Through the Interface

Forge Data Days coming to a city near you

Now that I’ve recovered from this week’s trip to Paris – and from both the pleasure and the shock of seeing people physically in meatspace – it’s time to look ahead to another trip. The Developer Advocacy and Support team have announced a new worldwide event tour where they’ll be talking to people about the upcoming Forge Data platform. Here are the dates that were confirmed at the time of writing this post: Europe May 31st | Munich, Germany June 2nd | Gothenburg, Sweden June 7th | Birmingham, UK June 9th | Milan, Italy June 14th | Barcelona, Spain... Read more →

BIM World Paris 2022

On Monday I hopped onto the train to Geneva and from there onto the TGV to Paris Gare de Lyon. I was in Paris for BIM World, where we displayed the Dar 2m Smart Bridge. It was my first time seeing the bridge in person, which was a really exciting moment for me. After checking into a very nice little hotel in the 6th arrondissement I headed to the conference centre to help with the setup. The bridge was already unboxed and hooked up when I arrived. Pete Storey had some wires to connect to get it up and... Read more →

Announcing VASA for Minecraft

Followers of this blog will have seen me mention the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package (you can find all the posts about it here). VASA is a toolkit that allows you to voxelise and analyse 3D geometry, whether for pathfinding, visibility or daylight analysis. The big news of the day is that Autodesk Research has managed to port VASA across to work with the popular voxel-based creation environment, Minecraft. This actually was pretty easy, as we could completely ignore all the code needed to voxelise a 3D environment from the codebase and focus on the analysis side of... Read more →

Detecting collisions in the Forge viewer

In a recent post we saw that switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry brought some unexpected benefits when it came to rendering robots inside Dasher. I wasn’t very happy about the fact that said robots were spinning destructively on the MX3D bridge, so I started looking into options for collision detection inside a Forge viewer application. From the start I should say that the approach that I ended up choosing is fairly rudimentary in nature: a much better solution would be to integrate a physics engine such as Ammo.js or perhaps even a voxelization engine such as VASA. But I figured... Read more →

BIM World Paris is next week

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be in Paris next week for BIM World on April 5th and 6th, 2022. The 2m Dar Smart Bridge has apparently arrived in Paris from Dubai, so once a few legal formalities have been completed it should be on-site at the event. I’m looking forward to seeing how it looks – and performs – in person, especially when connected to Dasher! Autodesk will have a fairly significant presence at BIM World, by all accounts. I’ve done my best to pull together the various activities (beyond whatever’s happening at the booths on... Read more →

Switching to use THREE.BufferGeometry in Forge viewer applications

I talked some time ago about some work that has been needed to be done in Project Dasher – and other Forge viewer clients – in anticipation of supporting viewers such as Tandem’s. In this case it was fairly specifically about the need to support loading of multiple models inside the viewer, rather than working on the assumption that there’s a single model available. For the last few days I’ve been looking at another area that by all accounts will be beneficial, whether driven by use of the Tandem viewer or the upcoming Forge viewer based on the latest... Read more →

Vote on my (and others') AU 2022 class proposals

I’ve gone ahead and submitted two class proposals for Autodesk University 2022. If you think they should be part of this year’s event, I’d certainly appreciate you voting for them: Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis inside Dynamo Autodesk Research first created the Space Analysis toolkit - and its accompanying Dynamo package - to support 2D generative design workflows such as those used during Project Discover for the architectural layout of Autodesk's Toronto office. VASA - short for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis - takes these techniques to the next level, allowing the geometric exploration of architectural spaces in 3D for activities... Read more →

Autodesk University 2022 will be in New Orleans

The Call For Proposals for Autodesk University 2022 is now live, and with it the news that this year’s event will be in The Big Easy, the beautiful city of New Orleans. I was last there for our Autodesk-internal TechX event in 2019. Here are a few snaps from back then: It was a good time, and I very much hope I get the chance to return in late September (the conference is being held from the 27th to the 29th). As mentioned recently, submitting your proposals early – the deadline is April 15th – will give you more... Read more →

The recording of the March Tandem webinar

Last week’s webinar – where I was kindly invited by the Autodesk Tandem team to join them to talk about Autodesk Research’s explorations into the potential for Digital Twins in the AEC space, specifically through Project Dasher – has now been posted via the In Tandem website (under Resources). It’s also on YouTube, so you can watch it directly over there. One really interesting section was Tim Kelly’s demo (starting around the 26-minute mark) of work the Tandem team has been doing to integrate Dasher-like capabilities into the product. Really exciting stuff! Here’s a preview of that segment of... Read more →

Reminder: join the Autodesk Tandem webinar today to see the future of connected Digital Twins

Today I’ll be speaking with Tim, Bob and Adam from the Tandem team about the work we’ve been doing in Project Dasher and how this is influencing their own offering, moving forward. The webinar is today (March 9th, 2022) at 4pm GMT | 5pm CET | 11am Eastern | 8am Pacific. If you’ve read this post in time, sign up here! Read more →

Walk across the Dar Smart Bridge at BIM World Paris for free!

