Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Introducing the Pier 9 IoT bridge prototype

Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing a number of guest posts by Autodesk colleagues working on a project that I think will be of interest to many of this blog’s readers. The first post is by Alec Shuldiner, who is introducing the project. At Autodesk, we have a bridge. Recently, we gave that bridge a nervous system: sensors, wires to carry the signal, a small amount of local computing power to pre-sort the data, and, far away, in a virtual head, a brain to make sense of it all. It’s a neat thing, and in a subsequent post... Read more →