Autodesk Research
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A big – and welcome – update has just been dropped by the Refinery team. I've been waiting for this one, in particular, as I expected it to work better with the MaRS graph. (I'm happy to say that it does – more on this later.) The big ticket item in the v0.35.0 (still Beta) release is an integration with Revit that doesn't require users to open Dynamo. It's at this point that you can probably hear a collective "say what?!?" from existing Refinery users (such as myself, I might add): until now you've been very exposed to Dynamo when…
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The summer is pretty much over (boo) so it's now time to start thinking about AU (yay). If nothing else it's a welcome distraction from the craziness of UK politics (which I'm following from Switzerland, making it presumably slightly less intense than it is for most of my fellow Brits). Before getting more into specific AU plans, a quick reminder that registration for AU 2019 – and the Forge DevCon that precedes it – is open. The Monday pre-conference (this year's is on November 18th) is always chock full of great information: I'm very much looking forward to attending it…
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An interesting post over on the DynamoBIM forum was brought to my attention, and I felt it worth reproducing it here. The Dynamo team have found a way to avoid the need to manually dispose of geometry when creating it from Python or C# – as many package developers do – which they believe will help avoid a whole lot of crashes when working with large geometry sets. If you suspect you're hitting these issues – due to your own code or a package you use – and can help test this new capability, we'd really appeciate you getting in…
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At the beginning of this week I headed back across to the fine city of Zürich for a couple of days. My first port of call on Monday morning was to the NEST building on Empa's Dübendorf campus. (I've talked about NEST many times in the past, as we have an ongoing project to host its digital twin using Dasher 360.) Arriving at the building it was exciting to see the building covered with scaffolding, as the work has started to build the HiLo roof. Here's the breakdown of NEST's units by floor. HiLo is accessible via the 3rd floor.…
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On Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting with Jacques Levy-Bencheton and Antoine Kersse from Paris-based Brunet Saunier Architecture in Geneva. Back in July I'd been asked by Jacques and Jerome Brunet to participate in a project they were working on relating to architecture for hospitals: they're creating a book based on a series of interviews – and their Phylum H work, which Jacques presented at AU 2018, do check out the recording – that will look at architecture of hospitals, both retrospectively and prospectively. My role would be to participate in an interview alongside Jacques – run by Antoine…
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I feel as though I've been neglecting this blog: I've barely managed a post a week for several weeks, now: partly because of family holidays, but also because I've been heads-down on Dasher 360, working on a number of cool new features as well as shoring up some of our older code. Anyway, the kids are now back at school and I expect to have a lot more to talk about during the remaining months leading up to AU 2019. For now I wanted to share some information about the Space Analysis package. Today's post takes a look at a…
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Yesterday the registration for the Forge DevCon and Autodesk University 2019 in Las Vegas opened. It's also the time speakers can find out when their classes our scheduled: it's always with a little apprehension that I find myself checking the schedule. I'm pretty happy with the slots I have, this year, though: As you can see my sessions are both at 10:30am, one on Wednesday November 20th and the other on Thursday November 21st. Which means I should largely be over my jetlag by the time I have to present, which is always good. Although I may well be Vegas-lagged…
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If I'd been anywhere else over the last few weeks, it would certainly have been the fine city of Toronto. The first GD for AEC Intensive Residency hosted there wrapped up, with a number of interesting outcomes generated. One has been shared by Isaac Seah on LinkedIn, and it's well worth looking into the details of how they used Generative Design via Refinery and Dynamo to explore increasing resilience of coastal cities in the face of climate change. It's very interesting stuff. Then there was another GD and Dynamo Hackathon held there, once again with the support of Radu Gidei…
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On Tuesday I flew across to Schipol airport for another Generative Design-heavy few days in Amsterdam: I'd been asked to deliver a keynote as part of a multi-day meeting between Autodesk's account team and Arup's strategic sourcing team. The focus of the presentation was primarily Generative Design with additional information regarding Digital Twins (and specifically MX3D). It was a very nice day, flying out of Zurich. I had a window seat (with a clean window!) for once, so took some photos on take-off and landing. There was lots of farmland at both ends of the trip: the big difference was,…
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While I was having fun in Paris, the participants at our first Generative Design for AEC Intensive Residency were having their own fun in Toronto. Here's a quick recap of the rest of the first week… Tuesday was all about Dynamo and Refinery. Our Product Managers for each presented their technologies and dug into some specifics on how to use them. First up was Sol Amour, PM for Dynamo. Next was Lilli Smith, PM for Refinery. Simon Breslav then dove more deeply into Project Rediscover (something I'll myself be talking about at AU 2019 in Las Vegas, so I'll definitely…