Through the Interface

Sign up for AU 2023 classes today!

AU 2023 class enrollment is now open for non-Autodesk attendees to register for their favourite sessions at the upcoming Autodesk University. (Autodeskers will get to do so nearer the event, once our customers and partners have had their pick.) I’m in the midst of preparing content for my two sessions. Thankfully I have friends like Jacob Small who send occasional suggestions, such as this one Jacob sent through for the VASA session: xkcd.com/2821 Don’t be at all surprised if we end up featuring some logic to help people use VASA’s pathfinding to route via ice cream stands. Keep them... Read more →

Introducing Central64: an open source implementation of central pathfinding

I’ve posted in the past about work done by Autodesk Research – in particular by Rhys Goldstein – to implement a more natural-seeming (but still direct and efficient) pathfinding algorithm. This is the algorithm at the heart of our Space Analysis package, and you can find details on how it works in these previous posts: A paper on our space analysis algorithm in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research Explaining how path counting helps simulate natural navigation Visibility in space analysis: an explainer The above posts reference these articles/papers that have been published elsewhere: Path Counting for Grid-Based Navigation... Read more →

The next release of AutoCAD and .NET

This post may feel like a blast from the past for any long-time readers still out there. After a break of several years, I’m once again posting about the topic this blog was founded (17 years ago!) to help people get to grips with: AutoCAD and .NET. This is definitely a blip rather than a trend, however: I just wanted to amplify this post by my friend Madhu Moogala, which talks at a very high level about the next release of AutoCAD (2024+1) and its API technology. Cutting to the chase, the nugget of information that interested me most... Read more →

Autodesk University 2023 plans

I’ve just come back from 2 weeks off work. We didn’t go very far, but did enjoy the Swiss countryside, as well as the national day on August 1st. Anyway, it’s back to the grindstone, with some looming deadlines around preparing content for AU 2023. The class schedule is now live, so you can head on over and search for or browse your favourite classes. Be sure to bookmark any that interest you, as you’ll be able to register from August 24th. Here are the two classes I’ll be presenting as primary speaker: My first class is bright and... Read more →

The public demo of Project Dasher is going offline

This milestone has crept up on me, over the last few months. I guess I’ve been putting off thinking – and blogging – about it. Earlier this year we made the decision to wind down development and support of the time-series database that serves as the back-end for Project Dasher. (Fun fact: this project was originally codenamed Blitzen – the name of a reindeer that was part of the “back-end” for Dasher on Santa’s sleigh – and eventually became known internally as Data 360.) Anyway, it was time to wind it down, both because of the widespread availability of... Read more →

A musical summer

It’s music festival season in Europe, and we’ve been making the most of getting out to concerts and festivals in Switzerland. The season kicked off for us while I was in Delft with my daughter: my two sons went with a friend to the Frauenfeld OpenAir festival – the largest hip-hop festival in Europe, apparently – to see Travis Scott. It’s not really my thing, so I was happy enough they managed it all on their own (and came home safely, of course). We often try to go to the Montreux Jazz Festival. This year, on the last Monday... Read more →

Visiting the MX3D bridge in Amsterdam and playing football in Munich

After a really interesting few days in Delft at CAAD Futures 2023, on Friday morning my daughter and I headed to Amsterdam on our way to Munich. The main goal of visiting Amsterdam was – of course – to visit the MX3D bridge, particularly as it’s due to be decommissioned later this year. (I know, I know: it doesn’t seem as though the bridge has been there long, but the permit was a limited one – appropriate for a temporary art installation – and there seems to have been some resistance to the project from a local heritage preservation... Read more →

CAAD Futures 2023

On Tuesday night my daughter and I headed to Geneva to hop on a plane to Amsterdam Schipol. We were quite lucky with our arrival: we were able to get out of the airport and onto a train to Delft within 20 minutes. On arriving in Delft we headed to our Airbnb, managing to avoid being hit by bicycles. We came across some interesting structural work being down on a nearby bridge. After dropping our bags, we headed out for dinner with my old friend Pete Storey, who kindly popped over from Utrecht to meet us for a bite... Read more →

Register today for Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich

Photo © Michael Šubák from Pixabay Hopefully those of you interested in attending the Autodesk DevCon 2023 in Munich, Bavaria, were able to save the date of September 11th-12th. Well, it’s now possible to register for the event. There is an attendance fee – with early-bird pricing of 180€ up until July 30th, with the price going up to 300€ and then 360€ at the event itself – but hopefully there are fewer capacity limits on attendance than in SF (one of the advantages of not being on a boat ;-). It’s a fun time to be in Munich,... Read more →

Voxelising point clouds in Dynamo with VASA

Last week we saw a Dynamo graph that imports a point cloud from an ASCII-based format to specify the initial locations for a fun flocking simulation. This week we’re going to look at a graph that uses a similar import technique but rather creates a voxel model based on the point cloud: The main difference from the previous import code is that rather than returning a list of Point objects, we’ve tweaked the code to return 9 doubles for each point that are taken as triangle definitions. The little secret is that the triangle’s vertices are coincident: we use... Read more →

Checking whether your class proposals have been accepted for Autodesk University 2023

