Through the Interface

Generative Design for AEC on Redshift

There's a new video on Redshift highlighting the work being done by the Refinery team, as well as some use-cases for Generative Design in the AEC space. Check it out! Here’s the article with the video and its transcript. I really like the way the animations illustrate some possibilities for the technology. Here’s one relating to stadium design: I also saw a more complete article has been posted giving useful context regarding the video about the GD residency in Toronto I shared in this previous post. Something else to check out, when you get the chance. From my side... Read more →

Knee-deep in AU prep

Things have been quiet on this blog, since my return from Scotland. Mainly because I’ve been heads-down dealing with preparation for Autodesk University 2019, which I’d love to say was on the horizon, whereas it’s – more accurately – coming at top speed around a nearby streetcorner. In less than 3 weeks many us us will be flying to Las Vegas for the latest installment of my favourite annual conference. Today was the deadline for AU speakers to submit class handouts: I managed to submit something for both my classes, so I can now switch focus to the various... Read more →

Scotland

This post continues the story of our trip to Scotland. As the last week was purely vacation, feel free to skip this post if you’re only interested in my work-related content. (And if you like the travelog stuff, feel free to check out these posts from our big trip of a couple of years ago.) While on Skye we stayed in an apartment near Sconser. Skye is actually a lot bigger than you expect – with a lot of single-lane roads with passing places – so it was nice to be staying relatively close to the ways onto the... Read more →

BILT and the Highlands

After the pre-BILT Hackathon on Wednesday, there were still three full days of the main conference to be experienced in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. My family was with me – at the start of our 2-week Scottish adventure – so I wasn’t planning (or able) to spend the full 3 days at the conference. I did make it along to the opening keynote, however, which was largely run by Marcus Fich, who introduced two Danish psychologists who talked about (among other things) our response to stressful situations. It was a very different and interesting session. After that I... Read more →

The DBEI Generative Design Hackathon in Edinburgh

On Wednesday morning I headed off, bright and early, to the Generative Design Hackathon that had been organised by DBEI prior to this year's BILT Europe in Edinburgh. I wandered past the local church in Bruntsfield: The walk to the conference centre led me via the canal: I arrived at EICC, the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, which is also hosting this year's BILT Europe over the coming days. Proceedings were kicked off by Wesley Benn, Executive Chairman of DBEI: He introduced the teams: And the judges: While Hypar's Anthony Hauck introduced the expert users (myself included): As well as... Read more →

Arrived in the UK for BiLT

After returning from Paris on Friday afternoon, I came across with my family to the UK on Saturday. Our first stop was at Eton – where an old friend of mine lives. We used his home for a base to head up to Watford on Sunday to do the Harry Potter Studio Tour, something my kids had been asking to do for the longest time. We were on the tour starting at 11am: we’d ended up having to buy over-priced tickets from a secondary tour operator and throwing away the bus transfer from central London… these secondary operators tend... Read more →

Autodesk’s third Soirée de l’Excellence Française in Paris

On Wednesday morning I hopped on the train to Paris, once again, this time to present at Autodesk France’s third “Soirée de l’Excellence Française”, an invitation-only VIP event for AEC customers in France. (I’d have blogged about it beforehand if the event was open to all, of course.) I arrived at la Gare de Lyon, as usual, and found an interesting art exhibit outside. I walked next door to the citizenM – part of the chain of hotels I’ve stayed at for AU London, the last two years. It’s a fun place to stay, although the switch to turn... Read more →

Looking back at the GD for AEC Residency; looking forward to the DBEI Hackathon

The Toronto team has posted a nice video looking back at July’s Generative Design for AEC Residency: It was clearly an interesting event – I do hope I’ll get to attend the next one. Here’s a still I extracted that shows Sol Amour, Dynamo’s Product Manager, hacking away at Python inside Dynamo. The Python node is big enough to be clearly visible on the video (the code itself is not, but I’m sure it’s about to do something cool). I’m starting to think about next Wednesday’s DBEI Hackathon, which has the theme “Generative Design in Practice” and so I’m... Read more →

Talking to VINCI in Paris

After a quick trip to Zurich on Tuesday, on Wednesday I took the train to Paris. I’d booked a hotel that was convenient for our Paris office, and walked there from la Gare de Lyon through le Parc de Bercy. I’d made tentative plans to meet up with friends in the evening, but as they had to cancel (for excellent reasons) I ended up wandering around Bercy Village to get a quick bite to eat. I’m mostly a people person, but I have to admit that having the occasional evening to myself is bit of a treat. (I’ll be... Read more →

