April 2020
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One of my pet peeves with Dynamo – as I typically use it standalone from Revit – is the quality of the text you can generate as graphics: the Dynamo Text package will generate curves (actually lots of little lines) that represent the outline of your characters, but they often look quite lame depending on your zoom level. Actually scratch that – they look lame irrespective of the zoom level. Sigh. Anyway – today I finally dug into what I needed to do to create better-looking text as output from your Dynamo graphs. My first attempt was to create a…
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For two of the last three weeks I've been lurking in virtual Forge Accelerators: as I mentioned last time, the Forge team has pivoted to virtual events after this year's Accelerator in Sydney was forced online due to a COVID-related office closure. (Incidentally I need to get used to the team's new name: they recently switched from Forge Partner Development to Developer Advocacy and Support. FPD is no more, the future is DAS!) The DAS team has since gone "all in" on these events, holding two during the month of April. The first one was codenamed Metropolis and ran during…
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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 helpful…
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Late last week I received the news that an article co-written by Rhys Goldstein, Divyae Mittal and myself has been published in the RuMoer, TU Delft's periodical for the building technologist. Divyae – who is wrapping up his Master's degree at TU Delft, in spite of the CORVID-19 pandemic – reached out as his thesis project makes use of both SyDEVS – a discrete event simulation framework Rhys has written and open sourced – and the Space Analysis Dynamo package. Divyae thought it worth covering both packages and his thesis in the RuMoer, and we wholeheartedly agreed! While my name…
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This post contains a "call to action" for the community and presents an opportunity for people to start using Generative Design in the context of a global pandemic. Please do read (or skip) through to the end! I've been really encouraged by the energy people have focused on helping others since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Just inside Autodesk there have been a number of COVID-19-related projects proposed and started, and all four of our Technology Centers are cranking out personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers. A special shout-out should go to our former Maker-in-Chief, Carl Bass, who…
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Last week I talked about an API that we've added to Dasher, allowing it to be controlled via URL parameters. I expect this to be useful when integrating Dasher into other systems – as you can control the initial view of data, such as for a particular sensor during a specific time period – but I also expect it to be helpful for people to collaborate. It's with this in mind that over the long Easter weekend I started building a "sharing" feature into Dasher. You can think of it as a URL builder, much in the way that you…
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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 Optimize…
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In the last post I neglected to remind people of Kiosk Mode, a great way to see some of Dasher's features. Simply click on the filmstrip button at the bottom of Dasher's vertical toolbar and move the cursor off to the side (this just stops the button from staying highlighted when the cursor gets hidden). Then just sit back and see how Dasher works. Here are some posts talking about how this works. Kiosk Mode knows about various Dasher extensions and can automate their usage. There's a fair amount of complexity in the mechanism, but it works well enough. Over…
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After many months of effort, we now have an updated version of Project Dasher available on dasher360.com. (The project is still very much active research, so for now you're able to try it out with the model of the NEST building, accessible via the Demo button on the main page.) The major feature of this update is the new timeline, which was designed by Autodesk Research and developed by our partner CCTech. This component has been under development for over a year, so it's really exciting to finally get it into people's hands. Beyond that, you should really give the…
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Things have changed a lot at Autodesk, over the last few weeks, as they have for most people on the planet. Working from home has become the norm: for someone who works from home, anyway, it's been interesting to see the playing field levelled a little: with everyone working remotely the dynamic in meetings has been very different. I have to admit that in many ways it's refreshing for me, personally, especially when combined with the fact I'm able to focus on "real" work, without having the regular distraction of travel to deal with. People are even socializing via video…