Through the Interface

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 →

Project Refinery: implement generative design workflows for AEC

I’m very glad to be able to share the news that Project Refinery is now available as a public Beta. This is the optioneering and optimization engine for Dynamo that Autodesk Research has been using to implement the “generative urban design” workflow for Van Wijnen. It allows you to generate 1000s of solutions to a particular design problem, whether you want to explore random solutions, work your way through the parameter space systematically, or use evolutionary computing to hone in on optimal solutions. In the Manufacturing space we had Project Dreamcatcher – now the generative design capabilities built into... Read more →

Interested in generative design for AEC? Watch this space…

I was hoping to be able to announce something exciting today, but it looks like I’m going to have to wait until Monday. In the meantime, here’s a quick taste of what you’re going to see next week. Exciting times! :-) If you’re coming to Las Vegas, next week, you’ll be able to hear more during my AU classes. See you there! Read more →

The calm before the storm that is AU2018

We’re in the last few days before the biggest week in my calendar: Autodesk University in Las Vegas. As usual I’m trying my best to conserve strength in the week before the trip, as if preparing for a marathon. (There’s actually a half-marathon in Las Vegas on Sunday, so a number of AU attendees are preparing for that as well as AU itself. Utter craziness!) Photo credit: James Marvin Phelps The Sign Says It All II via photopin (license) My handouts are uploaded and my slides are getting close to being presentable. To give you a sense of what’s... Read more →

Generative Design Day in Barcelona

After a crazy (but cool) few days in Amsterdam at the beginning of last week, on Thursday night I hopped across to Barcelona for an event being organised by our Enterprise Priority support team. They had invited our larger customers from all over Europe to come and hear about the use of generative design technologies in the AEC space, both present and future. I woke up early in the hotel opposite Autodesk’s nearly-beachfront office to see the morning light hitting it. The event itself was on the first floor of the office, so we were surrounded by autumn colours.... Read more →

Introducing Warnamo, a Dynamo package for managing warnings and errors

One of the highlights of last weekend’s AEC Hackathon in Berlin was getting to meet Michael and Keith from the Dynamo team. They’d delivered a pre-event workshop on the Friday and stayed on to tutor the many Dynamo-centric teams participating in the weekend’s Hackathon. On afternoon on Saturday Keith and Michael presented an additional session that briefly mentioned Refinery (the optimization engine for Dynamo that’s currently in Beta) but focused mainly on the API infrastructure that enabled its integration into Dynamo: the View Extension API. It was really helpful for me to see how it’s possible to extend Dynamo... Read more →

My AU 2018 classes… all about Generative Design for AEC

I’ve seen a few of these postings via LinkedIn, and thought it was time to post something of my own. As mentioned previously, I submitted three class proposals for this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. Two out of three have been accepted: the ones focused on Generative Design for AEC. I’m really excited about the first one, in particular, and it seems like it may also be featured in one of the pre-conference events (more on this once things get confirmed). I think it’ll be really cool to look at the project we’ve been working on with Van... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Berlin 2018

I’ve just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year’s German AEC Hackathon (last year’s was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn’t needed at the Hackathon. Let’s start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with... Read more →

Bringing geometry from Dynamo into Revit

It’s been a quiet week on the blogging front, mainly because of the May 1st holiday on Tuesday, but also because I’ve been heads-down on projects I can’t really talk much about. One thing that does seem worth sharing is an approach we’ve been using to take geometry from Dynamo into Revit. The project itself relates to the use of Generative Design for urban planning. I can’t yet talk about the generative aspect – which is extremely cool – but once the design is basically finalised there’s a need to bring the geometry into Revit. The ideal scenario would... Read more →

Blown away in Amsterdam

I was a little torn about my plans for this week: the Forge team is running a packed Accelerator in Munich, so it would have been great to have spent my week over there. As it happened I ended up coming to the Netherlands, instead, to meet with two incredibly innovative companies, Van Wijnen and MX3D. Despite missing the Accelerator the timing was actually pretty ideal: it proved possible to spend a day and a half with Van Wijnen at Autodesk’s office in Hoofddorp before coming into the city to join some of my Autodesk colleagues – Alex Tessier,... Read more →

