Through the Interface

5 awesome VASA project ideas for the AU2024 Dynamo Hackathon

[My apologies for the click-baity title. I do actually have a list of 5 cool project ideas, if you scroll down the post. So it’s not completely dishonest, at least.] In the last post I mentioned a few classes you can sign up for (and that I’m directly or indirectly involved in) from the Tuesday to Thursday of the AU2024 week (October 15th-17th) in San Diego. I now have something to recommend for the Monday of that week, too! In the past we’ve often had pre-events at AU2024: I wasn’t sure whether there would be one this year or... Read more →

Join the beta for the AEC Cloud Information Model API

Autodesk Platform Services – the platform formerly known as Forge – has a brand new service that’s soon going into beta: the AEC Cloud Information Model API. This API will allow you to access design parameters in Revit models hosted in the cloud with no need to pass by an instance Revit. The managed beta will give you access to data extracted from a fixed set of Revit sample models that is then hosted in the Autodesk Construction Cloud. It’ll be a great way to understand how the API works and provide feedback to the engineering team to steer... Read more →

DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

The material for this year’s online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here’s the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from... Read more →

Dynamo Core 2.11 (and Dynamo 2.10 and Generative Design in Revit 2022)

It’s that time of year, where our engineering teams release the primary annual updates to our products. AutoCAD 2022 was released a couple of weeks ago, and Revit 2022 dropped yesterday. I unfortunately spend very little time in our products, these days, so I’ll leave others to extoll their various benefits. Aside from working with the Forge platform, the product (or perhaps feature-set) I spend the most time with is Dynamo. I’m always happy to see Sol’s public release announcements on the DynamoBIM blog, both for his unique writing style and the velocity of improvements the team is making... Read more →

COVID Office Occupancy: a Dynamo mega-graph and blog series

I posted, back in May, about the work we’d been doing to explore the possibility of using the Space Analysis package for Dynamo to plan for post-COVID office layouts. Soon after that post our research relating to the pandemic shifted focus towards a longer-term plan of creating a “living lab” that would allow us not only to explore how design decisions might impact viral transmission, but to have these decisions based on data measured from a functioning ventilation system. Expect to hear more about that research in a future post. We handed over the work that had been done... Read more →

Saving data for selected generative designs from Revit 2021

In the last post we saw how the Data.Gate node can be used to send geometry to Revit 2021 when the “Create Revit Elements” button gets pressed from the Explore Outcomes UI for a Generative Design study. Phew. In this post we’re going to dig into how this node can also be used to have other “side effects” such as storing the various input parameters to a text file. For the purpose of this workflow I’ve chosen to hack the standard Three Box Massing.dyn graph (which ships with Revit 2021 as a sample for the Generative Design feature). The... Read more →

Managing data flow to and from Generative Design studies in Revit 2021

I was inspired to write this post by a chat I had with Zachary Kron, earlier in the week. I’d been noodling on how best to support a workflow where users of the Generative Design feature in Revit 2021 can select specific solutions in a study and do something with them. The specific use-case was around some functionality I’d prototyped back during the days of Project Refinery, where while exploring the results created during a generative study you could double-click individual designs – whether in the scatterplot or the design grid – which would add them to a graphical... Read more →

A quick round-up of articles on Generative Design in Revit 2021

This week has been interesting: after speculating last week about how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our design criteria – especially as it might relate to Generative Design – this week I ended up diving into a project related to exactly that. I’ll share more on this in due course. In the meantime, I thought I’d post a quick round-up of some news that has been coming in on the new Generative Design feature (formerly known as Project Refinery) in Revit 2021. To start with, here’s a good article from Autodesk that announces the feature. Next up, here’s a... Read more →

Generative Design is now available in Revit 2021

After many months of hard work, the Refinery team has delivered the first official release of their Generative Design feature as part of Revit 2021. Here’s the blog post describing the release. This marks the point at which generative design capabilities are first being made widely available to Revit users, directly from within the product. I know a number of customers have been waiting for this before engaging with the technology, so I’m impatient to see where things go from here. The feature comes with three pre-built sample studies for people to try: Three Box Massing, Workspace Layout and... Read more →

Join us for DevDays Online

Not everyone can make it to the Forge team’s annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here’s a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn’t work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays... Read more →

