Through the Interface

Project Rediscover is now available for download

I’m happy to announce that the recreation of Project Discover for Dynamo – what we’ve been referring to as Project Rediscover – is now available for download. I should point out that this is a first cut of the graph, and is definitely going to evolve over time: it’s a complex beast that uses advanced techniques – particularly on the metric calculation side of things – that we know we have to improve over time. But we did want to put this out there as an Alpha (or pre-Alpha) in advance of Autodesk University London 2019 to let people... Read more →

Dynamo and GD events in London and Toronto

There are some very interesting events scheduled for the coming weeks. Just prior to next week’s AU London 2019 – itself an event that will be heavy on content for computational and generative design, this year, including a talk by Lorenzo Villaggi and myself – there’s a Dynamo Day being hosted in London by the UK Dynamo User Group (or #UKDynUG) on Monday June 17th. There are four day-long workshop streams tailored for various needs… Dynamo Intro plus Geometry Dynamo Intro plus Data Dynamo Power Up Dynamo Dev Day … followed by an evening user group session with a... Read more →

Capturefinery is live on the Dynamo Package Manager!

(If you’re asking yourself “what’s Capturefinery?” then I suggest reading these posts first. TL;DR: Capturefinery is a tool for capturing screenshots of the various runs in a Refinery study and compiling them into animated GIFs for sharing via social media or including in customer presentations.) Firstly, a huge thank you to my partner in crime – and the first (so far only?) user of Capturefinery – Simon Breslav. He’s been kicking the tyres and giving very helpful feedback that has steered the development of this package. He very kindly tells me he likes it a lot – I hope... Read more →

More Capturefinery enhancements

I’m happy to announce that the Capturefinery package for Dynamo (and Refinery) is finally ready for posting to the package manager! My main misgivings – stopping me from posting it sooner – had been around the basic UX (fixed in the last update) and the fact that the tool requires (or required) the system to basically be dedicated to the capture operation. These have all now been addressed. Here are the enhancements I made today: The graphics are now captured via the Dynamo API, rather than via the OS (i.e. the screen) This means you can keep Dynamo minimised... Read more →

Capturefinery updated to help track down errors

I talked recently about a Dynamo view extension I created to capture presentation graphics (primarily animated GIFs) from the entries in the “hall of fame” of a particular Refinery study. This has been super-useful, internally, but not just for creating fancy graphics. Early on we realised that it was a great way to identify problems in Dynamo graphs: we could see the occasional error state (with the yellow text at the bottom left of the screen) flash past, indicating that a Dynamo run had completed with warnings and/or errors. Presumably the errors haven’t stopped the metrics from being evaluated... Read more →

Introducing Capturefinery, a Dynamo package that creates presentation graphics for Refinery studies

A few weeks ago I posted a GIF on Twitter that showed a few images from an earlier version of the Project Rediscover graph. I created this in a very manual, low-tech way: firstly, I selected a number of designs in Refinery, one-by-one, took a screenshot of each and then used GIMP to build an animated GIF. (This used to be very easy to do with previous versions of OS X, by the way: the Preview tool allowed you to drag images across into a GIF file and create new frames, and you could then use GIMP to adjust... Read more →

Parallel operations in Dynamo and Refinery

I’ve mentioned this topic a few times in recent weeks, so it was really time to sit down and put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). This one was a lot of fun to dig into, and I think the results will be of interest to people. Parallelism is something that I’ve been tracking since my studies during the 90s: I remember programming transputers using a programming language called occam, way back when. I was really happy when – around a decade ago – Microsoft got serious about tackling asynchrony and concurrency with F#’s Asynchronous Workflows and the... Read more →

Presentations and awards from the Dynamo and Generative Design Hackathon in London

A video of the final project presentations and the awards ceremony from the recent Dynamo and Generative Design Hackathon in London has been posted to YouTube by the UK Dynamo User Group. It’s a great way to get a sense of the various projects at the event, something a number of people have asked me about. I was only really there to help kick things off and answer initial questions about using Dynamo with Refinery to implement Generative Design workflows, so it’s fantastic to see how things ended up. If you have follow-on questions about the various projects, I... Read more →

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 →