Through the Interface

Welcome to 2019, the year of Generative Design

Happy New Year! I’ve just come back online after a wonderful (and much-needed) 2-week break. I hope those of you who were lucky enough to get time off at this time of year made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time with your loved ones. (I will admit that since the beginning of this year I’ve been spending a little time working on a really fun side project, so I can’t say I’ve disconnected completely… but more on this later. :-) As I don’t really have an image to accompany this post, here’s a quick... 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 →

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 →

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 →

Realtime visualization of sensor data from the MX3D bridge

We hit a major milestone with our research into smart infrastructure, this week. After a massive push over the last 3-4 weeks (which in itself was built on work done over several years), we were able to deploy a system that measures – and reports in realtime – the performance and usage of the world’s first 3D-printed steel bridge. To give you a quick sense of some of the results of this work, here’s an image of Dasher 360 showing the 3D model of the bridge with skeletons walking across it with the bridge’s accelerometer readings displayed as a... Read more →

The MX3D bridge at Dutch Design Week

On Sunday I flex across to Amsterdam, once again, this time to take the train down to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. Alex Tessier and Michael Lee – colleagues who had barely recovered from the last trip across before coming back to help the project with one last big push – had arrived a few days before me. When we got to the bridge – on oversized cycles borrowed from the hotel but clearly intended for giants – the sky was still a little overcast. Alex and Mike got cracking on fixing some stray sensors and connectors. Our “home”... Read more →

Digital robot twins

This week I spent quite a bit of time talking to people about digital twins that include skeletons and robots. For skeletons I’ve been working off real data from static JSON files – not yet time-series database-resident – but for robots I’ve just been relying on simulated movements. Until today, that is. Josh Cameron, an Autodesk Research colleague in Toronto, sent through a video he took of a robot while streaming its data to our time-series back-end. This helped me interpret the data (reasonably) correctly, at least for a first pass. You’ll notice the virtal robot is a different... Read more →

Forge DevCon Europe

It’s been a whirlwind few days. The trip up to Darmstadt on Monday went relatively smoothly: I had to take four trains to get there, and only missed one connection (the one in Frankfurt, but thankfully I could hop on another train and arrive just 10 minutes later than planned). Still, the nearly 6 hours of train passed reasonably smoothly. After arriving in Darmstadt I met with Sander Lijbers and Tony Thuy, who’d organised to host some customers from the Netherlands. We went for dinner at a nice restaurant serving local food. When in Germany, eat schnitzel! It was... Read more →

Coming to a Forge DevCon in the US or Europe? It turns out I’ll be talking at both!

Well, this just happened: after having had three generative design-related classes accepted for AU 2018 (well, really two were accepted and one ended up getting a repeat slot at the Connect & Construct pre-conference), I wasn’t due to talk about anything I’ve been doing lately with the Forge viewer. Which frankly was a shame, because between robots, skeletons and streamlines, as feel as though I’ve got lots of fun stuff to share, at the moment. That was until yesterday, when I got pinged by Stephen Preston (for the US DevCon) and Cyrille Fauvel (for the European one), to ask... Read more →

Adding smarts to the MX3D bridge

I’ve spent most of this week in Amsterdam with colleagues from the Toronto office. Our group descended on the MX3D offices in the funky NDSM wharf area of the city, to make a big push and help get the world’s first robotically 3D-printed steel bridge – and its supporting systems – ready for Dutch Design Week. Most of the team stayed in a hotel right next to MX3D, but we did get the chance to take the ferry across to “the mainland” (it isn’t really: everything is connected, it just seems that way) from time to time. It was... Read more →

When in Rome

It’s been a great few days in Rome, at the Forge team’s first ever Roman accelerator. Things kicked off on Monday morning, as we occupied the conference room at Rimond’s office in Rome’s Trastevere district. As is usual at these events, there are a number of companies doing really interesting things: several of them have specifically mentioned Dasher 360 as their inspiration for visualizing additional (even IoT) data in the Forge viewer. Very cool. Yesterday I joined Peter Schlipf to visit Roma Tre University, where we spent some time with Stefano Converso from the Architectural Design department, as well... Read more →

Displaying streamlines in the Forge viewer

The integration of the MeshLine library into the Forge viewer – which we’re using for the display of skeleton data, as we saw last time – has opened the door to displaying all kinds of other cool stuff. Back in 2014 colleagues in Autodesk Research published a SimAUD paper entitled “Towards Visualization of Simulated Occupants and their Interactions with Buildings at Multiple Time Scales”. It explored the use of various visualization techniques to display how a building’s simulated occupants interact with it. One of these techniques was called Speedlines (we also use the term Streamline): The original visualizations were... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 3

Right then… now it’s time for the really fun stuff. Looking back over this series of posts, we introduced it then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons and animated skeletons with fixed meshes attached. Today we’ll dig into making our animated skeletons properly visible. Having given up on using a SkinnedMesh, the remaining option was to tweak the underlying display of the SkeletonHelper object. This proved challenging for all sorts of reasons. Back in Chrome 55, it seems the ability to show lines with widths broke in three.js. This was fixed in... Read more →

Don’t miss these sessions at the Forge DevCon in Las Vegas

The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what’s possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I’m involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I’m co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. ;-)... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 2

We introduced the series, then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons. Now it’s time to look at approaches for making these skeletons more visible. As mentioned last time, today’s post is a bit of a “non-post”: it talks about adding a SkinnedMesh to be animated alongside an underlying skeleton, which we already know doesn’t currently work inside the Forge viewer. But it’s instructive to see the process in case either the situation changes or someone wants the code for a pure three.js application. Basically it’s possible to add a SkinnedMesh into a... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 1

After introducing the series and seeing how we can add simple vertex and edge geometry to a scene, today we’re going to start digging into the guts of the problem of how to display skeletons in the Forge viewer. This proved to be a really interesting process: I ended up learning a lot about how the Forge viewer and the three.js library it uses both work. I don’t recall the full history of the Forge viewer’s use of three.js, but recent releases have all depended on r71. This can present challenges, largely because three.js is (at the time of... Read more →

Adding 3D geometry to a scene in the Forge viewer

In the last post I introduced the series where I’ll be talking about the journey I’ve been going through to add skeletion data inside Dasher 360 (which is, of course, based on the Forge viewer). The first step I took along this path was to find a way to add simple 3D geometry into an existing scene inside the viewer. This is something we do in a limited way inside Dasher – we use point clouds to represent the locations of sensors, for instance – but I wanted to work out the right approach for doing this for data... Read more →