Autodesk Research
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This post is a bit of a grab-bag of various event-related topics. The first one (chronologically, if not in terms of the title above) is the availability of session recordings from the recent CanBIM event: "The Future of Work: Designing Resiliency and Building Work Safety Post-COVID". My own session was entitled "Using Generative Design and Digital Twins to Improve Occupant Well Being". As it was the first session of the day – with a new web streaming platform – there were a few teething issues for the sponsor's introduction (and the session auto-closed a little too promptly, which meant no…
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There's an exciting job posted for a key role in a new project (product?) team at Autodesk named Constructwin. Here's some information from the posting: Do you want the opportunity to be part of a startup environment and have a big impact on a brand-new product? Are you looking to be at the forefront of innovative new technology that will ultimately help people imagine, design, and make a better world? If so, come join the Constructwin team at Autodesk! Our mission is to create Digital Twin technology and solutions that will transform how buildings are designed, built, and operated. I…
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While I announced the sharing feature – and its corresponding API – some time ago, I still had some work to do before it could go live on the Dasher site: largely around supporting timezones properly when specifying time ranges for data display, but there were some other minor tweaks needed, too. Anyway, the feature is ready enough for people to kick the tyres on it, at least. Here's a link which will launch the public Dasher demo for you, taking you straight into a "surface shading" view for C02 values on the 1st floor, bringing up the graph for…
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I have a quick update to share on Dasher, today: I've just pushed live a version to the main Dasher site that enables a core Forge viewer extension to perform visual clustering of model contents. I talked about this back at the beginning of the year, but there was a core change needed to the Forge viewer to make it work for Dasher: specific details are in the blog post I just linked to, but it relates to the fact we rely on the Navisworks format for our models, and these have a different property structure when loaded through Forge.…
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I have the sense that I'm seeing my face too much at the moment (admittedly I'm very attached to it… haha). All I can say, in my defence, is that over the last few weeks I've started to receive more requests to participate in virtual activities. And I've mostly said yes, as it's a reasonable alternative to travelling to meet people, given the current circumstances we're all in. In case you haven't seen these various pieces of virtual content – and you're actually interested – here's a quick round-up of some current and future ones. Getting Simple When my friend…
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As a follow-up to the last post which talked about SimAUD and it's going online, today I wanted to mention some other online resources that might also be of interest to people during these times. The Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich is one of many institutions that have moved their public lectures online and have made them available for anyone to watch. So far I've watched a couple of them live, the second one being by my friend and former colleague, Matt Jezyk, who is now spearheading Tesla's efforts to streamline gigafactory design using techniques such…
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Next week is the annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design (SimAUD, pronounced Sim-Odd). This conference was started a decade ago by my former manager Azam Khan, along with Gabriel Wainer and Ramtin Attar. I've only had the pleasure of attending one SimAUD event – the 2018 edition was held in the Netherlands at TUDelft – but I was hoping/planning to attend this year's in Vienna: a paper submitted by Rhys Goldstein – with Simon Breslav , myself and Azam as co-presenters – was accepted for the conference. Here's a quick photo from a dinner we had in…
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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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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…