Through the Interface

Generative Design workshop for Sweco in Stockholm

On Wednesday morning I headed up to Stockholm to participate in a Generative Design workshop for Sweco. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to Sweden, so it was a fun coincidence that I already had a little taste of the country as I took my train to Zurich airport from Neuchatel. IKEA Switzerland has a special vending machine moving between the larger Swiss railway stations as part of a promotional event. It was a bit of a shame the machine was out of order, but these things do happen. The flight to Stockholm Arlanda was uneventful, and... Read more →

Daily Dynamo Sandbox builds and Refinery v0.4.44

There’s a lot happening this week in the world of Generative Design for AEC at Autodesk. Aside from the Space Analysis package we announced, there’s interesting news from both the Dynamo and Refinery teams. The Dynamo team has kicked off their daily build process once again, this time focusing on Dynamo Sandbox builds. This is very interesting news for me, and probably for other people working on GD projects outside of Revit: I use Dynamo Sandbox to do the majority of my GD-related studies – usually by starting the executable found at %programfiles%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2\DynamoSandbox.exe that’s installed with Dynamo for... Read more →

The Space Analysis package for Dynamo and Refinery is now available!

As promised last week, Autodesk Research has now posted v0.2 of our Space Analysis package to the Dynamo Package Manager. This version contains nodes for pathfinding as well as for visibility analysis. Both implementations work via a common SpaceLattice object – basically a 2D grid with diagonal connections – that can be used to drive both algorithms. In reality you may end up having multiple lattices – as pathfinding may be working with “barriers” that don’t affect visibility – but the node you need to use is the same. We had posted a previous version with just pathfinding, but... Read more →

Sneak peek at pathfinding

A quick update before a larger unveiling next week… We’ve made solid progress with implementing the grid-based capabilities of the SpaceAnalysis package. All being well we should have an “official” version available early next week. This release will contain pathfinding – based on Djikstra’s shortest path algorithm, working on a grid with the size and resolution of your choice – as well as the ability to test visibility – using the same grid for an Isovist-like analysis. We have a version already posted via the Dynamo Package Manager (ssshhhh!), but we’ve gone through and rationalised a bunch of the... Read more →

Last chance to apply to join the first Dynamo Hackathon in London

On April 5th-6th, 2019 in London, the UK Dynamo User Group is holding its first ever Dynamo Hackathon. Several members of the Dynamo and Refinery teams will be there, as well as yours truly (I’ll only be there on the 5th, though, as I have family commitments over the weekend). If you’d like to participate, you do need to move quickly: today (March 19th) is the last day that submissions will be accepted. (This deadline really crept up on me: I’ve been meaning to post about this for the last week or so, but was busy on other things…... Read more →

The first Forge Accelerator in Dublin

Last week I thoroughly enjoyed a short week at the first Forge Accelerator in Dublin. (It was short – for me – because I arrived on Monday afternoon and headed home, already, at Thursday lunchtime.) It was only my second time ever to visit Ireland, but the second in just a few months, and my next trip across is already planned for June (if one doesn’t happen sooner). I was staying across the River Liffey from the office, and enjoyed the stroll across a convenient pedestrian bridge, even if the wind and harmonic resonance sometimes made me question the... Read more →

Adjusting zoom to fit in the Forge viewer

A question came up during this week’s Forge Accelerator in Dublin that I thought would be of broader interest. It related to the fact that the Forge viewer’s default behaviour when you double-click the background and perform a zoom-to-fit isn’t always desirable. In this case the developer was fine with a zoom-to-fit being performed, but felt the resultant view wasn’t a good enough fit. Here’s the default zoom level on double-click in Dasher 360, for instance: As you can see the model remains quite far from the camera. The good news is that debugging into the Forge viewer source,... Read more →

At the Forge Accelerator in Dublin

After having spent a great few days with the Toronto team, I headed home on Friday afternoon. I did have a little bit of “fun” getting home, though: firstly the UPExpress going from Union Station to Pearson Airport stopped – ostensibly waiting for the right signal – for about 30 minutes. It wasn’t a big deal for me, thankfully: I’d left some buffer in my schedule, so still had a little time to wait at the airport. While I did so, for some reason I checked my downloaded Netflix content… none of it played: I kept getting an obscure... Read more →

Visiting MaRS

I seem to spend quite a bit of time, these days, talking about the new Autodesk office in Toronto. I did visit one part of the office when I came through in July 2017 – on our world tour – but people hadn’t, at that point, fully moved across from the former 210 King St East office. So this week was – somewhat surprisingly – the first time I’d actually seen the generatively-designed office space first-hand. Crazy. I’ve been staying in the Chelsea Hotel – apparently the largest hotel in Canada, with about a thousand rooms – which is... Read more →

