Autodesk Research
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I've seen a few of these postings via LinkedIn, and thought it was time to post something of my own. As mentioned previously, I submitted three class proposals for this year's Autodesk University in Las Vegas. Two out of three have been accepted: the ones focused on Generative Design for AEC. I'm really excited about the first one, in particular, and it seems like it may also be featured in one of the pre-conference events (more on this once things get confirmed). I think it'll be really cool to look at the project we've been working on with Van Wijnen…
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On Sunday night I hopped back across to Birmingham airport in the UK in order to visit the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC) in Coventry on Monday. The weather has been gorgeous in the UK for the last month or more, so everything was a little parched. That, in combination with the fact England was still in the running for the World Cup, meant the country seemed imbued with optimism: seemingly welcome respite from the Brexit-related anguish the UK has been suffering since the EU referendum. After a nice dinner with old friends and a quick sleep at a hotel, I…
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The call for proposals for Autodesk University 2018 has ended and people have the opportunity for vote for their favourite classes. Head on over to this page and start voting for the classes you'd like to see at AU 2018. From my side, I've submitted three different class proposals for AU 2018. I don't expect (or want!) them all to make the cut, but I'd be happy to receive your votes for the ones that interest you most. My favourite proposal is actually a class that would have 3 speakers, two from Autodesk and one from Van Wijnen. The plan…
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I'm on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there's a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted is…
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On Monday afternoon I flew back across to the Netherlands, this time from Bern airport. My main purpose for this trip was to attend the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, or SimAUD, in Delft. I've been staying at an Airbnb a little way out of the centre of town, the advantage being I'm just across from a really pretty park. Delft is a university town and is a bit like a smaller, easier version of Amsterdam. There are canals everywhere… … and almost everyone seems to travel around by bike: I rented a bike from a local…
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Yesterday I headed across to Zürich for a number of different meetings. One that I wanted to talk about on this blog is my visit to Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and – in particular – their NEST building. NEST is a testbed and showcase for emerging techniques in the construction and operation of buildings. They have a heavy focus on modularization, pre-fabrication and robotics. I'd been invited to visit by Reto Largo, Director of NEST, along with Philipp Mueller from Autodesk's Education team. Reto wanted to hear about Dasher 360, while I wanted to…
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Over the last few days I've been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance. To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here's what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher 360:…
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It's been a quiet week on the blogging front, mainly because of the May 1st holiday on Tuesday, but also because I've been heads-down on projects I can't really talk much about. One thing that does seem worth sharing is an approach we've been using to take geometry from Dynamo into Revit. The project itself relates to the use of Generative Design for urban planning. I can't yet talk about the generative aspect – which is extremely cool – but once the design is basically finalised there's a need to bring the geometry into Revit. The ideal scenario would be…
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In a recent post I mentioned a trip to Amsterdam to visit with Van Wijnen and MX3D. The press embargo has now lifted on MX3D's bridge – as you can see from a slew of recent articles – so I can now share a bit more information about that part of the visit. During that week I spent 2.5 days at MX3D, mostly to participate in discussions about how best to instrument the bridge with sensors. Autodesk started our collaboration with MX3D around the vision of using generative design for the creation of the bridge's form… during the last year…
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Colleagues in Autodesk's Office of the CTO (OCTO) – who work in the robotics lab on Pier 9 – have just released the code for a new tool called Mimic. Mimic is an open source plugin – with the Python code posted on GitHub – that allows you to simulate and control the use of a number of industrial robots (including various robots from ABB and KUKA). Here's a screenshot: I'm really happy to see OCTO releasing open source projects in this way. If you're interested in contributing to the project, be sure to check out the developer notes. There's…