Through the Interface

Call for Proposals for AU 2019 in Las Vegas (and Germany)

Today the call for proposals opens for AU 2019 – and its accompanying Forge DevCon – in Las Vegas. I was informed of this fact by an email which very creepily contained a photo of me describing something or other with my hands. (Jeremy Tammik speculated that I was once again talking about zombies. :-) As one door opens, another one closes: this is also the last day you can submit classes for AU Germany and the Forge DevCon in Darmstadt. It’s important to note that AU Germany is a German-language event, while its DevCon is in English. Here... Read more →

Displaying metrics for the MaRS graph inside Dynamo and Refinery

The last few days have been a lot of fun, as some of you will have noticed on my Twitter or LinkedIn feeds. Since the last post, where I announced the fact we’ve been working on Project Rediscover, I’ve spent quite a bit of time reworking the graph to have more reusable chunks. Here’s a recent snapshot of the graph: In the last post, the subgraph that generates text for the metrics and the radar chart as geometry – both to the right of the image – was hardcoded to the exact metrics we were dealing with. To make... Read more →

Revisiting MaRS for AU London 2019

I’ve talked before about Project Discover: the project where The Living used generative design to explore layout options for the new Autodesk office in the MaRS district of Toronto. As the project was run before Project Refinery was available – and so didn’t make use of a Refinery-compatible graph – we’ve been working on a new iteration of the tool that can be used with the Autodesk GD toolset for AEC workflows (i.e. Dynamo + Refinery). Internally we’re affectionately referring to this project as Project Rediscover. Things are moving along well: thanks largely to the Space Analysis package (and... Read more →

Using Refinery to optimise a Dynamo graph using Space Analysis for pathfinding and visibility

As a follow-up to this recent post, I decided to add a couple of metrics to the previous graph and try it out with Refinery. And here’s the updated graph for you to try for yourselves. The first metric relates to the pathfinding capability, and I’ve called it “Access”. There are a few things going on, here: for sure we want to measure the shortest average path, but also to disqualify (or at least penalise) designs that don’t have paths to all of of our points of interest (i.e. the corners). But I also wanted to weight the results... Read more →

Dynamo Space Analysis and Revit 2020’s Path of Travel

Many of you will have been happy to see the extent of the features announced last week for Revit 2020. It’s great to see Dynamo 2.1 integrated, for instance: It seems the Dynamo version is being tied specifically to Revit, which is an interesting development. I assume this is driven by the need to manage complexity of end-user environment configuration, but I do wonder whether it will impact the ability for users to absorb changes delivered by the Dynamo team. But that’s the trade-off between control and flexibility, I suppose: we’ll see how it works out. In addition, the... Read more →

Using the Space Analysis package for pathfinding and visibility in Dynamo

I’ve been meaning to create a post introducing the use of the Space Analysis package for a few weeks, now, but with various trips it’s been impossible to find the time. Anyway, here it is, at last. You can start by downloading the graph we’ll be walking through in this post. Here’s a picture of the graph, with its graphics generated. The graph is fairly simple: it loads some geometry from an SAT file that we’ll use as the definition of our barriers for the SpaceLattice. I’m using an SAT file we posted with the campus layout example that... Read more →

A great video introduction to Project Refinery

Our friend in Munich, Jacqueline Rohrmann, has recorded a fantastic 24-minute introduction to Project Refinery and posted it to her YouTube channel under her That BIM Girl pseudonym: I really like the way Jacqueline steps through how to get started with Refinery, but also “does the math” and validates the results generated by Refinery for a simple example. Very cool. I’m hoping Jacqueline will find the time to take a look at our Space Analysis package for Dynamo and post a video on getting started with it: I’d love to see Jacqueline’s thoughts on the package, delivered in her... Read more →

The first Dynamo Hackathon

What. A. Week. The first day of the world’s UK Dynamo User Group’s first Hackathon was an appropriate way to finish off a hectic but super-rewarding week. [Correction: it seems I misunderstood something… there have been other Dynamo Hackathons, apparently. Sorry about that.] I woke up early, this morning, and took a stroll around Hyde Park. I checked out from my hotel, picking up my cufflinks, on the way. (In a random episode during check-in, the afternoon before, I’d lent them to a fellow hotel guest – who was dressed to the nines for a charity event but had... Read more →

Generative Design for AEC at OTx EMEA

It was a fun (and slightly hectic) 16 hours in Barcelona. After heading back to the hotel from the OTx awards dinner – and whipping out a quick blog post – I got up and enjoyed the view from the 26th floor for a few minutes… … before heading across to the last day of OTX (One Team eXtension) EMEA, and the second day of the Generative Design for AEC track. This second day was the first “mixed” track – meaning both sales- and technically-oriented, as the first day had been purely for technical attendees – so it started... Read more →

The Living vs. The Dead: using Generative Urban Design to prepare for the zombie apocalypse

Over the last few months I’ve been working with my colleagues in The Living to add important – but still slightly speculative – capabilities into the Generative Urban Design tool we’ve been working on for Van Wijnen. The opportunity presented itself back at Autodesk University 2018, when Lorenzo Villaggi and I were discussing the state of the world over a few beers. It seemed absolutely clear, from our perspective, that given where we are today – thinking about global politics, the climate and civil liberties – it seems inevitable that the next thing to hit will be the zombie... Read more →

Generative Design workshop for Sweco in Stockholm

On Wednesday morning I headed up to Stockholm to participate in a Generative Design workshop for Sweco. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Sweden, so it was a fun coincidence that I already had a little taste of the country as I took my train to Zurich airport from Neuchatel. IKEA Switzerland has a special vending machine moving between the larger Swiss railway stations as part of a promotional event. It was a bit of a shame the machine was out of order, but these things do happen. The flight to Stockholm Arlanda was uneventful, and... Read more →

Daily Dynamo Sandbox builds and Refinery v0.4.44

There’s a lot happening this week in the world of Generative Design for AEC at Autodesk. Aside from the Space Analysis package we announced, there’s interesting news from both the Dynamo and Refinery teams. The Dynamo team has kicked off their daily build process once again, this time focusing on Dynamo Sandbox builds. This is very interesting news for me, and probably for other people working on GD projects outside of Revit: I use Dynamo Sandbox to do the majority of my GD-related studies – usually by starting the executable found at %programfiles%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2\DynamoSandbox.exe that’s installed with Dynamo for... Read more →

The Space Analysis package for Dynamo and Refinery is now available!

As promised last week, Autodesk Research has now posted v0.2 of our Space Analysis package to the Dynamo Package Manager. This version contains nodes for pathfinding as well as for visibility analysis. Both implementations work via a common SpaceLattice object – basically a 2D grid with diagonal connections – that can be used to drive both algorithms. In reality you may end up having multiple lattices – as pathfinding may be working with “barriers” that don’t affect visibility – but the node you need to use is the same. We had posted a previous version with just pathfinding, but... Read more →

Sneak peek at pathfinding

A quick update before a larger unveiling next week… We’ve made solid progress with implementing the grid-based capabilities of the SpaceAnalysis package. All being well we should have an “official” version available early next week. This release will contain pathfinding – based on Djikstra’s shortest path algorithm, working on a grid with the size and resolution of your choice – as well as the ability to test visibility – using the same grid for an Isovist-like analysis. We have a version already posted via the Dynamo Package Manager (ssshhhh!), but we’ve gone through and rationalised a bunch of the... Read more →

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 →