Through the Interface

Forge skeletons and disappearing signs

It’s been a strange few days. It’s the very last week anyone will be working from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. This really hit home when the Autodesk name and logo were removed from the building, last Friday. Photo credit: Estelle Ormrod I salvaged an A (the were signs on the front and back of the building, so this wasn’t the only one) for my daughter’s bedroom. It’ll be some kind of reminder of the wonderful years we’ve all spent here. The staff departures have been staggered, over the last 6 months or so: there have been leaving aperos for people... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct 2018

Last Thursday registration opened for the latest edition of Autodesk University and its pre-conference events, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct. I’ve just gone ahead and registered: I’ll arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday November 10th (to give myself a fighting chance of handling my jetlag before things kick off properly on Monday the 12th) and head home on the Thursday evening. My classes, this year, fall during the pre-conference and the first day of AU proper, which is nice, especially as it means you won’t need a full AU pass to attend (you can find pricing of Monday... Read more →

AEC Hackathon Berlin 2018

I’ve just arrived back from Berlin, which I was primarily visiting for this year’s German AEC Hackathon (last year’s was in Munich, which I attended briefly in the weeks leading up to our big trip). I was there with my family, and we had a great time visiting the city when I wasn’t needed at the Hackathon. Let’s start with a few tourist shots. On Thursday we visited a few places, such as the Holocaust Memorial… … and the Berlin Cathedral, which was beautiful inside but had stunning views across the city from its roof. We were staying with... Read more →

A visit to the MTC

On Sunday night I hopped back across to Birmingham airport in the UK in order to visit the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry on Monday. The weather has been gorgeous in the UK for the last month or more, so everything was a little parched. That, in combination with the fact England was still in the running for the World Cup, meant the country seemed imbued with optimism: seemingly welcome respite from the Brexit-related anguish the UK has been suffering since the EU referendum. After a nice dinner with old friends and a quick sleep at a hotel,... Read more →

Class recordings from AU London 2018 are now available online

The class recordings from this year’s Autodesk University held in London’s Tobacco Dock are now available for your viewing pleasure. Here’s the recording of the class I presented: If you’re interested in going a little deeper into the technical aspects of how we’ve used Autodesk’s Forge platform in Dasher 360, then I recommend watching this class from the Forge DevCon at AU 2017 in Las Vegas, where my colleague Simon Breslav presented similar material – but with greater depth – for an audience made up primarily of developers: We have a number of ongoing projects related to Dasher 360,... Read more →

Just a few weeks until the AEC Hackathon in Berlin

On July 20-22, 2018 I’ll be attending the AEC Hackathon in Berlin. Here’s some information about the event: The AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) Hackathon is a weekend of geeking at its finest. It gives those designing, building and maintaining our built environment, the opportunity to engage, collaborate and interact on multiple aspects of the building industry. Not all built environment professionals have to code or have much background with tech. Just come with your knowledge, an open mind, collaborative spirit, and willingness to solve Mon-Fri problems leveraging various kinds of technology. We’ve shaped an exhilarating Program on Robotics,... Read more →

AU classes and Forge events

I’m on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there’s a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted... Read more →

Migrating Dasher 360 to use the Forge viewer v4.2 - Part 1

Over the last few days I’ve been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance. To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here’s what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher... Read more →

Checking out the world’s first 3D printed steel bridge at MX3D in Amsterdam

In a recent post I mentioned a trip to Amsterdam to visit with Van Wijnen and MX3D. The press embargo has now lifted on MX3D’s bridge – as you can see from a slew of recent articles – so I can now share a bit more information about that part of the visit. During that week I spent 2.5 days at MX3D, mostly to participate in discussions about how best to instrument the bridge with sensors. Autodesk started our collaboration with MX3D around the vision of using generative design for the creation of the bridge’s form… during the last... Read more →

Beyond BIM: adding campus or city views to Dasher 360

Those of you who have followed the progress on Dasher 360 will be aware that it currently works with a single building (or other) model. It’s always been our intention to go “Beyond BIM” (both in terms of addressing the needs of other industries but also scaling up to look at sites and cities) but over the last few weeks we’ve made a big push, making our first real forays into this new territory. Here’s a sneak peek at a campus view in Dasher 360 that integrates an additional Forge viewer control (this might also use a 3D mapping... Read more →

Blown away in Amsterdam

I was a little torn about my plans for this week: the Forge team is running a packed Accelerator in Munich, so it would have been great to have spent my week over there. As it happened I ended up coming to the Netherlands, instead, to meet with two incredibly innovative companies, Van Wijnen and MX3D. Despite missing the Accelerator the timing was actually pretty ideal: it proved possible to spend a day and a half with Van Wijnen at Autodesk’s office in Hoofddorp before coming into the city to join some of my Autodesk colleagues – Alex Tessier,... Read more →

