Through the Interface

Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation

Rhys Goldstein, an Autodesk Research colleague with whom I’ve had the great pleasure of collaborating on various projects, over the years, has written an excellent explainer article that has just been published in Towards Data Science. This is intended as a companion to our paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, something I talked about in this recent post. Firstly, though, a quick shout-out to Zach Kron, who kindly allowed an image of one of his watercolours to be used in the article; one he created with the help of Dynamo and the Space Analysis package, which... Read more →

Come and see the 5m Dar Smart Bridge at Autodesk University 2022

In a recent post I hinted at a really impressive project that is being unveiled today in the exhibit hall of AU 2022. (My involvement was as usual pretty minor, primarily relating to data visualization, while the really impressive work was around designing and printing it.) The project is a 5 metre long single-cantilevered (in terms of the printing – it’s supported at both ends when in use) smart bridge, 3D-printed from recycled PETG and glass fibre in our Boston Technology Center for Dar. Here’s a video shared via LinkedIn that describes the project and a photo of Steve... Read more →

Human-centric building design

In a recent post, I mentioned that I’ve been asked to help lead our efforts in a particular area of research. I was deliberately vague at the time. Now, with Autodesk University 2022 around the corner, it seems a good time to say more about this. I hope it stimulates some interesting discussions at the event. As a company, one of Autodesk’s core interests is to enable the design and creation of healthier, safer, more resilient spaces. We want to explore tools for designers and architects that help them create buildings with more attention to the occupants. In the... Read more →

Some exciting enhancements in Dynamo 2.15

Dynamo 2.15 was released into the wild, last Thursday (at least via Dynamo Core, if not yet Dynamo for Revit), and as Sol Amour says in his blog post, it is “an absolutely epic release”. I’d seen it flash by, but only sat up to take proper notice when Sol pinged me on Twitter to mention that includes capabilities inspired by Warnamo, a package I wrote to help keep track of warnings and errors in Dynamo. So I decided to dig into some of the new features – a great resource for this being the habitually comprehensive Dynamo release... Read more →

A paper on our space analysis algorithm in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

I’m very happy to share the news that a paper authored by current and former members of Autodesk Research has been published in the open access Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). The paper is entitled “Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation” and talks in depth about the algorithm developed to power the Space Analysis package for Dynamo. Here’s the paper’s abstract, to tickle your fancy: Counting the number of shortest paths on a grid is a simple procedure with close ties to Pascal’s triangle. We show how path counting can be used to select relatively direct grid paths for... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →

Three AU proposals to vote for and a deadline reminder

It’s the last few days to submit your class proposals for Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans. The Call for Proposals closes on April 15th. I’ve now submitted three classes, myself, and would greatly appreciate you voting for the one(s) you would like to see part of the event. This is whether you intend on being there in-person in New Orleans or not: the vast majority of classes will either be livestreamed or recorded and made available on-demand for virtual attendees. Here they are. Voting is open until April 25th. Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Building Digital Twins... Read more →

BIM World Paris 2022

On Monday I hopped onto the train to Geneva and from there onto the TGV to Paris Gare de Lyon. I was in Paris for BIM World, where we displayed the Dar 2m Smart Bridge. It was my first time seeing the bridge in person, which was a really exciting moment for me. After checking into a very nice little hotel in the 6th arrondissement I headed to the conference centre to help with the setup. The bridge was already unboxed and hooked up when I arrived. Pete Storey had some wires to connect to get it up and... Read more →

Vote on my (and others') AU 2022 class proposals

I’ve gone ahead and submitted two class proposals for Autodesk University 2022. If you think they should be part of this year’s event, I’d certainly appreciate you voting for them: Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Autodesk Research first created the Space Analysis toolkit - and its accompanying Dynamo package - to support 2D generative design workflows such as those used during Project Discover for the architectural layout of Autodesk's Toronto office. VASA - short for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis - takes these techniques to the next level, allowing the geometric exploration of architectural spaces in 3D for activities... Read more →

A video on using sample points for pathfinding and sensor placement with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has now published Part 5 in his video series on using VASA. In it, Rhys walks through the latest two samples that come with VASA 0.2.0, one of which I talked a bit about in a recent post. Both samples make use of sample points – one in the context of aggregating path information, while the other uses them (as we’ve seen) for sensor placement. Both workflows have significant potential for use in the context of generative design – something I hope to dig into at some point in another post. Hopefully you’ll find this video –... Read more →

Placing sensors and evaluating their coverage using VASA

Last week I mentioned the release of VASA 0.2.0, which includes some new nodes and samples that raise some really interesting possibilities. I couldn’t help but come back to the “sensor coverage” sample (named 12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn), in particular, as I can see so many possibilities for its use. Here’s the description Rhys Goldstein included in the sample: A demonstration of how to combine sample point generation and proximity operations to select locations on walls and ceilings using the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. In this example, the locations are used to place sensors and approximate their coverage. First, sample... Read more →

