Through the Interface

Adjusting zoom to fit in the Forge viewer

A question came up during this week’s Forge Accelerator in Dublin that I thought would be of broader interest. It related to the fact that the Forge viewer’s default behaviour when you double-click the background and perform a zoom-to-fit isn’t always desirable. In this case the developer was fine with a zoom-to-fit being performed, but felt the resultant view wasn’t a good enough fit. Here’s the default zoom level on double-click in Dasher 360, for instance: As you can see the model remains quite far from the camera. The good news is that debugging into the Forge viewer source,... Read more →

At the Forge Accelerator in Dublin

After having spent a great few days with the Toronto team, I headed home on Friday afternoon. I did have a little bit of “fun” getting home, though: firstly the UPExpress going from Union Station to Pearson Airport stopped – ostensibly waiting for the right signal – for about 30 minutes. It wasn’t a big deal for me, thankfully: I’d left some buffer in my schedule, so still had a little time to wait at the airport. While I did so, for some reason I checked my downloaded Netflix content… none of it played: I kept getting an obscure... Read more →

Visiting MaRS

I seem to spend quite a bit of time, these days, talking about the new Autodesk office in Toronto. I did visit one part of the office when I came through in July 2017 – on our world tour – but people hadn’t, at that point, fully moved across from the former 210 King St East office. So this week was – somewhat surprisingly – the first time I’d actually seen the generatively-designed office space first-hand. Crazy. I’ve been staying in the Chelsea Hotel – apparently the largest hotel in Canada, with about a thousand rooms – which is... Read more →

Join DevDays Online to learn what’s coming with Autodesk platform technology

There’s a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what’s coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It’s also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year’s DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don’t worry if that time’s inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk... Read more →

Embracing 3D: a day spent navigating Swiss mountains

Today was a fantastic day. Members of the BIM 360 engineering team based in Gumligen went on their annual ski day and kindly invited me along. We’d originally planned to go on February 1st, but the weather was very poor and so the plan was cancelled. It was rescheduled for today, but only earlier this week – once it was clearly goingto be a gorgeous day. [For those of you who didn’t know we have BIM 360 develoment staff based in Switzerland: the team originally came with the C-Plan acquisition – which happened back around the turn of the... Read more →

February Fun and March Madness

There’s a lot happening inside Autodesk at the beginning of our Fiscal Year 2020. FY20 has kicked off with a number of internal reorgs in various groups: as part of broader changes, the organisation to which I report – formerly known as OCTO (the Office of the Chief Technology Officer) is being renamed to Autodesk Research. Which is what’s been in my own title, anyway, as I belonged to the “research” arm of OCTO before the renaming. While I liked the name OCTO well enough (it brought plenty of opportunities to do cool things with octopuses ;-), I think... Read more →

Back at NEST

The week before last I headed across to Zurich for the day for meetings. During the afternoon I passed by the NEST building in Dübendorf – home of the DFAB House project – to meet with NEST’s Director, Reto Largo, and talk more about our plans to collaborate. To learn a bit more about what’s happening with this fantastic building, it’s worth checking out this session from AU 2018 in Las Vegas delivered by both Reto and Thomas Müller from Mensch und Maschine Schweiz. Our plan is to “Dasherize” the whole building, which has upwards of 2,000 sensors in... Read more →

How to embed videos from the new Autodesk University website

This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I’m sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it’ll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there... Read more →

The Forge Design Automation API now has (Beta) support for Revit

There’s great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge’s Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here’s an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors... Read more →

Refinery 0.4.26 is now available for download

A new version of Project Refinery is now available for your generative pleasure via the Autodesk Feedback community. It’s a pretty big release – being the first since the launch of the public beta at AU 2018 – and has some very interesting features. New Features Refinery installer New sample files 10 times faster Less computing resources used Better initial geometry views Smaller geometry storage on disk Filtering of designs in parallel coordinates Sorting for thumbnail views and table Better progress indicators Pause and resume for studies Refinery Server shutdown occurs automatically on exiting Dynamo Bug Fixes Chinese input... Read more →