A visit to Autodesk’s Advanced Manufacturing Facility in the UK

I didn’t think, on Monday, that I’d be visiting the UK this week. So it came as a surprise that on Tuesday I ended up buying a flight to head across to Birmingham on Wednesday, coming back Friday. You’re probably thinking, “ouch, that must have been expensive!” – which was exactly my expectation, looking into flights – but it turns out that at this time of year (probably due to the demand from skiers) EasyJet runs daily flights between Geneva and Birmingham. And – this week, at least – the flights were nearly empty: I managed to get a... Read more →

Hackrod is open to the crowd

I was really excited to hear, over the weekend, that our friends at Hackrod have launched a successful crowd-funding campaign and that there’s still time to participate. The campaign is being hosted on MicroVentures, which means investors should receive interest on their investment as well as equity in the project, assuming things work out. This admittedly seems a nicer model than getting a T-shirt or coffee mug saying you supported their Kickstarter. ;-) I haven’t yet decided whether I’m personally going to get in on the action (so to speak) but I thought I’d post about it in case... Read more →

Dasher 360 at the Advanced Manufacturing Facility

During a 3-day event, this week, Autodesk opened its Advanced Manufacturing Facility (AMF) in Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city. Here’s a video showing some information about this very cool facility. It’s one of 6 technology centres that Autodesk is running at various locations around the world. The others are Pier 9 in San Francisco, the Boston BUILD Space, Autodesk Toronto’s new MaRS office, the VR Center in Munich and the Materials Lab in Kilsyth, Australia. My team is proud to have been asked to provide technology to be showcased at the AMF: Dasher 360 is running there, providing... Read more →

Controlling Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts showing how to query information about Hue lights via a Philips Hue bridge from Dynamo Studio, it’s time for the really fun stuff: controlling lights from Dynamo. To make this happen some changes were needed to the zero-touch node that talks to the Philips Hue API on behalf of Dynamo, mainly to allow the setting of a light’s properties. The Philips Hue API allows this to be done either via Hue, Saturation and Brightness or by the XY offset in the CIE colour space. I ended up exposing the ability to... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 2

In the last post we looked at some initial code to get basic information about the lights connected to a Philips Hue bridge. In this post we’re going to extend the code to expose more information but also to query the bridge repeatedly, allowing the graph to display the latest light colours as they change. Here’s a view of the updated graph. A few things have changed: firstly the Bridge object exposes some new information – in our case we can see the names of the lights, but we could also access the names and IDs of the various... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 1

I mentioned in a recent post that I was chewing on how design apps might connect with building automation systems to display data via lights. My first step along this path was to see how Dynamo Studio might connect into my home’s Philips Hue bridge and get information about the “smart” lights it contains. To do this I created a zero-touch node in C# that calls into the Philips Hue API exposed by my local bridge. (To make this piece work you need to follow the steps on this page that show how to create an authorised user ID... Read more →

Thinking about light

A year ago I talked about my early forays into the world of home automation, mainly via Philips Hue. I’m now treating the “experiment” as a success, and have decided to invest in more lights (and another Hue bridge for our main home). While thinking about this, I decided to check on the availability of an API. Sure enough there’s a great REST API available for Philips Hue, as well as a number of SDKs. All of which has me thinking about possibilities of using Philips Hue as a way to visualize data. Just as we use Forge inside... Read more →

Dasher 360 at Autodesk University and the Forge DevCon

If my calculations are correct, I’ll be in Singapore during this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. It’s the first I’ll have missed for many years – and it’s going to feel more than a little strange, when that week comes along – but this trip (and my family) will be taking precedence, for once. While I’m not going to be there myself, my good friend and colleague, Simon Breslav, is stepping in to deliver the class I would be giving if I were there. Although as Simon is the person who developed a great deal of the code... Read more →

3D & Mixed Reality at Microsoft House

OK, so that was perhaps a little mad. Earlier today I spent 5 hours on the train – going from Neuchatel to Zurich and then on the new SBB service via the Gotthard Base Tunnel – to get to Milan, had a coffee with my uncle (who lives and works nearby), gave a 30-minute presentation on Forge and AR/VR at a Meetup, and then spent 4.5 hours on more trains – this time going towards Geneva on the EuroCity (formerly Cisalpino), and then changing at Brig to head via Bern – to get home. This was the main train... Read more →