APS (Forge)
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This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan's Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event was…
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Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They're an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award, and…
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I've been having a lot of fun working on projects I can't really blog about, this week – on the one hand hacking Refinery to add some new UI features I thought would be interesting to explore, and on the other hand working in Dynamo to make some architectural changes to the Van Wijnen tool – so I really haven't had much time to blog about anything here. Hopefully I'll have more to talk about during the last few weeks before the holidays. I did just want to publish this video created by my friend and colleague Merry Wang –…
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Among other things, this week, I've been trying to kick-off my AU2018 catch-up viewing. So far I've just had the chance to fill in the keynotes that I missed, so I thought I'd collect those that I could find together for others to view. The first keynote of the Monday's pre-conference events was that of Connect & Construct: Next up was that of the Forge DevCon. Very strangely (for me, anyway) I couldn't attend this one in person, as I was presenting a Connect & Construct session at the same time. Of the main AU event, there was, of course,…
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Like many of you (with some countries unfortunately having been excluded due to privacy regulations) I've just received an awesome customized video about this year's Autodesk University. Here's a link to the one I received, in case you didn't get one yourself. I'm guessing they didn't actually record a custom video – perhaps by training an infinite number of monkey videographers – to make this. Anyway – it was a great job, however it was done. The video was to announce a new web platform for AU content, including the recordings from this year's event. Of my classes two were…
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I really enjoy my job, these days (although frankly that's been true for the majority of my career at Autodesk): I get to work on projects related to IoT (Dasher 360) and to generative design (using Dynamo + Refinery). This is a real privilege, because there's a connection between the two that's tangible and that will become more and more important. It's that connection that I want to talk about today, as this week was the first time I've covered my two areas of focus in a single, in-depth presentation. On Wednesday afternoon I presented a keynote session at the…
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I'm on the train home after a whirlwind week in Las Vegas. Another great AU is "in the bag" and I'm looking forward to getting home to my family. But first a quick recap of the week… I arrived on Saturday night, as usual, and managed to get a decent first night's sleep. On Sunday I did a few things… I checked out the rooms I'd be presenting in during the week, which is always slightly surreal. I wandered along the strip: they'd closed it off for the Rock N Roll Marathon, which apparently caused incredible havoc for those arriving…
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We're in the last few days before the biggest week in my calendar: Autodesk University in Las Vegas. As usual I'm trying my best to conserve strength in the week before the trip, as if preparing for a marathon. (There's actually a half-marathon in Las Vegas on Sunday, so a number of AU attendees are preparing for that as well as AU itself. Utter craziness!) Photo credit: James Marvin Phelps The Sign Says It All II via photopin (license) My handouts are uploaded and my slides are getting close to being presentable. To give you a sense of what's coming,…
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There's just over a week to go before the craziest week of my year (i.e. Autodesk University) kicks off, once again. I've been heads-down preparing various slide-decks and handouts for the big event. Things are in reasonably good shape, but there's still a bit of work left to do. I had a quick glance at the class list – mainly to make sure that I had the classes themselves in my calendar, before people start double-booking me for meetings – and I noticed the numbers of registrations: Here's a list to the various classes with links so you can check…
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We hit a major milestone with our research into smart infrastructure, this week. After a massive push over the last 3-4 weeks (which in itself was built on work done over several years), we were able to deploy a system that measures – and reports in realtime – the performance and usage of the world's first 3D-printed steel bridge. To give you a quick sense of some of the results of this work, here's an image of Dasher 360 showing the 3D model of the bridge with skeletons walking across it with the bridge's accelerometer readings displayed as a heatmap.…