Free webinar series on Forge Design Automation for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and 3ds Max

The Forge team has published details of a series of free webinars coming up over the next few weeks that take an in-depth look at the various Design Automation APIs for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and 3ds Max. Here are the dates and presenters for the various versions of the Design Automation API. All times are 8am Pacific. December 5th, 2019 | AutoCAD | Albert Szilvasy December 10th, 2019 | Revit | Sasha Crotty December 11th, 2019 | Inventor | Andrew Akenson December 12th, 2019 | 3ds Max | Kevin Vandecar For more details and to register, head on over... Read more →

Dynamo Space Analysis and Revit 2020’s Path of Travel

Many of you will have been happy to see the extent of the features announced last week for Revit 2020. It’s great to see Dynamo 2.1 integrated, for instance: It seems the Dynamo version is being tied specifically to Revit, which is an interesting development. I assume this is driven by the need to manage complexity of end-user environment configuration, but I do wonder whether it will impact the ability for users to absorb changes delivered by the Dynamo team. But that’s the trade-off between control and flexibility, I suppose: we’ll see how it works out. In addition, the... 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 →

Bringing geometry from Dynamo into Revit

It’s been a quiet week on the blogging front, mainly because of the May 1st holiday on Tuesday, but also because I’ve been heads-down on projects I can’t really talk much about. One thing that does seem worth sharing is an approach we’ve been using to take geometry from Dynamo into Revit. The project itself relates to the use of Generative Design for urban planning. I can’t yet talk about the generative aspect – which is extremely cool – but once the design is basically finalised there’s a need to bring the geometry into Revit. The ideal scenario would... Read more →

DevDays Online

For those of you who (like me) missed this year’s in-person DevDays – or perhaps have colleagues who would benefit from seeing sessions you managed to attend yourself in Las Vegas or elsewhere – you’ll be interested to hear that DevDays Online will be disseminating all that DevDays goodness over the wire during the month of February. The great news is that this isn’t being limited to ADN members: anyone can sign up and attend. The sessions will also be recorded, in case any are at times that don’t work for you. You can register to attend the various... Read more →

VR guinea pigs

On Friday we had our first external visitors to the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel. Jose and Erich came across from Amstein + Walthert, an engineering firm headquartered in Zurich. Jose had reached out to me – we’ve been in contact a few times, over the years – as he’d read about the VR room on this blog and was curious to try it out. The room still isn’t 100% ready – we’re waiting for some furniture to show up – but it seemed a good opportunity to try out some of our VR demos on live volunteers. Here’s... Read more →

Autodesk LIVE in the Vive

I’ve finally found the time to get one of the new Demons bound to my service installed with Autodesk VRED, Revit and LIVE. I had some teething issues getting the HTC Vive to work: my rookie mistake was thinking I could connect it to a DisplayPort via a basic DP –> HDMI dongle. This was enough for the PC – and Steam VR – to detect it, but not enough for anything to show inside the HMD. After a phone consult with Merten Stroetzel, I fixed it by having it come off the DVI port (another option would be... Read more →

Autodesk LIVE now supports VR

I’ve been waiting for this piece of news for months: Autodesk LIVE – the “one-click” publishing workflow from Revit to high-quality, interactive 3D visualization courtesy of Stingray – now supports VR via the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift via a public beta. Admittedly it’s more like two (or even three!) clicks, but the clicking does seem altogether painless. Here’s a video showing what’s what: This is great timing, as I’ve just heard that my Demons are at the doorstep (well, Zurich airport). I’ll for sure be kicking the tyres on this workflow over the coming weeks. If you’re curious... Read more →

Reducing the pain of VR content generation: Autodesk LIVE

Some of you may have heard about the launch of a new Autodesk product, last week, that’s focused on generating interactive 3D environments from Revit models. It’s called Autodesk LIVE and is part of the Autodesk LIVE Design umbrella (at least I think I have that the right way around). Autodesk LIVE Design is all about making it easier to apply best-in-class visualization technology from our Media & Entertainment division – who collectively know a few things about high-end rendering and animation, admittedly – to the world of design and engineering. Here’s a video describing how Autodesk LIVE –... Read more →

Getting room information for Revit models in the Forge Viewer

This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they’re just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our “Autodesk Research and IoT” session, which showed room-centric navigation built into... Read more →