Dynamo
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On Sunday morning I headed across to Geneva Airport for my trip to Autodesk University 2024 in San Diego.The trip itself didn't start very smoothly: I couldn't check in online - I suspect having two passports, only one of which has a valid US ESTA - meant that the airline flagged me for manual review. I really need to be more careful with my API (not the one I work with usually ๐ in future.Anyway, this check-in fail led to a cascade of irritations, from having to pay for a seat (to avoid being assigned a middle seat on a…
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[My apologies for the click-baity title. I do actually have a list of 5 cool project ideas, if you scroll down the post. So it's not completely dishonest, at least.] In the last post I mentioned a few classes you can sign up for (and that I'm directly or indirectly involved in) from the Tuesday to Thursday of the AU2024 week (October 15th-17th) in San Diego. I now have something to recommend for the Monday of that week, too! In the past we've often had pre-events at AU2024: I wasn't sure whether there would be one this year or not,…
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I've been talking quite a bit about our use of VASA inside Forma via our WebAssembly build of the toolkit (which is still not currently available publicly). I've done quite a lot of work to improve that particular prototype and I'm happy to say it's shaping up nicely: the UX is much better than it was, for instance. I'll be talking about our work on this at an upcoming Autodesk-internal tech conference, and as part of the preparation for this I've spent a few days building a pure Dynamo equivalent of the extension. VASA's Dynamo package is available in the…
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I'm now back from Oslo, and decided to record the demo I delivered there at the end of the Forma Hackathon (or something approximating it, as I used twice as much time as we were each allocated on the day). Here's a photo shared by the event organizers of me talking: Here's the video I recorded this morning: ย ย As I mentioned at the end of the video, the capabilities I've demoed inside this Forma extension could also be implemented using Dynamo for Forma. That's probably something I'll blog more about, at some point, if there's enough interest.
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The recordings and other materials prepared for the two classes I helped present at AU 2023 are now available online. In today's post I'll point you to the first class, entitled "Channeling Minecraft to Analyze Architectural Spaces with VASA and Dynamo". This one was one of the first sessions of AU 2023, and had a very good crowd in attendance. Here are a few photos from the live session. Thanks again to Fernando Malard for snapping them. I already posted a quick summary of the content (without audio) - here that is again. Here is the material posted…
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While preparing for one of my upcoming AU classes, I decided to explore how someone could use VASA - our Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis toolkit - with Forma. Right now Forma is largely focused on conceptual design - taking into account the surrounding urban context - so this thinking was largely focused on how VASA might be used at the urban scale. This is something we've looked at before in the context of FormIt and Dynamo. While a tighter integration is likely to be possible at some point - I'll talk a little more about our work on a WebAssembly…
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Last week we saw a Dynamo graph that imports a point cloud from an ASCII-based format to specify the initial locations for a fun flocking simulation. This week we're going to look at a graph that uses a similar import technique but rather creates a voxel model based on the point cloud: The main difference from the previous import code is that rather than returning a list of Point objects, we've tweaked the code to return 9 doubles for each point that are taken as triangle definitions. The little secret is that the triangle's vertices are coincident: we use the…
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I was thrilled to see a post by Long Nguyen over the weekend announcing his publication of a Dynamo package called WhatTheFlock โ with full source code โ that implements a Boids-like flocking simulation. This work is significant not because ornithologists will use Dynamo to predict or simulate murmurations (although that in itself is a fun thought) but because Long has demonstrated a valuable technique that might be used to implement other arguably more useful types of multi-agent simulation inside Dynamo. Long is using a background process to perform calculations before rendering the results into the Dynamo window. A really…
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Last week Rhys Goldstein and I had a blast joining Sol Amour and Jacob Small during the Dynamo Office Hours session on Packages of Note, something I mentioned in a recent post. We spent some time stepping through a few samples for both Space Analysis and VASA, to give a rough sense of what's involved in using each. Next week I'm heading over to Denmark for the first half of the week, where I'll be attending the APS Sustainability Accelerator in Copenhagen. If you're going to be in Copenhagen next week and want to meet up for a…
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During the next Dynamo Office Hours โ being held on March 9th, 2023 at 1pm EST โ Rhys Goldstein and I will be joining Tiana Dame, Sol Amour and Jacob Small to talk about "Packages of Note", which will include an introduction to the Space Analysis and VASA packages. I'm sure it's going to be a fun event โ it's always a blast catching up with Sol and Jacob โ and a good chance to learn about a few Dynamo packages developed and maintained by Autodesk. The focus will be on introducing the various packages โ rather than going into…