Through the Interface

Last chance to apply to join the first Dynamo Hackathon in London

On April 5th-6th, 2019 in London, the UK Dynamo User Group is holding its first ever Dynamo Hackathon. Several members of the Dynamo and Refinery teams will be there, as well as yours truly (I’ll only be there on the 5th, though, as I have family commitments over the weekend). If you’d like to participate, you do need to move quickly: today (March 19th) is the last day that submissions will be accepted. (This deadline really crept up on me: I’ve been meaning to post about this for the last week or so, but was busy on other things…... Read more →

Building buzz

I’m on holiday with my family, this week, enjoying the Bernese Oberland with family and friends. In Toronto – where I’m heading next week – my team-mates are busy trying out the 2D path-finding component I talked about in the last post. Now that Simon Breslav has wrapped the C++ path-finding module created by Rhys Goldstein – building a .NET wrapper and using it from Dynamo – he’s started using it to implement a version of the “buzz” metric The Living used for Project Discover. Here’s a sneak peek of how it currently looks with one possible layout of... Read more →

Interested in space analysis for Dynamo and Refinery?

Over the last few weeks colleagues in Autodesk Research have been building the foundations for a space analysis package that can be used for generative design workflows in Dynamo. We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking it for a spin. But first, a little background… We’ve known we’ve needed to get better performance when analysing 2D and 3D spaces since embarking on the original layout of the new MaRS office in Toronto as part of Project Discover: the approach we had worked well – as I think is clear from the results of the project... Read more →

Using A-Frame to build a VR experience for Refinery

This week I decided to take the WebVR/WebXR extension work I did for Van Wijnen to the next level: mainly to integrate metric information in some way into the scene, whether as 3D text objects or via some kind of Heads-Up Display (HUD). But before embarking on this I decided to take another look at the implementation of the HTML client. When I first wrote the HTML page that consumes geometry data from the Refinery server, I decided to use raw JavaScript and WebVR/WebXR calls with three.js. I’d thought briefly about using A-Frame – an awesome framework started by... Read more →

(AU) London calling…

Some good news for people who thought they’d missed their chance to speak at this year’s Autodesk University in London: the Call For Proposals (CFP) for AU London 2019 has been extended until January 25th, 2019. I love Autodesk University events in general, but the London edition – which I attended for the first time in 2018 – is quickly becoming my favourite, venue-wise. Tobacco Dock is a fabulous place to hold an event, providing the weather gods are smiling. (Last year’s event was basically perfect, while the inaugural event in 2017 was very hot, apparently… and I can... Read more →

In Brugg

Today I’m back in the Swiss town of Brugg, to give a talk about Generative Design to a group of Masters students at the FHNW. (In case you don’t recognise the reference, the title of today’s post is a probably-overly-subtle nod to the Oscar-nominated, 2008 film “In Bruges”: Brugge is the Flemish name for Bruges, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Brugg has a similar derivation in Swiss German.) I first visited Brugg as we cycled along the Aare river last summer, and was invited back after presenting about Generative Design and Digital Twins at the... 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 →

Connecting Refinery to VR

It’s time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to Virtual Reality. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It’s not a complicated process, but... 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 →

An interview about generative design

While at Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas, my friend and co-presenter – Lorenzo Villaggi – and I were invited by Jacqueline Rohrmann – known to many of you as That BIM Girl – to talk to her (and her YouTube viewers) about generative design, and specifically the tool we helped create for Van Wijnen to perform generative urban design. I first met Jacqueline at the AEC Hackathon in Berlin, back in July: she was part of a team – That BIM Pineapples – that I mentored. I met her again in Darmstadt at the Forge DevCon, when she... Read more →

A short video about the MX3D smart bridge project

I’ve been having a lot of fun working on projects I can’t really blog about, this week – on the one hand hacking Refinery to add some new UI features I thought would be interesting to explore, and on the other hand working in Dynamo to make some architectural changes to the Van Wijnen tool – so I really haven’t had much time to blog about anything here. Hopefully I’ll have more to talk about during the last few weeks before the holidays. I did just want to publish this video created by my friend and colleague Merry Wang... Read more →

AU 2018 class recordings are now online

Like many of you (with some countries unfortunately having been excluded due to privacy regulations) I’ve just received an awesome customized video about this year’s Autodesk University. Here’s a link to the one I received, in case you didn’t get one yourself. I’m guessing they didn’t actually record a custom video – perhaps by training an infinite number of monkey videographers – to make this. Anyway – it was a great job, however it was done. The video was to announce a new web platform for AU content, including the recordings from this year’s event. Of my classes two... 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 →

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 →