Through the Interface

AU 2025 proposals, DevCon recording, Dynamo and Workshop XR updates

In Europe we’re about to celebrate the long Easter weekend, so things have been a little busy finishing up work in a number of areas, especially as soon after I’ll be heading across to the US for the rest of the month. I managed to submit two Autodesk University 2025 proposals - let’s hope that at least one of them gets accepted. I was also (apparently) the first DevCon presenter to record their session ahead of next month’s event. I’m very happy to have gotten that one out of the way before my travels. I haven’t had time to... Read more →

Neuroscience, getting roads from Forma and following them with VASA

After a relatively quiet winter season - I’ve had a few trips to the UK and Italy, but nothing too hectic - things are about to get much more busy. Looking at my calendar I see trips to Italy and the UK again, but also trips to Boston, L.A. and SF (thankfully all in one trip) and others to Amsterdam and Toronto. And it’s only going to get busier. I’m actually really lucky to have been able to attend the Neuroscience and Design class during this period: only one of the 12 sessions looks like it’s going to be... Read more →

Managing meshes with the Forma API

Last week I spent quite a bit of time on the slopes snowboarding, but mostly in the mornings: I was back working at my computer in the afternoons. And while the mornings weren’t meant to be spent working, I actually found that some of my best ideas came to me while sitting on a chair-lift. One such idea was around efficient mesh management inside Forma. We’ve been working on a prototype web-based multi-agent simulation system where the results are displayed in either Forma or Tandem. This will form much of what I'll talk about in my session at the... Read more →

Learn about combining APS and WebAssembly at Autodesk DevCon Europe

While at the time of writing I’m not yet on the official speaker list, I’m happy to say that I will be presenting a session at the Autodesk DevCon that’s being held in Amsterdam from May 20th-21st, 2025. I’ll also be attending the Dynamo Hackathon on May 19th as a warm-up. My session is entitled “Supercharge your browser-based APS applications with WebAssembly” and will explore how you can take C++ libraries and build them into WebAssembly modules to bring impressive capabilities to your browser-based Autodesk Platform Services applications. Over the last few years I’ve spent quite a bit of... Read more →

Hackathons in Zurich and (soon) Amsterdam

On Friday I did my annual (well, it’s actually only the second time, but I get the feeling it’s becoming annual) trip to Winterthur for the Friday-night kick-off of this year’s AEC Hackathon Zürich. The focus of the first set of Friday afternoon talks was on the wood industry and its challenges - a fascinating topic to hear about first-hand. I was actually more interested by the second set of talks, which were focused on digitalization challenges, including a really nice session by Michael Drobnik from Herzog & de Meuron. As last year there were lots of hackers present,... Read more →

AU 2024 Days 0 and 1

On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn’t start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ;-) in future. Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat... Read more →

Gearing up for AU 2024

We’re once again in the craziness before the storm (hmm - wasn’t there meant to be some calm?!?) that is Autodesk University. Requests for meetings are gradually filling up calendars… from my side it’s looking like another busy (but very fun) event. As a reminder, here are the classes that I’ll be part of, in some capacity this year. The class on extending Forma - where I’m co-speaking - has the slides and handout posted, in case you want to check it out ahead of time. In anticipation of this year's event (and the chance to connect with academic... Read more →

5 awesome VASA project ideas for the AU2024 Dynamo Hackathon

[My apologies for the click-baity title. I do actually have a list of 5 cool project ideas, if you scroll down the post. So it’s not completely dishonest, at least.] In the last post I mentioned a few classes you can sign up for (and that I’m directly or indirectly involved in) from the Tuesday to Thursday of the AU2024 week (October 15th-17th) in San Diego. I now have something to recommend for the Monday of that week, too! In the past we’ve often had pre-events at AU2024: I wasn’t sure whether there would be one this year or... Read more →

Sign up for AU2024 classes today! Here are some suggestions.

