Autodesk
-
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.…
-
This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I'm sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it'll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there could…
-
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…
-
A new version of Project Refinery is now available for your generative pleasure via the Autodesk Feedback community. It's a pretty big release – being the first since the launch of the public beta at AU 2018 – and has some very interesting features. New Features Refinery installer New sample files 10 times faster Less computing resources used Better initial geometry views Smaller geometry storage on disk Filtering of designs in parallel coordinates Sorting for thumbnail views and table Better progress indicators Pause and resume for studies Refinery Server shutdown occurs automatically on exiting Dynamo Bug Fixes Chinese input names…
-
Happy New Year! I've just come back online after a wonderful (and much-needed) 2-week break. I hope those of you who were lucky enough to get time off at this time of year made the most of it and managed to spend some quality time with your loved ones. (I will admit that since the beginning of this year I've been spending a little time working on a really fun side project, so I can't say I've disconnected completely… but more on this later. 🙂 As I don't really have an image to accompany this post, here's a quick scenic…
-
Today is our last day of work for this calendar year. I spent it in our Gumligen office – Autodesk's main office now in Switzerland – where we had a workshop in the morning followed by a raclette for lunch. Many thanks to all of those involved in organising and preparing the meal: it was a really nice moment. This afternoon I built a quick and dirty Dynamo script that creates Christmas trees… … and then ran it through Project Refinery to generatively design some Christmas trees. Because Christmas. 🙂 It's now time to sign off for 2018. It's been…
-
There's a video that's currently going viral on YouTube – with 35 million views and at #4 on the trending list – wherein a former NASA engineer turned professional YouTuber (sigh) shows how he designed and deployed a super-cool glitter bomb to counter local parcel thieves. It was picked up a few days ago by the BBC, back when it had a mere 6 million views. The video is genuinely fascinating, especially towards the end where it shows footage captured by the integrated mobile phones of various thieves opening it up and triggering explosions of glitter followed by releases of…
-
I couldn't visit Dublin without popping by Autodesk's new office there. So it was that after a great few days with the Kingspan team, I hopped on the Luas green line from Leopardstown and headed into the centre of Dublin. I got off on the edge of the central zone at Charlemont and headed along the canal to the location Google Maps told me to target. Unfortunately, on arriving at Fitzwilliam Place, I came to realise there was a problem with the instructions I'd been getting from Google. It didn't really fit with the image in my head of our…
-
This week I had the chance to make a long-overdue first visit to Ireland. I flew across to Dublin for meetings with Kingspan, a large building products manufacturer. Brian Glancy, Kingspan's Head of BIM Strategy, had organised a session for the people working with BIM in the various Kingspan companies around the world. It was the first time most of the attendees had met one another, and the discussions were extremely interesting: most of the people there work with wildly different toolsets – most containing Autodesk tools, at some level, but many relying heavily on competitive products. The event was…
-
Yesterday I headed across to Esslingen, a town south-east from Zurich, to meet with a large Swiss customer of ours, Basler & Hofmann. They're an independent engineering, planning and consulting company with 600 employees in 4 countries (although most are based here in Switzerland). One of the reasons for meeting in Esslingen was the chance to visit the site of their Office Building Extension eGHA project – the winner of an AEC Excellence Award that was presented at Autodesk University 2018. Our hosts were Mathias Kuhn and Gianluca Genova, who had been in Las Vegas to receive their award, and…