Through the Interface

Using VASA with Forma - Part 1

While preparing for one of my upcoming AU classes, I decided to explore how someone could use VASA - our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit - with Forma. Right now Forma is largely focused on conceptual design - taking into account the surrounding urban context - so this thinking was largely focused on how VASA might be used at the urban scale. This is something we’ve looked at before in the context of FormIt and Dynamo. While a tighter integration is likely to be possible at some point - I’ll talk a little more about our work on a... Read more →

Voxelising point clouds in Dynamo with VASA

Last week we saw a Dynamo graph that imports a point cloud from an ASCII-based format to specify the initial locations for a fun flocking simulation. This week we’re going to look at a graph that uses a similar import technique but rather creates a voxel model based on the point cloud: The main difference from the previous import code is that rather than returning a list of Point objects, we’ve tweaked the code to return 9 doubles for each point that are taken as triangle definitions. The little secret is that the triangle’s vertices are coincident: we use... Read more →

Flocking point clouds in Dynamo

I was thrilled to see a post by Long Nguyen over the weekend announcing his publication of a Dynamo package called WhatTheFlock – with full source code – that implements a Boids-like flocking simulation. This work is significant not because ornithologists will use Dynamo to predict or simulate murmurations (although that in itself is a fun thought) but because Long has demonstrated a valuable technique that might be used to implement other arguably more useful types of multi-agent simulation inside Dynamo. Long is using a background process to perform calculations before rendering the results into the Dynamo window. A... Read more →

Dynamo Office Hours showing Space Analysis and VASA

Last week Rhys Goldstein and I had a blast joining Sol Amour and Jacob Small during the Dynamo Office Hours session on Packages of Note, something I mentioned in a recent post. We spent some time stepping through a few samples for both Space Analysis and VASA, to give a rough sense of what’s involved in using each. Next week I’m heading over to Denmark for the first half of the week, where I’ll be attending the APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen. If you’re going to be in Copenhagen next week and want to meet up for a chat,... Read more →

An introduction to Space Analysis and VASA during the next Dynamo Office Hours

During the next Dynamo Office Hours – being held on March 9th, 2023 at 1pm EST – Rhys Goldstein and I will be joining Tiana Dame, Sol Amour and Jacob Small to talk about “Packages of Note”, which will include an introduction to the Space Analysis and VASA packages. I’m sure it’s going to be a fun event – it’s always a blast catching up with Sol and Jacob – and a good chance to learn about a few Dynamo packages developed and maintained by Autodesk. The focus will be on introducing the various packages – rather than going... Read more →

Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation

Rhys Goldstein, an Autodesk Research colleague with whom I’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on various projects, over the years, has written an excellent explainer article that has just been published in Towards Data Science. This is intended as a companion to our paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, something I talked about in this recent post. Firstly, though, a quick shout-out to Zach Kron, who kindly allowed an image of one of his watercolours to be used in the article; one he created with the help of Dynamo and the Space Analysis package, which... 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 →

A paper on our space analysis algorithm in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

I’m very happy to share the news that a paper authored by current and former members of Autodesk Research has been published in the open access Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper is entitled “Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation” and talks in depth about the algorithm developed to power the Space Analysis package for Dynamo. Here’s the paper’s abstract, to tickle your fancy: Counting the number of shortest paths on a grid is a simple procedure with close ties to Pascal’s triangle. We show how path counting can be used to select relatively direct grid paths for... 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 →

Vote on my (and others') AU 2022 class proposals

I’ve gone ahead and submitted two class proposals for Autodesk University 2022. If you think they should be part of this year’s event, I’d certainly appreciate you voting for them: Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Autodesk Research first created the Space Analysis toolkit - and its accompanying Dynamo package - to support 2D generative design workflows such as those used during Project Discover for the architectural layout of Autodesk's Toronto office. VASA - short for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis - takes these techniques to the next level, allowing the geometric exploration of architectural spaces in 3D for activities... Read more →

A video on using sample points for pathfinding and sensor placement with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has now published Part 5 in his video series on using VASA. In it, Rhys walks through the latest two samples that come with VASA 0.2.0, one of which I talked a bit about in a recent post. Both samples make use of sample points – one in the context of aggregating path information, while the other uses them (as we’ve seen) for sensor placement. Both workflows have significant potential for use in the context of generative design – something I hope to dig into at some point in another post. Hopefully you’ll find this video –... Read more →

Placing sensors and evaluating their coverage using VASA

Last week I mentioned the release of VASA 0.2.0, which includes some new nodes and samples that raise some really interesting possibilities. I couldn’t help but come back to the “sensor coverage” sample (named 12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn), in particular, as I can see so many possibilities for its use. Here’s the description Rhys Goldstein included in the sample: A demonstration of how to combine sample point generation and proximity operations to select locations on walls and ceilings using the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. In this example, the locations are used to place sensors and approximate their coverage. First, sample... Read more →

VASA 0.2.0 is now available

Rhys Goldstein has been busy implementing some new features in the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. I’ve just published a new version to the Dynamo Package Manager containing the following enhancements: Added "PathModel.GenerateSamplePoints" and "DistanceField.GenerateSamplePoints", which generate sample points according to an approximate spacing parameter. Added proximity operations ("NearestFilledAlongX", "NearestFilledAlongY", "NearestFilledAlongZ", and "NearestFilledHorizontally"), which find the filled voxel nearest to a point. Added special operations ("AutoCrop", "AutoSplit", "DensityMap", "DensityMapWithWeights"), which automatically crop, split, and create density maps from voxel models. Added new examples ("11-VASA-Path-Density.dyn" and "12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn"), which demonstrate the new features. Fixed a bug in the fill from... Read more →

A video on visibility and daylight analysis with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the third part of his video series introducing capabilities of the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package for Dynamo. This part focuses on how VASA can perform visibility and daylighting analyses. Here’s an animation showing some of topics covered: And here’s the video itself: We’re taking a break from this series now until the New Year, when Rhys will be sharing a walkthrough of the remaining VASA samples. Read more →

VASA 0.1.2 is now available

The first version of VASA we posted to the Dynamo package manager was numbered 0.1.0. Yesterday we posted a new version with some interesting new features, not least of which is the lack of an error when you install it (this one was very much my fault: I’d neglected to mark a couple of DLLs as not being node libraries when I posted it). Here’s a breakdown of the new features in 0.1.2, courtesy of the package’s author, Rhys Goldstein: Added VoxelModel.ToSolid, which converts a voxel model into a Dynamo solid that can be processed using standard Dynamo operations... 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 →

A video on pathfinding with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the second part of his informative video series on using the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package with Dynamo. The first part was an overall introduction to the package while this part dives into pathfinding, taking a close look at samples that show how it might be used in both 2D and 3D. While the overall video is really interesting – some of you might find it a bit long at 43 minutes but it’s quite watchable at 2X and is packed full of useful information – one of the sections that stood out for... 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 →

A video introduction to VASA

Rhys Goldstein, the researcher behind our 2D and 3D Space Analysis toolkits, has recorded a great video introduction to VASA (an acronym for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis). It steps through how to install the VASA package inside Dynamo and then create a simple voxelisation of Dynamo geometry. Rhys also shows how to load and run the samples provided with the package, and takes some time to step through – and then dissect – the main overview sample. Here it is: If you don’t have time to spend 23 minutes watching a video, it should be quite watchable at higher... Read more →