Autodesk Research
-
After a couple of interesting days in Berlin, last week – which for now I'm not going to talk about in detail, maybe another time – I've come across to the UK. This is my first trip since the UK formally left the EU, even if it's still part of the customs union for the remainder of the year. I feel very strongly that this is a bad thing for the country – and for the world – but there you go. There's nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. Yesterday morning I headed to Battersea to visit the…
-
On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa's Dübendorf campus. I've posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it's 16-screen media wall.…
-
An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn't working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge viewer…
-
Some of you may already have seen Augusto's tweet showing the "Visual Clusters" Forge viewer extension that has been developed by the BIM 360 Design team. It really is super-cool: the extension takes the content of the model loaded in the Forge viewer and clusters it spatially based on the value of the various items' category property. The extension was first published in v7.6 of the Forge viewer, so it's been around a little while. If you don't have a Forge viewer application to test it out with, fear not! Petr Broz has added the capability to load extensions into…
-
On Sunday morning I booked an Uber to get across to Bangalore airport for my flight to Pune. It was still early, so the only other being in the street was a cow. It was busier when I arrived at Bangalore airport. And more Christmassy, too. I got myself some idli sambar (the breakfast is better at the domestic terminal than the international one, by all accounts), and then waited by the gate for my SpiceJet flight. The flight was slightly delayed, but basically uneventful – it takes a little over an hour to get from Bangalore to Pune. This…
-
I mentioned last time that I was expecting to publish some posts about Autodesk University 2019 material I found particularly compelling (now that I've had the chance to consume some). I didn't get to watch as many recordings as I'd have liked – for now – but I did manage to watch the rest of a class of which I only caught the first few minutes before having to run to another meeting in Las Vegas, my friend Lorenzo Villaggi's session on Geometry Systems. There are two main pieces to generative design systems – at least in the way they're…
-
The Autodesk University elves have been working day and night over the last few weeks to prepare 674 AU class recordings for posting to web. Some of my classes were livestreamed, this year, so I have already posted recordings for these. This post is just me gathering the various recordings together in a single post. Before that, though, I did promise a festive photo for each of the coming posts. Here's one I took this morning, when we woke to find that St Nicholas had passed by the house. The feast of St Nicholas – which is celebrated throughout much…
-
As the festive season is upon us, I've decided to start each post with a seasonal photo. Here's me with a reindeer/dog (reindog?) in the lobby of the hotel we stayed at in Hoofddorp. As mentioned in the last post, Sander Lijbers made the most of my vague suggestion to meet with a customer or two during my visit to the Netherlands by inviting many of the accounts he manages to a one-day event in our Amsterdam office. Everyone accepted – with some even flying in from the UK – so we had a really good, engaged group! Sander had…
-
After not being good for very much last week – while recovering from AU in Las Vegas – I headed back across to the Netherlands on Monday afternoon. In Geneva airport there was a large stuffed reindeer just sitting there. A huge thanks to Ben Rand for pointing out the obvious: that Rudolph is probably a big fan of Project Dasher! 🙂 I took the train from Schipol down to Delft, which was feeling very festive. I love Dutch train stations and the connectivity between multi- and two-wheeled transport. I had a very nice room in a hotel close to…
-
Wednesday and Thursday were my busy days at this year's Autodesk University in Las Vegas. After a breakfast meeting with a colleague from Toronto, I had my first class of AU2019 to deliver. It was a live-streamed class that was focused on advanced visualization (primarily of IoT data) using the Forge viewer. Somewhat unfortunately the class was scheduled at the same time as the AEC mainstage (more on this later), but that basically just meant that the room wasn't completely full and that most of the attendees were Forge-focused. As it was live-streamed the class recording is already available: Since…