This is all very exciting. I’ve booked my TGV ticket for Paris to attend a physical, in-person event: BIM World Paris is being held on April 5th & 6th, 2022, at Porte de Versailles. Autodesk is sponsoring the event, and the Autodesk Research team will be using the opportunity to show off the work that was done on the 2m Dar Smart Bridge, something I’ve covered recently in some depth. I’ll be attending along with my friends and colleagues Pete Storey and Fikret Kalay. In preparation for the event, I’ve been remoting into the PC running the bridge’s “operating... Read more →

Autodesk University 2022 dates and CFP

The AU team has announced the dates for Autodesk University 2022: it will be held from September 27-29, 2022, and – barring some regression in the current health situation – in-person for the first time since Autodesk University 2019! I can also reveal that we’ll be meeting in a city that isn’t Las Vegas. (Sorry to not say more about this, but we’ve been asked not to talk specifically about where’s it’s being held, for now.) This is clearly earlier than the usual November/December timeframe, so the Call For Proposals (CFP) will logically be held that much sooner. In... Read more →

A video on using sample points for pathfinding and sensor placement with VASA

Rhys Goldstein has now published Part 5 in his video series on using VASA. In it, Rhys walks through the latest two samples that come with VASA 0.2.0, one of which I talked a bit about in a recent post. Both samples make use of sample points – one in the context of aggregating path information, while the other uses them (as we’ve seen) for sensor placement. Both workflows have significant potential for use in the context of generative design – something I hope to dig into at some point in another post. Hopefully you’ll find this video –... Read more →

Join the Tandem webinar in March to see the future of Dasher

The Autodesk Tandem team have kindly invited me to join their regular webinar – coming up on March 9th – to talk about the history of Project Dasher and to participate in a more future-centric discussion with Bob Bray and Tim Kelly. Here’s the description of the webinar. Even I want to attend, it sounds so interesting! ;-) From the lens of a software architect, learn why digital twin is key to the future of build What will it take to win the digital twin race? Get a front row seat and join our very own Kean Walmsley, software... Read more →

Autodesk open-sources web-based USD viewing implementation

I’ve been part of Autodesk’s open source committee – responsible for driving and approving open source contributions by the company – as the representative for Autodesk Research for the last few years. One of the most interesting projects to come through the committee – at least from my perspective – has now been released into the wild: Autodesk’s Visualization team (who also develop the Forge viewer) has open-sourced an implementation of the USD toolkit that targets the web. For those of you unfamiliar with USD – and I’m talking about the file format, not the currency – it stands... Read more →

Learn about Autodesk Construction Cloud and its API

There’s a great opportunity coming up in March to learn about building software that works with Autodesk Construction Cloud: the ACS Integration Partner Summit 2022 is being held on St Patrick’s Day, March 17th. Here’s some information on what to expect from this event: Autodesk Construction Overview Hear about Autodesk's construction platform vision, including recent business updates and a technical overview of the breadth of supported construction workflows. Autodesk Construction Cloud Platform, product, and Forge API updates A large focus will be on Forge APIs. We will discuss recently released APIs that allow you to deliver new features and... Read more →

Placing sensors and evaluating their coverage using VASA

Last week I mentioned the release of VASA 0.2.0, which includes some new nodes and samples that raise some really interesting possibilities. I couldn’t help but come back to the “sensor coverage” sample (named 12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn), in particular, as I can see so many possibilities for its use. Here’s the description Rhys Goldstein included in the sample: A demonstration of how to combine sample point generation and proximity operations to select locations on walls and ceilings using the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. In this example, the locations are used to place sensors and approximate their coverage. First, sample... Read more →

VASA 0.2.0 is now available

Rhys Goldstein has been busy implementing some new features in the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package. I’ve just published a new version to the Dynamo Package Manager containing the following enhancements: Added "PathModel.GenerateSamplePoints" and "DistanceField.GenerateSamplePoints", which generate sample points according to an approximate spacing parameter. Added proximity operations ("NearestFilledAlongX", "NearestFilledAlongY", "NearestFilledAlongZ", and "NearestFilledHorizontally"), which find the filled voxel nearest to a point. Added special operations ("AutoCrop", "AutoSplit", "DensityMap", "DensityMapWithWeights"), which automatically crop, split, and create density maps from voxel models. Added new examples ("11-VASA-Path-Density.dyn" and "12-VASA-Sensor-Coverage.dyn"), which demonstrate the new features. Fixed a bug in the fill from... Read more →

Building the 2m Dar Smart Bridge

Colleagues in Autodesk Research have been working with Dar Al-Handasah on a project to 3D print a series of footbridges with integrated sensors. It’s similar in some ways to MX3D’s Smart Bridge Amsterdam, but printing with plastic rather than steel. I’ve talked about the bridge at a couple of events, now, so I thought it was time to share some more information about this fascinating project. My role in the project is, once again, fairly minor: I’ve been helping with the visualization of sensor data from the bridge inside Dasher (more on that later on), but it’s been fun... Read more →

The NEST exhibit at the new Autodesk Gallery

Last week this announcement was made that included a video showing off the sparkling new Autodesk Gallery at our 1 Market Street office in San Francisco. There’s a lot of inspiring content in the new Gallery – for instance it showcases the results of Autodesk Research’s collaboration with NASA JPL, the generatively designed interplanetary lander, and the scanning robot from Forge partner Scaled Robotics – but I wanted to highlight a project that I’ve participated in quite a bit, over the years, and I’m super-happy to see has a place in the stunning new Gallery: there’s a scale model... Read more →