Heading to Toronto

I’m at Zurich airport, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt, from where I’ll head onwards to Toronto. (The way over has a stop as the daily direct flight leaves too early for me to comfortably take… at least I can take the direct flight home – a red-eye – on Friday night.) The main purpose for this trip is a team offsite on Thursday, but I’ll be spending as much time as I can on Wednesday and Friday working with my Toronto-based colleagues. There are a few Dasher 360-related tasks I need to move forward, while I’m there, and... Read more →

Building buzz

I’m on holiday with my family, this week, enjoying the Bernese Oberland with family and friends. In Toronto – where I’m heading next week – my team-mates are busy trying out the 2D path-finding component I talked about in the last post. Now that Simon Breslav has wrapped the C++ path-finding module created by Rhys Goldstein – building a .NET wrapper and using it from Dynamo – he’s started using it to implement a version of the “buzz” metric The Living used for Project Discover. Here’s a sneak peek of how it currently looks with one possible layout of... Read more →

Interested in space analysis for Dynamo and Refinery?

Over the last few weeks colleagues in Autodesk Research have been building the foundations for a space analysis package that can be used for generative design workflows in Dynamo. We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in taking it for a spin. But first, a little background… We’ve known we’ve needed to get better performance when analysing 2D and 3D spaces since embarking on the original layout of the new MaRS office in Toronto as part of Project Discover: the approach we had worked well – as I think is clear from the results of the project... Read more →

Join DevDays Online to learn what’s coming with Autodesk platform technology

There’s a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what’s coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It’s also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year’s DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don’t worry if that time’s inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk... Read more →

Embracing 3D: a day spent navigating Swiss mountains

Today was a fantastic day. Members of the BIM 360 engineering team based in Gumligen went on their annual ski day and kindly invited me along. We’d originally planned to go on February 1st, but the weather was very poor and so the plan was cancelled. It was rescheduled for today, but only earlier this week – once it was clearly goingto be a gorgeous day. [For those of you who didn’t know we have BIM 360 develoment staff based in Switzerland: the team originally came with the C-Plan acquisition – which happened back around the turn of the... Read more →

Using A-Frame to build a VR experience for Refinery

This week I decided to take the WebVR/WebXR extension work I did for Van Wijnen to the next level: mainly to integrate metric information in some way into the scene, whether as 3D text objects or via some kind of Heads-Up Display (HUD). But before embarking on this I decided to take another look at the implementation of the HTML client. When I first wrote the HTML page that consumes geometry data from the Refinery server, I decided to use raw JavaScript and WebVR/WebXR calls with three.js. I’d thought briefly about using A-Frame – an awesome framework started by... Read more →

February Fun and March Madness

There’s a lot happening inside Autodesk at the beginning of our Fiscal Year 2020. FY20 has kicked off with a number of internal reorgs in various groups: as part of broader changes, the organisation to which I report – formerly known as OCTO (the Office of the Chief Technology Officer) is being renamed to Autodesk Research. Which is what’s been in my own title, anyway, as I belonged to the “research” arm of OCTO before the renaming. While I liked the name OCTO well enough (it brought plenty of opportunities to do cool things with octopuses ;-), I think... Read more →

Back at NEST

The week before last I headed across to Zurich for the day for meetings. During the afternoon I passed by the NEST building in Dübendorf – home of the DFAB House project – to meet with NEST’s Director, Reto Largo, and talk more about our plans to collaborate. To learn a bit more about what’s happening with this fantastic building, it’s worth checking out this session from AU 2018 in Las Vegas delivered by both Reto and Thomas Müller from Mensch und Maschine Schweiz. Our plan is to “Dasherize” the whole building, which has upwards of 2,000 sensors in... Read more →

How to embed videos from the new Autodesk University website

This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I’m sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it’ll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there... Read more →

The Forge Design Automation API now has (Beta) support for Revit

There’s great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge’s Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here’s an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors... Read more →

Reasons to be cheerful

Very unusually, for me, I’ve completely re-written this post over the course of the week. At the beginning of the week I was feeling more than a little gloomy about the state of the world – primarily relating to politics, climate change and data privacy issues – but I’m gradually starting to feel more optimistic. Yes, every single day we see more news related to US and UK politics, but I’m now genuinely expecting some of the craziness to work its way through during the course of this year. The climate is still a serious worry and will be... Read more →