Welcome to 2019, the year of Generative Design

Happy New Year! I’ve just come back online after a wonderful (and much-needed) 2-week break. I hope those of you who were lucky enough to get time off at this time of year made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time with your loved ones. (I will admit that since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending a little time working on a really fun side project, so I can’t say I’ve disconnected completely… but more on this later. :-) As I don’t really have an image to accompany this post, here’s a quick... Read more →

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Today is our last day of work for this calendar year. I spent it in our Gumligen office – Autodesk’s main office now in Switzerland – where we had a workshop in the morning followed by a raclette for lunch. Many thanks to all of those involved in organising and preparing the meal: it was a really nice moment. This afternoon I built a quick and dirty Dynamo script that creates Christmas trees… … and then ran it through Project Refinery to generatively design some Christmas trees. Because Christmas. :-) It’s now time to sign off for 2018. It’s... Read more →

A high-tech glitter bomb designed with Fusion 360

There’s a video that’s currently going viral on YouTube – with 35 million views and at #4 on the trending list – wherein a former NASA engineer turned professional YouTuber (sigh) shows how he designed and deployed a super-cool glitter bomb to counter local parcel thieves. It was picked up a few days ago by the BBC, back when it had a mere 6 million views. The video is genuinely fascinating, especially towards the end where it shows footage captured by the integrated mobile phones of various thieves opening it up and triggering explosions of glitter followed by releases... Read more →

Autodesk’s new office in Dublin

I couldn’t visit Dublin without popping by Autodesk’s new office there. So it was that after a great few days with the Kingspan team, I hopped on the Luas green line from Leopardstown and headed into the centre of Dublin. I got off on the edge of the central zone at Charlemont and headed along the canal to the location Google Maps told me to target. Unfortunately, on arriving at Fitzwilliam Place, I came to realise there was a problem with the instructions I’d been getting from Google. It didn’t really fit with the image in my head of... Read more →

A visit to Kingspan in Dublin

This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan’s Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event... Read more →

A visit to Basler & Hofmann

Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They’re an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award,... Read more →

Catching up on the Autodesk University 2018 keynotes

Among other things, this week, I’ve been trying to kick-off my AU2018 catch-up viewing. So far I’ve just had the chance to fill in the keynotes that I missed, so I thought I’d collect those that I could find together for others to view. The first keynote of the Monday’s pre-conference events was that of Connect & Construct: Next up was that of the Forge DevCon. Very strangely (for me, anyway) I couldn’t attend this one in person, as I was presenting a Connect & Construct session at the same time. Of the main AU event, there was, of... Read more →

Generative design and IoT, a virtuous circle!

I really enjoy my job, these days (although frankly that’s been true for the majority of my career at Autodesk): I get to work on projects related to IoT (Dasher 360) and to generative design (using Dynamo + Refinery). This is a real privilege, because there’s a connection between the two that’s tangible and that will become more and more important. It’s that connection that I want to talk about today, as this week was the first time I’ve covered my two areas of focus in a single, in-depth presentation. On Wednesday afternoon I presented a keynote session at... Read more →

Webinar on computational and generative design for AEC

My friend Dieter Vermeulen will be presenting a free, 1-hour webinar at 11am GMT on December 6, 2018, about how Computational Design can improve automation and optimization in the AEC industry. Here’s a photo of Dieter having a turn as DJ at the recent DynaNoche at AU Las Vegas. While the webinar’s title mentions computational design, Dieter tells me he’ll also be talking about the generative design tool Autodesk released into public Beta last week. Here’s the invitation to attend the session: Join us for this webinar brought to you by Building Magazine & Autodesk. Improve Automation in AEC... Read more →

Autodesk University 2018

I’m on the train home after a whirlwind week in Las Vegas. Another great AU is “in the bag” and I’m looking forward to getting home to my family. But first a quick recap of the week… I arrived on Saturday night, as usual, and managed to get a decent first night’s sleep. On Sunday I did a few things… I checked out the rooms I’d be presenting in during the week, which is always slightly surreal. I wandered along the strip: they’d closed it off for the Rock N Roll Marathon, which apparently caused incredible havoc for those... Read more →