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 →

Showcasing NEST at AU London 2019

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about the work we’re doing with Dynamo and Refinery – especially as it relates to our plan to share a version of the “Project Rediscover” graph at AU London 2019. But there’s more my team is hoping to be able to share in mid-June at Tobacco Dock: we’re working towards having a version of the NEST building – in particular the DFAB House, a showcase for digital fabrication in the building industry – inside Dasher 360. Ideally it’ll be displayed on a large touchscreen for people to interact with. [See below... Read more →

Autodesk’s Automotive Innovation Forum 2019

This is “one of those weeks”, with presentations in Munich on Wednesday, Barcelona on Thursday and London on Friday. I haven’t had a week like this since the old DevDays tours. The good old days! I arrived on Tuesday night at Munich Airport. Wednesday’s event was the Automotive Innovation Forum in Munich. It’s the first time I’ve attended this event, and it proved to be very interesting: around 560 automotive customers came to the Hilton at Munich Airport to learn about our automotive-related offerings (primarily Alias and VRED but also our generative design tools). The day opened with various... Read more →

The first Forge Accelerator in Dublin

Last week I thoroughly enjoyed a short week at the first Forge Accelerator in Dublin. (It was short – for me – because I arrived on Monday afternoon and headed home, already, at Thursday lunchtime.) It was only my second time ever to visit Ireland, but the second in just a few months, and my next trip across is already planned for June (if one doesn’t happen sooner). I was staying across the River Liffey from the office, and enjoyed the stroll across a convenient pedestrian bridge, even if the wind and harmonic resonance sometimes made me question the... Read more →

Adjusting zoom to fit in the Forge viewer

A question came up during this week’s Forge Accelerator in Dublin that I thought would be of broader interest. It related to the fact that the Forge viewer’s default behaviour when you double-click the background and perform a zoom-to-fit isn’t always desirable. In this case the developer was fine with a zoom-to-fit being performed, but felt the resultant view wasn’t a good enough fit. Here’s the default zoom level on double-click in Dasher 360, for instance: As you can see the model remains quite far from the camera. The good news is that debugging into the Forge viewer source,... Read more →

At the Forge Accelerator in Dublin

After having spent a great few days with the Toronto team, I headed home on Friday afternoon. I did have a little bit of “fun” getting home, though: firstly the UPExpress going from Union Station to Pearson Airport stopped – ostensibly waiting for the right signal – for about 30 minutes. It wasn’t a big deal for me, thankfully: I’d left some buffer in my schedule, so still had a little time to wait at the airport. While I did so, for some reason I checked my downloaded Netflix content… none of it played: I kept getting an obscure... Read more →

Join DevDays Online to learn what’s coming with Autodesk platform technology

There’s a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what’s coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It’s also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year’s DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don’t worry if that time’s inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk... Read more →

February Fun and March Madness

There’s a lot happening inside Autodesk at the beginning of our Fiscal Year 2020. FY20 has kicked off with a number of internal reorgs in various groups: as part of broader changes, the organisation to which I report – formerly known as OCTO (the Office of the Chief Technology Officer) is being renamed to Autodesk Research. Which is what’s been in my own title, anyway, as I belonged to the “research” arm of OCTO before the renaming. While I liked the name OCTO well enough (it brought plenty of opportunities to do cool things with octopuses ;-), I think... Read more →

Back at NEST

The week before last I headed across to Zurich for the day for meetings. During the afternoon I passed by the NEST building in Dübendorf – home of the DFAB House project – to meet with NEST’s Director, Reto Largo, and talk more about our plans to collaborate. To learn a bit more about what’s happening with this fantastic building, it’s worth checking out this session from AU 2018 in Las Vegas delivered by both Reto and Thomas Müller from Mensch und Maschine Schweiz. Our plan is to “Dasherize” the whole building, which has upwards of 2,000 sensors in... Read more →

The Forge Design Automation API now has (Beta) support for Revit

There’s great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge’s Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here’s an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors... 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 →

A visit to Kingspan in Dublin

This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan’s Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event... Read more →

A visit to Basler & Hofmann

Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They’re an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award,... 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 →

Catching up on the Autodesk University 2018 keynotes

Among other things, this week, I’ve been trying to kick-off my AU2018 catch-up viewing. So far I’ve just had the chance to fill in the keynotes that I missed, so I thought I’d collect those that I could find together for others to view. The first keynote of the Monday’s pre-conference events was that of Connect & Construct: Next up was that of the Forge DevCon. Very strangely (for me, anyway) I couldn’t attend this one in person, as I was presenting a Connect & Construct session at the same time. Of the main AU event, there was, of... 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 →

Generative design and IoT, a virtuous circle!

I really enjoy my job, these days (although frankly that’s been true for the majority of my career at Autodesk): I get to work on projects related to IoT (Dasher 360) and to generative design (using Dynamo + Refinery). This is a real privilege, because there’s a connection between the two that’s tangible and that will become more and more important. It’s that connection that I want to talk about today, as this week was the first time I’ve covered my two areas of focus in a single, in-depth presentation. On Wednesday afternoon I presented a keynote session at... 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 →

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 →

An update on my AU2018 classes

There’s just over a week to go before the craziest week of my year (i.e. Autodesk University) kicks off, once again. I’ve been heads-down preparing various slide-decks and handouts for the big event. Things are in reasonably good shape, but there’s still a bit of work left to do. I had a quick glance at the class list – mainly to make sure that I had the classes themselves in my calendar, before people start double-booking me for meetings – and I noticed the numbers of registrations: Here’s a list to the various classes with links so you can... Read more →