VASA 0.2.0 is now available

Rhys Goldstein has been busy implementing some new features in the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. I’ve just published a new version to the Dynamo Package Manager containing the following enhancements: Added "PathModel.GenerateSamplePoints" and "DistanceField.GenerateSamplePoints", which generate sample points according to an approximate spacing parameter. Added proximity operations ("NearestFilledAlongX", "NearestFilledAlongY", "NearestFilledAlongZ", and "NearestFilledHorizontally"), which find the filled voxel nearest to a point. Added special operations ("AutoCrop", "AutoSplit", "DensityMap", "DensityMapWithWeights"), which automatically crop, split, and create density maps from voxel models. Added new examples ("11-VASA-Path-Density.dyn" and "12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn"), which demonstrate the new features. Fixed a bug in the fill from... Read more →

A video on visibility and daylight analysis with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the third part of his video series introducing capabilities of the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package for Dynamo. This part focuses on how VASA can perform visibility and daylighting analyses. Here’s an animation showing some of topics covered: And here’s the video itself: We’re taking a break from this series now until the New Year, when Rhys will be sharing a walkthrough of the remaining VASA samples. Read more →

An interview and an anniversary

Recently Mayur Mistry from Engineering ArchiTECHure asked me to join him for a YouTube livestream. Mayur often holds his interviews over the weekend, but he very kindly accommodated my schedule and held the session during the week. So while it was “live”, it wasn’t at the usual time for Mayur’s subscribers and the discussion remained very much between the two of us. I’ve seen some really good sessions on his channel – several of his guests have prepared extensive material to show – so my apologies if you’re expecting something more formal: we just chatted for an hour. Many... Read more →

Using VASA with FormIt via Dynamo – Part 2

In the last post we looked at using VASA from within Dynamo for FormIt to solve mazes generated by a cool plugin created by Brett from the FormIt team. The Dynamo graph we saw used VASA in “3D mode” – where the voxel height is higher than 1 – but that came with the added need to create a floor for the maze (something that isn’t too hard, as we know the exact dimensions and location of the maze). In today’s post we’re looking at how VASA might be used to perform pathfinding operations at the urban scale, taking... Read more →

A video on pathfinding with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has published the second part of his informative video series on using the VASA (Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis) package with Dynamo. The first part was an overall introduction to the package while this part dives into pathfinding, taking a close look at samples that show how it might be used in both 2D and 3D. While the overall video is really interesting – some of you might find it a bit long at 43 minutes but it’s quite watchable at 2X and is packed full of useful information – one of the sections that stood out for... Read more →

A video introduction to VASA

Rhys Goldstein, the researcher behind our 2D and 3D Space Analysis toolkits, has recorded a great video introduction to VASA (an acronym for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis). It steps through how to install the VASA package inside Dynamo and then create a simple voxelisation of Dynamo geometry. Rhys also shows how to load and run the samples provided with the package, and takes some time to step through – and then dissect – the main overview sample. Here it is: If you don’t have time to spend 23 minutes watching a video, it should be quite watchable at higher... Read more →

Introducing VASA, a tool for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis

I’ve been hinting about this for a few weeks now, but today is (very excitingly) the day for the big unveiling. My colleague Rhys Goldstein has been working his magic, once again, taking the algorithms he developed for the 2D Space Analysis package and applying them to 3-space. If you were impressed by Space Analysis, what we’re showing now may just knock your socks off. The new package is called VASA, which stands for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis. It’s available today for download from the Dynamo Package Manager. It’s worth unpacking a couple of terms, here: voxel-based means VASA... Read more →

A minor update to Space Analysis (2D), and getting ready for 3D!

This week I’ve been getting my Revit installation working again – it had been a while since I’d used it, and it was overdue an upgrade from 2021 to 2022 – mainly because I have to publish a couple of new packages (or package versions) to the Dynamo Package Manager. The first is a minor update to the Space Analysis package, taking it from version 0.3.3 to version 0.4.0. There is a breaking change, however, in that people using the Visibility nodes from Python may have to modify their code to use the correct (newly added) namespace. We only... Read more →

Dynamo 2.12, MaRS v3 and the future of Space Analysis

The latest update to Dynamo Core (which for now you can use via Dynamo Sandbox) has some really interesting enhancements, both in terms of usability and performance. Check out Sol Amour’s two blog posts that introduce Dynamo Core 2.12. As it had been a while since I’d tried the MaRS graph in a new drop of Dynamo, I went ahead and loaded it. I immediately noticed a couple of things: it was referencing an old, now-deprecated version of the Solar Analysis package, so I updated to the latest & greatest version on my system and then reloaded the graph... Read more →