A video on Generative Design for Architecture

The project I’m currently working on fits squarely under the umbrella of “Generative Design for Architecture”. We’re using Dynamo Studio to generate layouts of residential housing – including both individual homes and apartment buildings – with the results quantified in a number of metrics that will be easily explorable by the user of the system. It’s the approach The Living – the architectural studio in Autodesk Research doing pioneering work in the generative design space – has used for a number of projects, including Project Discover and the layout of the AU 2017 Exhibit Hall. I came across this... Read more →

Merging multiple graphs inside Dynamo Studio

I’m working alongside several Autodesk Research colleagues on a really large Dynamo graph. We’re mostly working in separate instances of the .DYN file – and focusing on different areas of it, as far as possible – and merging the changes together has been a task of which I’ve taken ownership. At the time of writing, Dynamo doesn’t have decent support for multi-user graph editing, nor is its data storage tuned for source control mechanisms such as Git. All of which makes identifying differences between graphs and merging updated areas to be quite challenging. One basic problem that we’ve had... Read more →

Controlling Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts showing how to query information about Hue lights via a Philips Hue bridge from Dynamo Studio, it’s time for the really fun stuff: controlling lights from Dynamo. To make this happen some changes were needed to the zero-touch node that talks to the Philips Hue API on behalf of Dynamo, mainly to allow the setting of a light’s properties. The Philips Hue API allows this to be done either via Hue, Saturation and Brightness or by the XY offset in the CIE colour space. I ended up exposing the ability to... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 2

In the last post we looked at some initial code to get basic information about the lights connected to a Philips Hue bridge. In this post we’re going to extend the code to expose more information but also to query the bridge repeatedly, allowing the graph to display the latest light colours as they change. Here’s a view of the updated graph. A few things have changed: firstly the Bridge object exposes some new information – in our case we can see the names of the lights, but we could also access the names and IDs of the various... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 1

I mentioned in a recent post that I was chewing on how design apps might connect with building automation systems to display data via lights. My first step along this path was to see how Dynamo Studio might connect into my home’s Philips Hue bridge and get information about the “smart” lights it contains. To do this I created a zero-touch node in C# that calls into the Philips Hue API exposed by my local bridge. (To make this piece work you need to follow the steps on this page that show how to create an authorised user ID... Read more →

Digging into Dynamo custom nodes

As mentioned in a recent post, I’m currently working on a project using Dynamo Studio. It’s fun getting back into Dynamo and DesignScript: I helped prototype the initial implementation of DesignScript inside AutoCAD about a decade ago, and I love seeing how the technology has evolved in the meantime. There are a few of us from Autodesk Research working on the project, which is also fun, but in a less literal way. Dynamo doesn’t work especially well with source control, as far as I can tell, so there’s a fair amount of manual merging of nodes into the master... Read more →

ETHZ, EPFL and all that jazz

This week has been a little hectic, once again. Yesterday I spent the morning back across at ETH Zurich, speaking with members of the Block Research Group about Forge, Dynamo and HoloLens. They’ve just moved into a brand new building labelled HIB – where the various schools at ETH focusing on architecture from a technological perspective will be co-located – but as it’s so new it’s yet to be sign-posted. I eventually did find it, but not without asking for directions from 5 different people. Inside the ceiling is pretty cool: they’ve used a combination of skylights for natural... Read more →

Connecting Dynamo to the Internet of Things

We have our annual, internal Technical Summit coming up in a couple of weeks. I’ll be heading across to Montreal with 700+ other Autodesk employees to learn more about the cool stuff going on within the company. As I’ve done in previous years, I’ll do my best to report information that I think will be interesting to this blog’s readers (and that is ready to be discussed publicly, of course). One of the event’s activities is being hosted by my team: the IoT Hackday. We’ll have 30+ participants spread across 8 different teams. Each team will get provided some... Read more →

A blog by Autodesk’s AEC Generative Design group

I’ve been spending more time looking at generative design in recent months (although this is a relative thing… I’ve still only posted once about Dynamo, for instance). So far a big chunk of my research has been understanding what’s going on in different parts of the company with respect to generative design. As part of this effort, several months ago I chatted with Anthony Hauck who heads up a team focused on generative design in the AEC space. He talked to me about Project Akaba – an early generative tool for space planning – and its successor, Project Fractal.... Read more →