Autodesk
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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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Over the last few months I've been working with my colleagues in The Living to add important – but still slightly speculative – capabilities into the Generative Urban Design tool we've been working on for Van Wijnen. The opportunity presented itself back at Autodesk University 2018, when Lorenzo Villaggi and I were discussing the state of the world over a few beers. It seemed absolutely clear, from our perspective, that given where we are today – thinking about global politics, the climate and civil liberties – it seems inevitable that the next thing to hit will be the zombie apocalypse.…
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On April 5th-6th, 2019 in London, the UK Dynamo User Group is holding its first ever Dynamo Hackathon. Several members of the Dynamo and Refinery teams will be there, as well as yours truly (I'll only be there on the 5th, though, as I have family commitments over the weekend). If you'd like to participate, you do need to move quickly: today (March 19th) is the last day that submissions will be accepted. (This deadline really crept up on me: I've been meaning to post about this for the last week or so, but was busy on other things… now…
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Last week I thoroughly enjoyed a short week at the first Forge Accelerator in Dublin. (It was short – for me – because I arrived on Monday afternoon and headed home, already, at Thursday lunchtime.) It was only my second time ever to visit Ireland, but the second in just a few months, and my next trip across is already planned for June (if one doesn't happen sooner). I was staying across the River Liffey from the office, and enjoyed the stroll across a convenient pedestrian bridge, even if the wind and harmonic resonance sometimes made me question the wisdom…
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A question came up during this week's Forge Accelerator in Dublin that I thought would be of broader interest. It related to the fact that the Forge viewer's default behaviour when you double-click the background and perform a zoom-to-fit isn't always desirable. In this case the developer was fine with a zoom-to-fit being performed, but felt the resultant view wasn't a good enough fit. Here's the default zoom level on double-click in Dasher 360, for instance: As you can see the model remains quite far from the camera. The good news is that debugging into the Forge viewer source, you…
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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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There's a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what's coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It's also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year's DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don't worry if that time's inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk Developer…
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Today was a fantastic day. Members of the BIM 360 engineering team based in Gumligen went on their annual ski day and kindly invited me along. We'd originally planned to go on February 1st, but the weather was very poor and so the plan was cancelled. It was rescheduled for today, but only earlier this week – once it was clearly goingto be a gorgeous day. [For those of you who didn't know we have BIM 360 develoment staff based in Switzerland: the team originally came with the C-Plan acquisition – which happened back around the turn of the millenium…
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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…