DesignScript
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Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I've worked on. I've enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here's the version from YouTube: Evan's a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there's a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will…
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The project I'm currently working on fits squarely under the umbrella of "Generative Design for Architecture". We're using Dynamo Studio to generate layouts of residential housing – including both individual homes and apartment buildings – with the results quantified in a number of metrics that will be easily explorable by the user of the system. It's the approach The Living – the architectural studio in Autodesk Research doing pioneering work in the generative design space – has used for a number of projects, including Project Discover and the layout of the AU 2017 Exhibit Hall. I came across this video,…
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I'm working alongside several Autodesk Research colleagues on a really large Dynamo graph. We're mostly working in separate instances of the .DYN file – and focusing on different areas of it, as far as possible – and merging the changes together has been a task of which I've taken ownership. At the time of writing, Dynamo doesn't have decent support for multi-user graph editing, nor is its data storage tuned for source control mechanisms such as Git. All of which makes identifying differences between graphs and merging updated areas to be quite challenging. One basic problem that we've had to…
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Now that we've seen a couple of posts showing how to query information about Hue lights via a Philips Hue bridge from Dynamo Studio, it's time for the really fun stuff: controlling lights from Dynamo. To make this happen some changes were needed to the zero-touch node that talks to the Philips Hue API on behalf of Dynamo, mainly to allow the setting of a light's properties. The Philips Hue API allows this to be done either via Hue, Saturation and Brightness or by the XY offset in the CIE colour space. I ended up exposing the ability to set…
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In the last post we looked at some initial code to get basic information about the lights connected to a Philips Hue bridge. In this post we're going to extend the code to expose more information but also to query the bridge repeatedly, allowing the graph to display the latest light colours as they change. Here's a view of the updated graph. A few things have changed: firstly the Bridge object exposes some new information – in our case we can see the names of the lights, but we could also access the names and IDs of the various groups,…
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I mentioned in a recent post that I was chewing on how design apps might connect with building automation systems to display data via lights. My first step along this path was to see how Dynamo Studio might connect into my home's Philips Hue bridge and get information about the "smart" lights it contains. To do this I created a zero-touch node in C# that calls into the Philips Hue API exposed by my local bridge. (To make this piece work you need to follow the steps on this page that show how to create an authorised user ID for…
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As mentioned in a recent post, I'm currently working on a project using Dynamo Studio. It's fun getting back into Dynamo and DesignScript: I helped prototype the initial implementation of DesignScript inside AutoCAD about a decade ago, and I love seeing how the technology has evolved in the meantime. There are a few of us from Autodesk Research working on the project, which is also fun, but in a less literal way. Dynamo doesn't work especially well with source control, as far as I can tell, so there's a fair amount of manual merging of nodes into the master graph.…
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It's been an interesting first week in Autodesk Research. I've had the opportunity to jump into a few projects that are really interesting. One involves the use of generative design tools to perform a number of different analyses on design alternatives for an architectural project, assessing criteria such as maximum team co-location and improving the circulation of people through corridors. One the tools being used for the analysis is Dynamo: something I've been meaning to spend some time with for ages, but finally have good reason to. (Some of you may remember my involvement/interest in the DesignScript project… DesignScript is…
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In case you missed it, last week Scott Sheppard announced the availability of a new version of DesignScript on Autodesk Labs. This release unveils DesignScript Studio which brings a visual programming environment to the DesignScript language. People who are familiar with Rhino Grasshopper or SoftImage's ICE will be aware of the benefits of working with a graphical tool for mapping associations and flows of data. I personally prefer working directly in code, myself, but there are certainly times when this kind of tool can help unravel complexity. The other primary feature is a new lightweight OpenGL-based script execution tool that…
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I arrived yesterday morning in Singapore, coming in on a Singapore Airlines A380 from Zurich. It was a great flight, as far as long-hauls in economy go: comfortable seats with a great choice of films to watch (my favourite on this leg being "The Cloud Atlas", an excellent adaptation of a brilliant novel lent to me by Jeremy Tammik a couple of years ago). I even managed to catch an hour or two of sleep, which is surprising for a daytime flight, even if it landed at 6am local time in Singapore. I rested for a few hours at the…