There's still time to register for the Forge DevCon @ AU Germany

For those of you who haven’t yet signed up, there’s still a little time left to register for this year’s European Forge DevCon being held on October 14th 2019, just ahead of AU Germany on October 15th-16th. Once again both events are being held in Darmstadt (a nice town close to Frankfurt, for those who don’t know it). While AU Germany is primarily a German-language event, the Forge DevCon pre-conference is always in English. There’s a modest attendance fee for this year’s event: it costs 160 € per person, for which you get a gourmet dinner, snacks, drinks and... Read more →

The first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland

Yesterday I was back at the NEST building in Dübendorf for Autodesk’s first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland. It was nice to be back there, even if just to see the progress being made on the construction of the HiLo roof. Here’s the view from the ground: I also went up to take a few snaps from the roof. You can clearly see the knitted cabling that will provide support for the structure. There were a few people working on the structure, too. (I took my snaps from an open doorway as I didn’t want to disturb them.)... Read more →

Build your own SoundSystem: Space Analysis now supports multi-source acoustics

After somehow adding support for acoustic analysis to the Space Analysis package, Rhys Goldstein has taken it to the next level by adding support for multiple sound sources. When Rhys first did this he was a little surprised by the results he was seeing. There were some really interesting interference patterns at the boundaries between sound sources: Find this example at %appdata%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2.3\packages\SpaceAnalysis\extra\spaceanalysis-acoustics-06-six-points-voronoi-pattern.dyn. (You may need to change the Dynamo version number.) Rhys dug into the field a little more deeply and came across this interesting blog post that highlights the possibility for sounds of similar frequencies to interfere... Read more →

A visit to swisstopo

Some weeks ago an old friend of mine, Karim Homayoun, let me know of an event being held at swisstopo – the Swiss Federal Office of Topography in Bern – that was being organised as part of the European Heritage Days. While Switzerland isn’t formally part of the EU, it is part of the Council of Europe, and so participates extensively in this important activity. There have been many such events throughout the country over the weekend. There were two guided tours of swisstopo being organised – one in French in the morning and one in German in the... Read more →

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 →

A new release of Refinery with tighter Revit integration and output constraints

A big – and welcome – update has just been dropped by the Refinery team. I’ve been waiting for this one, in particular, as I expected it to work better with the MaRS graph. (I’m happy to say that it does – more on this later.) The big ticket item in the v0.35.0 (still Beta) release is an integration with Revit that doesn’t require users to open Dynamo. It’s at this point that you can probably hear a collective “say what?!?” from existing Refinery users (such as myself, I might add): until now you’ve been very exposed to Dynamo... 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 →

Does Dynamo (and Revit) crash for your projects? We'd love to hear from you!

An interesting post over on the DynamoBIM forum was brought to my attention, and I felt it worth reproducing it here. The Dynamo team have found a way to avoid the need to manually dispose of geometry when creating it from Python or C# – as many package developers do – which they believe will help avoid a whole lot of crashes when working with large geometry sets. If you suspect you’re hitting these issues – due to your own code or a package you use – and can help test this new capability, we’d really appeciate you getting... 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 →

A visit to Geneva with Brunet Saunier Architecture

On Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting with Jacques Levy-Bencheton and Antoine Kersse from Paris-based Brunet Saunier Architecture in Geneva. Back in July I’d been asked by Jacques and Jerome Brunet to participate in a project they were working on relating to architecture for hospitals: they’re creating a book based on a series of interviews – and their Phylum H work, which Jacques presented at AU 2018, do check out the recording – that will look at architecture of hospitals, both retrospectively and prospectively. My role would be to participate in an interview alongside Jacques – run by... Read more →

Using a view cone for targeted visibility in Dynamo with Space Analysis

I feel as though I’ve been neglecting this blog: I’ve barely managed a post a week for several weeks, now: partly because of family holidays, but also because I’ve been heads-down on Dasher 360, working on a number of cool new features as well as shoring up some of our older code. Anyway, the kids are now back at school and I expect to have a lot more to talk about during the remaining months leading up to AU 2019. For now I wanted to share some information about the Space Analysis package. Today’s post takes a look at... Read more →