The class catalog for Autodesk University 2024 has been live for a week or two already, with attendees being able to bookmark sessions ahead of the ability to enroll fully. Well, today’s the day that enrollment opens properly, so have at it! Classes often fill up quickly, so doing it sooner can certainly be better than waiting. I also have a few suggestions if you’re at a loss for what to choose. These are all classes that I or my research team are involved in, of course. That’s just how things work around here. :-) It turns out there’s... Read more →

Using web workers to run intensive browser-side analyses in Autodesk Forma

The topic for this post relates to a project I’ve been working on for a few weeks, now. We’ve taken a complex set of spatial analyses - that use our favourite voxel-based architectural space analysis Dynamo package, VASA - and have translated them to work directly in the browser. (This translation process isn’t really the subject of this series, but it’s pretty interesting, nonetheless, and it’s mostly what I was working on during the recent trip to Munich for the DevCon. Most of the Dynamo code was fairly easy to translate, although things like the automatic lacing of nodes... Read more →

Combining a translucent VASA visibility cone with intersecting Forma geometry

A very quick update on my holiday “fun”. After a bit of work I managed to combine two VASA voxel models - one for the visibility cone and one for its intersection with Forma’s site surroundings, something we saw last time - into a single Forma mesh. You can hopefully see that the performance is very decent, and the translucent, fog-like effect of the cone to be a reasonable visual complement to the intersection area. I ended up going through the extra effort to combine them both into a single mesh - putting the vertices together as well as... Read more →

Intersecting VASA's visibility cones with the surroundings inside Forma

This week I’m up in the mountains with my family. It’s my younger children’s winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some... Read more →

More work on VASA inside Forma

This week I’ve been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the “proposal” being developed. For the Hackathon I’d hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it’s possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data:... Read more →

My VASA demo from this week's Forma Hackathon

I’m now back from Oslo, and decided to record the demo I delivered there at the end of the Forma Hackathon (or something approximating it, as I used twice as much time as we were each allocated on the day). Here’s a photo shared by the event organizers of me talking: Here’s the video I recorded this morning: As I mentioned at the end of the video, the capabilities I’ve demoed inside this Forma extension could also be implemented using Dynamo for Forma. That’s probably something I’ll blog more about, at some point, if there’s enough interest. Read more →

Forma Hackathon in Oslo

On Monday I headed to Zurich airport with our eldest son to hop across to Oslo. He’s between semesters at Uni - waiting for his exam results to trickle in - and it’s great we’re getting the chance to get a change of air for a few days. It’s rare that I sit in a window seat, so I was sure to capture the view as we left Zurich... … and arrived in snowy Oslo. The weather had impacted our trip very slightly - a 30-minute delay to our 2-hour flight - but we were still happy to touch... Read more →

Come and build a Forma extension in Oslo

Happy New Year to everyone reading this blog. I hope that those of you who had time off enjoyed it to the max: I certainly did. Mixing metaphors gratuitously, I’m now back in the saddle and trying hard to get my head back in the game. Here’s a fun topic to get the year started: Håvard Høiby from the Forma team has posted about an event that’s coming up in Oslo from February 13-14, 2024. It’s called an Extendathon: a public Hackathon (although if you want to treat it like an APS Accelerator and work on your own company’s... Read more →

AU 2023 class materials: Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo

The recordings and other materials prepared for the two classes I helped present at AU 2023 are now available online. In today’s post I’ll point you to the first class, entitled "Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo". This one was one of the first sessions of AU 2023, and had a very good crowd in attendance. Here are a few photos from the live session. Thanks again to Fernando Malard for snapping them. I already posted a quick summary of the content (without audio) - here that is again. Here is the material posted for... Read more →

Using VASA with Forma - Part 3

I was sure this series was finished - as indicated in the last post which talked about both VASA’s pathfinding and visibility from a point inside Forma, after having talked about a manual approach for connecting the two tools - but I did leave the door ajar to me finding something else to talk about on this topic. Sure enough, I got thinking about the missing “big ticket” item that VASA is able to implement with relatively low effort: visibility from a direction (as opposed to from a point) which can simulate things like shadows cast by direct sunlight.... Read more →

Using VASA with Forma - Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at an approach for exporting Forma geometry to an STL file that can be loaded into Dynamo and analysed using VASA, our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit. The overall goal is to be able to use VASA for urban-scale analysis of the site context. (Later on I hope we’ll also be able to work with more detailed architectural geometry as the level of detail in Forma evolves.) In that post I also alluded to something that’s coming soon which will streamline the above workflow: you’ll hear more about that at... Read more →

Using VASA with Forma - Part 1

While preparing for one of my upcoming AU classes, I decided to explore how someone could use VASA - our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit - with Forma. Right now Forma is largely focused on conceptual design - taking into account the surrounding urban context - so this thinking was largely focused on how VASA might be used at the urban scale. This is something we’ve looked at before in the context of FormIt and Dynamo. While a tighter integration is likely to be possible at some point - I’ll talk a little more about our work on a... Read more →