showcase some of our more recent (previously unseen) projects. So there’s likely to be new information even for people who have seen me... Read more →

Draping temperature data from a thermal image across the Forge viewer scene - Part 2

In the last post we looked at how it’s possible to take temperature data from a thermal image and use the Data Visualization Extension to connect that information to locations in a 3D Forge viewer scene. In this post we look at how we can use the events from the same extension to display a simple tooltip showing the temperature when one of these locations is hovered over. Let’s start by looking at what we get from the thermal image. It’s pretty simple: we have colour. As we’re averaging a number of pixels it’s likely to be on a... Read more →

A belated Happy New Year

I’ve now been back at work for a few days after an extended holiday break, so my head is back far enough above water for me to write a quick blog post. At Autodesk we were extremely lucky to have an extended holiday shutdown, this festive season, so employees around the world clocked off after work on December 17th. For me this meant a perfect opportunity to hit the slopes ahead of the Christmas rush. My kids were in school until the 23rd, but I managed have a few days hanging out on my own, up in the mountains,... Read more →

Using VASA via WebAssembly for pathfinding inside FormIt

As a quick recap, here are the posts we’ve seen in recent weeks on this topic: Autodesk FormIt and its JavaScript API Introductory look at FormIt and the Maze Generator plugin. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 1 How VASA can be used within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes (etc.) in 3D. Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2 Applying the same principle with urban scenes imported by the 3D Context Creator plugin. In today’s post we look at the fact that VASA can also be used directly from a FormIt JavaScript plugin –... Read more →

Come work at Autodesk on the Tandem team!

Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R13688 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 I’m really happy to see that the Tandem team is hiring. And they’re hiring into a really varied set of roles, so hopefully there’s something in this list for everyone. :-) Customer Adoption Specialist Principal Software Developer Senior Software Developer UX Designer Senior UX Designer Technical Program Manager I’m pretty sure that all these positions are “remote-ready”, although I believe from a timezone perspective the Eastern US is strongly preferred for at least the engineering-centric roles. I may have that wrong, of course, and I’ll be sure to come back and... Read more →

Frustrated by travel restrictions? Join the last virtual Forge Accelerator of 2021!

The subject is basically a perfect description of my own situation, today, but I thought there might be others out there in the same boat (as it were). I have a feeling that more people will end up being stuck at home over the next few weeks, whether they like it or not. From my side I was very much looking forward to a trip to the UK, next week, where I’d have had the chance to catch up with my UK colleagues for the first time in-person in probably 2 years. And to join for the team Christmas... Read more →

Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2

In the last post we looked at using VASA from within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes generated by a cool plugin created by Brett from the FormIt team. The Dynamo graph we saw used VASA in “3D mode” – where the voxel height is higher than 1 – but that came with the added need to create a floor for the maze (something that isn’t too hard, as we know the exact dimensions and location of the maze). In today’s post we’re looking at how VASA might be used to perform pathfinding operations at the urban scale, taking... Read more →

Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 1

In this recent post we looked at FormIt’s JavaScript API and learned how Brett Garrison was able to use it to develop a Maze Generator plugin. In this post we look at one way to find solutions for the mazes generated by this plugin using VASA from Dynamo. When I first started looking into VASA with FormIt, Rhys Goldstein sent across a Dynamo graph he’d used to grab contextual building geometry from FormIt – to create a voxel model of the space – and then send the pathfinding results back afterwards. I’ve adapted this graph to work with the... Read more →

Want to see Dasher inside Tandem? Tell us what you need.

The Autodesk Tandem team has just launched their Customer Research Program. This is the perfect way to engage with the Tandem team and let them know what features you might need from your future digital twin infrastructure. In particular, if you’re interested in seeing features from Project Dasher show up inside Tandem – via what I referred to in a recent post as “Dasher inside Tandem” – then this is your chance to be heard. Related to this topic, I came across a funny meme recently on Twitter. I couldn’t find it again, so here’s my attempt at reproducing... Read more →

Autodesk FormIt and its JavaScript API

A few weeks ago I started taking a closer look at Autodesk FormIt, mainly with a view to understanding how it might integrate with VASA. FormIt is a multi-platform (which I believe in this case means Windows, iOS and web) conceptual design and analysis tool. I haven’t really followed the development of FormIt, over the years, so if you’re interested in learning more about that then I suggested heading over to the product team’s blog. If you want to get started with using FormIt, then this Primer seems helpful. Two things in particular had me intrigued about FormIt: its... Read more →

Getting ready for Tandem: a call to action for Forge developers

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time exploring how Project Dasher might make use of the platform capabilities of Autodesk Tandem. This is just one effort connecting the two projects, and the one I tend to think of as “Tandem inside Dasher”: the Tandem team is looking what makes sense in terms of “Dasher inside Tandem” (i.e. which Dasher features it makes sense to surface in Tandem for their customers). As I’ve hopefully said before, Autodesk Tandem fills a really important gap in the process to build out a model-centric digital twin: Project Dasher project was never intended... Read more →

Streamlines in the Forge viewer

One more feature inspired by Project Dasher has made its way into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion): streamlines. This is something I’ve talked about a few times in the past, and I’m happy to see it make its way into the Forge platform. Streamlines are a great mechanism for indicating movement – of people or assets – through an architectural space, or perhaps something like a toolpath in a manufacturing context. The way we implemented them originally inside Dasher wasn’t ideal, in all fairness: I used the MeshLine.js library to be able to display lines with... Read more →

Forge and digital twins at Autodesk University 2021

I’ve finally found the time to view the main information from the recent Autodesk University event, and thought it worth highlighting what I consider to be some of the “big ticket” items, especially from my own – somewhat Forge- and digital twin-centric – perspective. First-up, Forge was everywhere in the keynotes. If it wasn’t previously clear that Autodesk is serious about becoming a platform company, it should be from the messaging at this AU. On a side note, there are a number of internal organisational changes that have happened/are happening at Autodesk to accelerate this shift, so I’m currently... Read more →

Learn Forge website now available in English, Japanese and Chinese

While I was away on vacation I received the news that the excellent learnforge.autodesk.io website – a great resource for learning how to develop software that uses Autodesk Forge – has been translated into Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. This will be of great use to customers and would-be Forge developers who are keen to learn more about the platform but have a better grasp of Japanese or Chinese than English. If you have more requests for languages (I know at least one more is in the pipeline), then please post a comment and I’ll pass it on... Read more →