Autodesk Research
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Today the call for proposals opens for AU 2019 – and its accompanying Forge DevCon – in Las Vegas. I was informed of this fact by an email which very creepily contained a photo of me describing something or other with my hands. (Jeremy Tammik speculated that I was once again talking about zombies. 🙂 As one door opens, another one closes: this is also the last day you can submit classes for AU Germany and the Forge DevCon in Darmstadt. It's important to note that AU Germany is a German-language event, while its DevCon is in English. Here are…
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I've been spending a lot of time talking about the work we're doing with Dynamo and Refinery – especially as it relates to our plan to share a version of the "Project Rediscover" graph at AU London 2019. But there's more my team is hoping to be able to share in mid-June at Tobacco Dock: we're working towards having a version of the NEST building – in particular the DFAB House, a showcase for digital fabrication in the building industry – inside Dasher 360. Ideally it'll be displayed on a large touchscreen for people to interact with. [See below for…
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The last few days have been a lot of fun, as some of you will have noticed on my Twitter or LinkedIn feeds. Since the last post, where I announced the fact we've been working on Project Rediscover, I've spent quite a bit of time reworking the graph to have more reusable chunks. Here's a recent snapshot of the graph: In the last post, the subgraph that generates text for the metrics and the radar chart as geometry – both to the right of the image – was hardcoded to the exact metrics we were dealing with. To make it…
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I've talked before about Project Discover: the project where The Living used generative design to explore layout options for the new Autodesk office in the MaRS district of Toronto. As the project was run before Project Refinery was available – and so didn't make use of a Refinery-compatible graph – we've been working on a new iteration of the tool that can be used with the Autodesk GD toolset for AEC workflows (i.e. Dynamo + Refinery). Internally we're affectionately referring to this project as Project Rediscover. Things are moving along well: thanks largely to the Space Analysis package (and yes,…
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As a follow-up to this recent post, I decided to add a couple of metrics to the previous graph and try it out with Refinery. And here's the updated graph for you to try for yourselves. The first metric relates to the pathfinding capability, and I've called it "Access". There are a few things going on, here: for sure we want to measure the shortest average path, but also to disqualify (or at least penalise) designs that don't have paths to all of of our points of interest (i.e. the corners). But I also wanted to weight the results to…
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Many of you will have been happy to see the extent of the features announced last week for Revit 2020. It's great to see Dynamo 2.1 integrated, for instance: It seems the Dynamo version is being tied specifically to Revit, which is an interesting development. I assume this is driven by the need to manage complexity of end-user environment configuration, but I do wonder whether it will impact the ability for users to absorb changes delivered by the Dynamo team. But that's the trade-off between control and flexibility, I suppose: we'll see how it works out. In addition, the new…
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I've been meaning to create a post introducing the use of the Space Analysis package for a few weeks, now, but with various trips it's been impossible to find the time. Anyway, here it is, at last. You can start by downloading the graph we'll be walking through in this post. Here's a picture of the graph, with its graphics generated. The graph is fairly simple: it loads some geometry from an SAT file that we'll use as the definition of our barriers for the SpaceLattice. I'm using an SAT file we posted with the campus layout example that defines…
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What. A. Week. The first day of the world's UK Dynamo User Group's first Hackathon was an appropriate way to finish off a hectic but super-rewarding week. [Correction: it seems I misunderstood something… there have been other Dynamo Hackathons, apparently. Sorry about that.] I woke up early, this morning, and took a stroll around Hyde Park. I checked out from my hotel, picking up my cufflinks, on the way. (In a random episode during check-in, the afternoon before, I'd lent them to a fellow hotel guest – who was dressed to the nines for a charity event but had managed…
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It was a fun (and slightly hectic) 16 hours in Barcelona. After heading back to the hotel from the OTx awards dinner – and whipping out a quick blog post – I got up and enjoyed the view from the 26th floor for a few minutes… … before heading across to the last day of OTX (One Team eXtension) EMEA, and the second day of the Generative Design for AEC track. This second day was the first "mixed" track – meaning both sales- and technically-oriented, as the first day had been purely for technical attendees – so it started with…
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This is "one of those weeks", with presentations in Munich on Wednesday, Barcelona on Thursday and London on Friday. I haven't had a week like this since the old DevDays tours. The good old days! I arrived on Tuesday night at Munich Airport. Wednesday's event was the Automotive Innovation Forum in Munich. It's the first time I've attended this event, and it proved to be very interesting: around 560 automotive customers came to the Hilton at Munich Airport to learn about our automotive-related offerings (primarily Alias and VRED but also our generative design tools). The day opened with various keynotes.…