APS (Forge)

  • 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 such…

  • 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…

  • 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!

  • 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 system",…

  • 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 architect…

  • 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 for…

  • 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 workflows,…

  • 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 to…

  • Our friends at BIM Fórum Brasil have now posted the recording of last week's event on Digital Twins. (If the last link says "We Couldn't Find This Page", just click on the Brazilian flag in the page header.) A big chunk of the session is in Portuguese, but my piece was in English. If you only understand English, I suggest skipping forward to the 20-minute mark. If you've heard me talk about this topic before, you might still want to check out the section on the Dar Smart Bridge project at the 35-minute mark. (Be ready to crank up the…

  • I've been asked to talk about our work on Digital Twins (or Gêmeos Digitais) at the BIM Fórum Brasil event, on Wednesday of this week (January 26th, 2022). The event starts at 10am in Brasilia, which is 2pm in Central Europe, so the timing should work well for Asia, Europe and early birds on the east coast of North America, too. I'll be sharing information on our older projects, as usual, but I'm also planning to showcase some of our more recent (previously unseen) projects. So there's likely to be new information even for people who have seen me talk…