Just a quick note to say that you can now log in to the Autodesk University website (this guidance has changed, please see below) from today – June 23rd – to see the status of your class proposals and learn whether or not they were accepted for AU 2023 in Las Vegas. I was very happy to learn that the two proposals I submitted this year were accepted: I’m sure there’ll be an email sent very shortly, but I just thought I’d share this in case anyone’s impatient to find out their situation relative to classes at this year’s... Read more →

Flocking point clouds in Dynamo

I was thrilled to see a post by Long Nguyen over the weekend announcing his publication of a Dynamo package called WhatTheFlock – with full source code – that implements a Boids-like flocking simulation. This work is significant not because ornithologists will use Dynamo to predict or simulate murmurations (although that in itself is a fun thought) but because Long has demonstrated a valuable technique that might be used to implement other arguably more useful types of multi-agent simulation inside Dynamo. Long is using a background process to perform calculations before rendering the results into the Dynamo window. A... Read more →

CAAD Futures 2023 at TU Delft from July 5-7

For the last few years I’ve been on the scientific committee for a conference called CAAD Futures. My involvement began with the 2021 edition of the conference: I reviewed several papers submitted to the conference and also ended up being invited to talk during one of the conference’s workshops (it was called Beyond generative Computer Aided-Architectural/Urban Design (CAAD/CAUD) and was hosted by Todor Stojanovski). That last edition was held in Los Angeles – and the workshop hosted in Stockholm – but I only participated remotely. This year’s edition is being held in Europe, at TU Delft in the Netherlands,... Read more →

Save the date: Autodesk DevCon in Munich on September 11-12

The dates and location were announced for the SF edition of the Autodesk DevCon 2023 a few weeks ago, and now it’s Europe’s turn. Join the Autodesk team in Munich on September 11th and 12th at the Holiday Inn Munich-Westpark. Registration hasn’t yet opened, so right now it’s just about putting the dates in your diaries and (potentially) planning travel/accommodation. I expect to come across to be there – it’ll be great to catch up with everyone! As I couldn’t remember the location, off the top of my head, I went ahead and searched my Google Photos for the... Read more →

A meeting of former Autodeskers in Neuchâtel

Yesterday evening I popped along to La Cantine in Colombier to attend a get-together of former Autodesk Neuchâtel employees. I was only expecting a few people to be there, but there must have been somewhere between 50 and 100 of my former colleagues there during the course of the evening. La Cantine is a restaurant run by an old friend and former Autodesker, Antonio Barroca, and I’ve mentioned both Antonio and his restaurant in the past. If you’re ever in the Neuchâtel region, do stop by for some great food with a wonderful atmosphere. Here’s Antonio fanning the flames... Read more →

Visibility in Space Analysis: an explainer

Our resident spatial-analyst-in-chief, Rhys Goldstein, has gone and done it again. After his very well-received Medium post explaining grid-based pathfinding was published in Towards Data Science, Rhys has now had a follow-up post published that explains our work on visibility. And it’s fantastic! Assessing visibility and pathfinding in 2D and 3D spaces are really cornerstones of our work to assess how occupant-centric prospective building designs are likely to be. This is a critical capability for us in our day-to-day work, but it's also very interesting from an algorithmic perspective and Rhys's article helps create awareness of these techniques with... Read more →

Register today for Autodesk DevCon 2023 in SF

An Autodesk DevCon is coming back to San Francisco in 2023! It will be held on September 6th and 7th at Pier 9, between the Klamath Ferry and our Technology Center. Photo © The Bay Area Council Foundation It’s worth noting that there is a fee to attend the event (this is currently $150 but will increase to as much as $300 on the day of the event). Space is limited, given the venue, so it is worth registering as soon as you know you can attend – there’s a very good chance that we won’t have tickets left... Read more →

It’s the last day to submit class proposals for Autodesk University 2023

The CFP period for this year’s AU has simply flown by – mainly because it’s turned out to be a busy period between personal milestones and work travel – and today (May 15th) is the last day to submit your proposals for the event. Over the weekend I went ahead and finalised last-minute changes to mine and clicked submit. The titles (as shown above) are: Monitoring and visualizing data from the MX3D and Dar Smart Bridges Channeling Minecraft to analyze architectural spaces with VASA and Dynamo Both are variations on proposals I submitted for last year’s event (but obviously... Read more →

TechX 2023 in Dallas

Last week I was in Dallas, Texas, for TechX 2023, Autodesk’s annual internal event for technical and design staff. As the technical content shared at the event is company confidential, I’m mostly sharing pictures of people I had the good fortune to hang out with, during the course of the week. There was quite a bit of “real” work going on, too, though, so hopefully you won’t come away with the impression that it was just a week-long party. Ahem. As there’s no direct flight to Dallas from Switzerland, I chose to fly via Heathrow from Geneva on the... Read more →

Putting the TechX in Texas

I’m packing my bags soon for another trip across the pond for our annual, Autodesk-internal geekfest, TechX 2023. This year’s event is being held in Dallas, Texas, a city I haven’t visited in perhaps 20 years. I’m sure a lot has changed – we’ll see! Photo credit: Robert Hensley, CC license. In any case TechX isn’t about the venue – or even about the technical content, which, while often really interesting, is also watchable remotely during and after the event – as much as the chance to (re)connect with people. In that sense it’s similar to the Autodesk University... Read more →