Autodesk Research
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After having spent a great few days with the Toronto team, I headed home on Friday afternoon. I did have a little bit of "fun" getting home, though: firstly the UPExpress going from Union Station to Pearson Airport stopped – ostensibly waiting for the right signal – for about 30 minutes. It wasn't a big deal for me, thankfully: I'd left some buffer in my schedule, so still had a little time to wait at the airport. While I did so, for some reason I checked my downloaded Netflix content… none of it played: I kept getting an obscure error…
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I seem to spend quite a bit of time, these days, talking about the new Autodesk office in Toronto. I did visit one part of the office when I came through in July 2017 – on our world tour – but people hadn't, at that point, fully moved across from the former 210 King St East office. So this week was – somewhat surprisingly – the first time I'd actually seen the generatively-designed office space first-hand. Crazy. I've been staying in the Chelsea Hotel – apparently the largest hotel in Canada, with about a thousand rooms – which is conveniently…
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I'm at Zurich airport, waiting for my flight to Frankfurt, from where I'll head onwards to Toronto. (The way over has a stop as the daily direct flight leaves too early for me to comfortably take… at least I can take the direct flight home – a red-eye – on Friday night.) The main purpose for this trip is a team offsite on Thursday, but I'll be spending as much time as I can on Wednesday and Friday working with my Toronto-based colleagues. There are a few Dasher 360-related tasks I need to move forward, while I'm there, and I'm…
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I'm on holiday with my family, this week, enjoying the Bernese Oberland with family and friends. In Toronto – where I'm heading next week – my team-mates are busy trying out the 2D path-finding component I talked about in the last post. Now that Simon Breslav has wrapped the C++ path-finding module created by Rhys Goldstein – building a .NET wrapper and using it from Dynamo – he's started using it to implement a version of the "buzz" metric The Living used for Project Discover. Here's a sneak peek of how it currently looks with one possible layout of the…
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Over the last few weeks colleagues in Autodesk Research have been building the foundations for a space analysis package that can be used for generative design workflows in Dynamo. We'd love to hear from you if you're interested in taking it for a spin. But first, a little background… We've known we've needed to get better performance when analysing 2D and 3D spaces since embarking on the original layout of the new MaRS office in Toronto as part of Project Discover: the approach we had worked well – as I think is clear from the results of the project –…
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This week I decided to take the WebVR/WebXR extension work I did for Van Wijnen to the next level: mainly to integrate metric information in some way into the scene, whether as 3D text objects or via some kind of Heads-Up Display (HUD). But before embarking on this I decided to take another look at the implementation of the HTML client. When I first wrote the HTML page that consumes geometry data from the Refinery server, I decided to use raw JavaScript and WebVR/WebXR calls with three.js. I'd thought briefly about using A-Frame – an awesome framework started by Mozilla…
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There's a lot happening inside Autodesk at the beginning of our Fiscal Year 2020. FY20 has kicked off with a number of internal reorgs in various groups: as part of broader changes, the organisation to which I report – formerly known as OCTO (the Office of the Chief Technology Officer) is being renamed to Autodesk Research. Which is what's been in my own title, anyway, as I belonged to the "research" arm of OCTO before the renaming. While I liked the name OCTO well enough (it brought plenty of opportunities to do cool things with octopuses ;-), I think the…
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The week before last I headed across to Zurich for the day for meetings. During the afternoon I passed by the NEST building in Dübendorf – home of the DFAB House project – to meet with NEST's Director, Reto Largo, and talk more about our plans to collaborate. To learn a bit more about what's happening with this fantastic building, it's worth checking out this session from AU 2018 in Las Vegas delivered by both Reto and Thomas Müller from Mensch und Maschine Schweiz. Our plan is to "Dasherize" the whole building, which has upwards of 2,000 sensors in it.…
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There's great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge's Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here's an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors in…
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Some good news for people who thought they'd missed their chance to speak at this year's Autodesk University in London: the Call For Proposals (CFP) for AU London 2019 has been extended until January 25th, 2019. I love Autodesk University events in general, but the London edition – which I attended for the first time in 2018 – is quickly becoming my favourite, venue-wise. Tobacco Dock is a fabulous place to hold an event, providing the weather gods are smiling. (Last year's event was basically perfect, while the inaugural event in 2017 was very hot, apparently… and I can only…