Through the Interface

A major update to Dasher 360; now showing the NEST building

Today’s a big day: Dasher360.com has been updated to let you browse the model and data coming from Empa’s amazing NEST building in Zürich, Switzerland. Head on over and give it a try! Here’s a quick video introducing the new Dasher 360 (you can also access this from the main Dasher 360 page): Expect the model to improve, over time: we want to include a few additional units – such as the Urban Mining & Recycling unit – as well as increase the number of sensors and remove a few visual artifacts. But in all honesty it’s already super-cool,... Read more →

Ramping up for Autodesk University 2019

The summer is pretty much over (boo) so it’s now time to start thinking about AU (yay). If nothing else it’s a welcome distraction from the craziness of UK politics (which I’m following from Switzerland, making it presumably slightly less intense than it is for most of my fellow Brits). Before getting more into specific AU plans, a quick reminder that registration for AU 2019 – and the Forge DevCon that precedes it – is open. The Monday pre-conference (this year’s is on November 18th) is always chock full of great information: I’m very much looking forward to attending... Read more →

NEST and ETH Zurich

At the beginning of this week I headed back across to the fine city of Zürich for a couple of days. My first port of call on Monday morning was to the NEST building on Empa’s Dübendorf campus. (I’ve talked about NEST many times in the past, as we have an ongoing project to host its digital twin using Dasher 360.) Arriving at the building it was exciting to see the building covered with scaffolding, as the work has started to build the HiLo roof. Here’s the breakdown of NEST’s units by floor. HiLo is accessible via the 3rd... Read more →

Registration is open for the Forge DevCon and AU 2019

Yesterday the registration for the Forge DevCon and Autodesk University 2019 in Las Vegas opened. It’s also the time speakers can find out when their classes our scheduled: it’s always with a little apprehension that I find myself checking the schedule. I’m pretty happy with the slots I have, this year, though: As you can see my sessions are both at 10:30am, one on Wednesday November 20th and the other on Thursday November 21st. Which means I should largely be over my jetlag by the time I have to present, which is always good. Although I may well be... Read more →

A Residency, a Hackathon and some time off

If I’d been anywhere else over the last few weeks, it would certainly have been the fine city of Toronto. The first GD for AEC Intensive Residency hosted there wrapped up, with a number of interesting outcomes generated. One has been shared by Isaac Seah on LinkedIn, and it’s well worth looking into the details of how they used Generative Design via Refinery and Dynamo to explore increasing resilience of coastal cities in the face of climate change. It’s very interesting stuff. Then there was another GD and Dynamo Hackathon held there, once again with the support of Radu... Read more →

Back in Amsterdam

On Tuesday I flew across to Schipol airport for another Generative Design-heavy few days in Amsterdam: I’d been asked to deliver a keynote as part of a multi-day meeting between Autodesk’s account team and Arup’s strategic sourcing team. The focus of the presentation was primarily Generative Design with additional information regarding Digital Twins (and specifically MX3D). It was a very nice day, flying out of Zurich. I had a window seat (with a clean window!) for once, so took some photos on take-off and landing. There was lots of farmland at both ends of the trip: the big difference... Read more →

Upgrading to Forge viewer v7.0

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’d spent some of my time at the Forge Accelerator in Barcelona migrating the Dasher 360 codebase to work with v7.0 of the Forge viewer. This version of the viewer does have breaking changes – all of which should be documented in Jaime’s blog post – but I thought it worth listing the changes that affected us in a post of my own. The first big change we had to deal with – and this one was pervasive, albeit easy to handle – was the promotion of GuiViewer3D from the Private namespace... Read more →

A quick update on various projects

Things are heating up in the Systems Research team (and not just because it’s summertime). I’ve been digging into the Dasher 360 codebase, this week, to add better support for “equipment” sensors – which have multiple sensors and data feeds coming off them for a single unit – particularly with respect to tooltips. As an example, here’s a ubertooltip summarising recent data coming off a Mazak 5-axis mill in our Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Birmingham. There are devices in the AMF that have more sensors – up to 60, in fact – but those feeds were less visually interesting... Read more →

This year's Forge Accelerator in Barcelona

This week I had a quick trip to attend this year’s Barcelona Forge Accelerator. This year the event started on Tuesday – on Monday it was the festival of San Juan – so I arrived “fashionably late” at the end of Tuesday morning. Just in time to pop down to the beach to have lunch with current and former colleagues. For some reason I end up staying in a different hotel every time I come to Barcelona. This time it was the SB Diagonal Zero, which is just across the street from the Princess (where I stayed for OTx).... Read more →

AU London 2019

It’s been a crazy (but very cool) few days here in the UK and Ireland. It started with the pre-event (or perhaps the pre-pre-event) of the annual Autodesk football tournament in Dublin. We didn’t win, but we had an absolute blast. I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s event in Barcelona! On Sunday a group of us flew from Dublin into Heathrow: the others headed directly into town, while I stopped at a friend’s for dinner in Windsor. Heading into town, later on, I saw a message from Jaime Rosales: the Circle & District lines were completely closed, so... Read more →

Voting for AU 2019 class proposals (including mine)

Now that the dust has settled on the Call for Proposals process for AU 2019 – and its accompanying Forge DevCon – in Las Vegas, you can vote for your favourite sessions. Here’s a blog post on the Forge site explaining how to do so for Forge classes. I’ve submitted two, this year. The first is about how Forge developers can build their own products using components we’re publishing from the Dasher 360 codebase. You can find the class by searching for “Dasher”, even if the class is about more than that. Here’s the text for this first proposal:... 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 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 →

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 →

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 →