Through the Interface

Knee-deep in AU prep

Things have been quiet on this blog, since my return from Scotland. Mainly because I’ve been heads-down dealing with preparation for Autodesk University 2019, which I’d love to say was on the horizon, whereas it’s – more accurately – coming at top speed around a nearby streetcorner. In less than 3 weeks many us us will be flying to Las Vegas for the latest installment of my favourite annual conference. Today was the deadline for AU speakers to submit class handouts: I managed to submit something for both my classes, so I can now switch focus to the various... Read more →

BILT and the Highlands

After the pre-BILT Hackathon on Wednesday, there were still three full days of the main conference to be experienced in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. My family was with me – at the start of our 2-week Scottish adventure – so I wasn’t planning (or able) to spend the full 3 days at the conference. I did make it along to the opening keynote, however, which was largely run by Marcus Fich, who introduced two Danish psychologists who talked about (among other things) our response to stressful situations. It was a very different and interesting session. After that I... Read more →

The DBEI Generative Design Hackathon in Edinburgh

On Wednesday morning I headed off, bright and early, to the Generative Design Hackathon that had been organised by DBEI prior to this year's BILT Europe in Edinburgh. I wandered past the local church in Bruntsfield: The walk to the conference centre led me via the canal: I arrived at EICC, the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, which is also hosting this year's BILT Europe over the coming days. Proceedings were kicked off by Wesley Benn, Executive Chairman of DBEI: He introduced the teams: And the judges: While Hypar's Anthony Hauck introduced the expert users (myself included): As well as... Read more →

Autodesk’s third Soirée de l’Excellence Française in Paris

On Wednesday morning I hopped on the train to Paris, once again, this time to present at Autodesk France’s third “Soirée de l’Excellence Française”, an invitation-only VIP event for AEC customers in France. (I’d have blogged about it beforehand if the event was open to all, of course.) I arrived at la Gare de Lyon, as usual, and found an interesting art exhibit outside. I walked next door to the citizenM – part of the chain of hotels I’ve stayed at for AU London, the last two years. It’s a fun place to stay, although the switch to turn... Read more →

Looking back at the GD for AEC Residency; looking forward to the DBEI Hackathon

The Toronto team has posted a nice video looking back at July’s Generative Design for AEC Residency: It was clearly an interesting event – I do hope I’ll get to attend the next one. Here’s a still I extracted that shows Sol Amour, Dynamo’s Product Manager, hacking away at Python inside Dynamo. The Python node is big enough to be clearly visible on the video (the code itself is not, but I’m sure it’s about to do something cool). I’m starting to think about next Wednesday’s DBEI Hackathon, which has the theme “Generative Design in Practice” and so I’m... Read more →

There's still time to register for the Forge DevCon @ AU Germany

For those of you who haven’t yet signed up, there’s still a little time left to register for this year’s European Forge DevCon being held on October 14th 2019, just ahead of AU Germany on October 15th-16th. Once again both events are being held in Darmstadt (a nice town close to Frankfurt, for those who don’t know it). While AU Germany is primarily a German-language event, the Forge DevCon pre-conference is always in English. There’s a modest attendance fee for this year’s event: it costs 160 € per person, for which you get a gourmet dinner, snacks, drinks and... Read more →

The first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland

Yesterday I was back at the NEST building in Dübendorf for Autodesk’s first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland. It was nice to be back there, even if just to see the progress being made on the construction of the HiLo roof. Here’s the view from the ground: I also went up to take a few snaps from the roof. You can clearly see the knitted cabling that will provide support for the structure. There were a few people working on the structure, too. (I took my snaps from an open doorway as I didn’t want to disturb them.)... Read more →

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 →