VASA
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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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The topic for this post relates to a project I've been working on for a few weeks, now. We've taken a complex set of spatial analyses - that use our favourite voxel-based architectural space analysis Dynamo package, VASA - and have translated them to work directly in the browser. (This translation process isn't really the subject of this series, but it's pretty interesting, nonetheless, and it's mostly what I was working on during the recent trip to Munich for the DevCon. Most of the Dynamo code was fairly easy to translate, although things like the automatic lacing of nodes meant…
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In my last post I mentioned my trip to Las Vegas for this year's Autodesk-internal TechX event. This post summarizes the whole week, to give a taste for how these events go. Things started on Sunday evening at the Allē Lounge on 66 roof bar at Resorts World, where Autodesk's technical leadership community got together for a welcome reception. The view was spectacular!I have made a lot of friends at Autodesk, over the years, and TechX is my main chance to reconnect with many of them. I've known Alan Quinton since my days living in the Bay Area (back in…
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It's that time off year again: our internal Autodesk geekfest (called TechX) is being held this week in Las Vegas at the Resorts World Hotel. (It's held in a different city every year.) I've come across to attend a Technical Leadership Forum on Monday, and then present a TechX session on using WebAssembly to create a Forma extension (in this case using VASA) on Tuesday. I'll also be participating in a number of other activities before heading home on Friday. As I wanted to be here in time for a reception on the Sunday night, I headed across on Saturday…
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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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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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A very quick update on my holiday "fun". After a bit of work I managed to combine two VASA voxel models - one for the visibility cone and one for its intersection with Forma's site surroundings, something we saw last time - into a single Forma mesh. You can hopefully see that the performance is very decent, and the translucent, fog-like effect of the cone to be a reasonable visual complement to the intersection area. I ended up going through the extra effort to combine them both into a single mesh - putting the vertices together as well as their…
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This week I'm up in the mountains with my family. It's my younger children's winter half-term break, but as I do have a few meetings to attend during the week I decided to only take half days off: snowboarding in the morning and working in the afternoons. I found some time between meetings to work on the VASA inside Forma prototype. My goal for the week was to have the visibility cones displayed for our proposal building - something we saw in the last few posts - intersect with the surrounding geometry, whether other buildings or greenery of some kind.…
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This week I've been continuing some of the work I did during the recent Forma Hackathon in Oslo. Part of this was using the Forma Elements API to extract information about buildings included in the "proposal" being developed. For the Hackathon I'd hardcoded the size of the buildings - the number of floors and the heights of each floor - but the Forma team (thanks, Vilde!) has been helping me figure out how to get this information from Forma. In a nutshell, it's possible to get the grossFloorAreaPolygons for the building of interest and then analyze the associated data: 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: 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.