Autodesk Research
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In advance of next week's AU2019 class entitled "Hands-on with Project Rediscover: generatively designing Autodesk Toronto's office", I'm happy to announce that version 2 of the MaRS graph is now available for download. (Many thanks to Simon Breslav for all his work on the graph, as well as to both Simon and Rhys Goldstein for their hard work making Space Analysis what it is: a cornerstone of Project Rediscover.) While version 1 was about "getting something out there that works", the focus for version 2 was to have something that's more discoverable and understandable. We've done a few things to…
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Colleagues in Autodesk Research are working on some really interesting technology that you can try out at AU2019. There's an Idea Exchange study entitled "Generative Design in VR for Structural Engineering" being held at these times during the conference: Tuesday November 19th, 12pm–3pm and 3:30pm–6pm Wednesday November 20th, 3:30pm–6pm Those interested just need to swing by the Idea Exchange (it's a big space on the way to exhibition hall and will be hard to miss) during these timeslots and let the recruiter know they want to participate in the study. It takes about 15 minutes to complete, and will be…
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I'm currently putting the finishing touches on my material for Autodesk University 2019. To encourage a few last-minute sign-ups, here are a few teaser GIFs from my classes. The first is from the class on Project Rediscover (which is apparently now full at 109 sign-ups, so in quite a small room). I used Capturefinery to create a GIF of quite a large Refinery study, but this time highlighting the congestion in a more 3D context. The second is from the class on Project Dasher – and using Forge for advanced data visualization – which still has 36 spaces in the…
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Things have been quiet on this blog, since my return from Scotland. Mainly because I've been heads-down dealing with preparation for Autodesk University 2019, which I'd love to say was on the horizon, whereas it's – more accurately – coming at top speed around a nearby streetcorner. In less than 3 weeks many us us will be flying to Las Vegas for the latest installment of my favourite annual conference. Today was the deadline for AU speakers to submit class handouts: I managed to submit something for both my classes, so I can now switch focus to the various presentations…
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On Wednesday morning I hopped on the train to Paris, once again, this time to present at Autodesk France's third "Soirée de l'Excellence Française", an invitation-only VIP event for AEC customers in France. (I'd have blogged about it beforehand if the event was open to all, of course.) I arrived at la Gare de Lyon, as usual, and found an interesting art exhibit outside. I walked next door to the citizenM – part of the chain of hotels I've stayed at for AU London, the last two years. It's a fun place to stay, although the switch to turn all…
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The Toronto team has posted a nice video looking back at July's Generative Design for AEC Residency: It was clearly an interesting event – I do hope I'll get to attend the next one. Here's a still I extracted that shows Sol Amour, Dynamo's Product Manager, hacking away at Python inside Dynamo. The Python node is big enough to be clearly visible on the video (the code itself is not, but I'm sure it's about to do something cool). I'm starting to think about next Wednesday's DBEI Hackathon, which has the theme "Generative Design in Practice" and so I'm also…
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After a quick trip to Zurich on Tuesday, on Wednesday I took the train to Paris. I'd booked a hotel that was convenient for our Paris office, and walked there from la Gare de Lyon through le Parc de Bercy. I'd made tentative plans to meet up with friends in the evening, but as they had to cancel (for excellent reasons) I ended up wandering around Bercy Village to get a quick bite to eat. I'm mostly a people person, but I have to admit that having the occasional evening to myself is bit of a treat. (I'll be back…
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Yesterday I was back at the NEST building in Dübendorf for Autodesk's first BIM 360 community event in Switzerland. It was nice to be back there, even if just to see the progress being made on the construction of the HiLo roof. Here's the view from the ground: I also went up to take a few snaps from the roof. You can clearly see the knitted cabling that will provide support for the structure. There were a few people working on the structure, too. (I took my snaps from an open doorway as I didn't want to disturb them.) But…
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After somehow adding support for acoustic analysis to the Space Analysis package, Rhys Goldstein has taken it to the next level by adding support for multiple sound sources. When Rhys first did this he was a little surprised by the results he was seeing. There were some really interesting interference patterns at the boundaries between sound sources: Find this example at %appdata%\Dynamo\Dynamo Core\2.3\packages\SpaceAnalysis\extra\spaceanalysis-acoustics-06-six-points-voronoi-pattern.dyn.(You may need to change the Dynamo version number.) Rhys dug into the field a little more deeply and came across this interesting blog post that highlights the possibility for sounds of similar frequencies to interfere constructively –…
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Today's a big day: Dasher360.com has been updated to let you browse the model and data coming from Empa's amazing NEST building in Zürich, Switzerland. Head on over and give it a try! Here's a quick video introducing the new Dasher 360 (you can also access this from the main Dasher 360 page): Expect the model to improve, over time: we want to include a few additional units – such as the Urban Mining & Recycling unit – as well as increase the number of sensors and remove a few visual artifacts. But in all honesty it's already super-cool, so…