Through the Interface

Getting started with Forge

For this week’s talk for 10,000 codeurs, my friend Jaime Rosales kindly put together some great slides that give a really succinct introduction to the Forge platform, including a number of helpful links to various online resources. I made a few edits to make sure people could use the links in the exported PDF along with a few cosmetic tweaks, but otherwise the content is all Jaime’s. At some point I may take the time to convert the content into native web elements (there are some cool animated GIFs for the various demos, for instance), but in the meantime... Read more →

Announcing Floppy Fridays!

The situation in Switzerland regarding the pandemic is looking bleak, at the moment (and no, yodelling isn’t helping). The number of cases per-capita is currently ahead of the US, and the critical infrastructure in my home canton is starting to get overwhelmed, hence us being put on “red alert”. I’m expecting our kids to be sent home any day now, but we’ll see what the authorities decide. Anyway, this has definitely been at the forefront of my thinking, of late, when it comes to what we’ll end up doing to keep busy during the upcoming confinement. People who follow... Read more →

My new AI chairs

After having talked about Autodesk Research’s collaboration with Philippe Starck and Kartell to create the world’s first mass-produced, generatively-designed (and made from 100% recycled material!) chair, I decided to buy one. Well, two. As I mentioned in the talk I gave at the SDSC-Connect event, I didn’t find a way to get an employee discount, but I’m proud enough of the work done by my colleagues in Research to put more money than I would normally into a couple of plastic chairs. This almost certainly makes my presentation for the SDSC-Connect event the most expensive I’ve ever given, at... Read more →

AU 2020 material is in the bag, a few upcoming talks

This year has been strange at so many levels that it seems a bit petty to highlight one particular area. But preparing material for Autodesk University 2020 has certainly been one such area, and it’s very fresh in the mind of AU speakers around the world. With this year’s event being all digital, it’s clear that the AU team had to find a way to get classes delivered remotely: one option would have been to live-stream them all, but at some point the decision was made to get everything pre-recorded for on-demand delivery. (On-demand classes are not the only... Read more →

Steep roads, waterfalls and outsider art

Our children have been off school for the last two weeks, so I’ve been alternating between preparing my Autodesk University 2020 material and going on excursions with the family. We had planned to visit Kosovo during this break, but as it was on Switzerland’s quarantine list we chose to cancel our flights. Somewhat frustratingly – just the week after – the Swiss Confederation added 15 new countries to the quarantine list and removed only one: Kosovo. So we could have gone, after all. Argh. That said, when we’d planned the trip back in July, I hadn’t realised the timeframe... Read more →

AEC and Forge Hackathons

If you enjoy hackathons – and have the time to spare – then you could spend the next month hacking, should you so desire! Last Friday the 2nd online AEC Hackathon kicked off with its lightning round. The event is about now a week in: it started officially on October 5th, but it really only started in earnest with Friday’s kick-off and lightning round. The event will run until October 25th, so you still have time to find or build a team and participate. It was fun listening to the recording of the lightning round – which was short... Read more →

The new Types By Level panel in Project Dasher

Over the last month or so we’ve been focused on the benefits brought to Project Dasher by combining 2D heatmaps with our traditionally 3D view of the world. We started by creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level, before introducing the idea of overlaying building systems information, too. Most recently we took a sneak peek at the topic of today’s post, a new UI that simplifies access to these 2D (and 3D) heatmaps. The idea came up during a team meeting: as we realised we had this combinatorial... Read more →

My generative design presentation from SDSC-Connect 2020 and a teaser for AU 2020

From one online conference to another. Here’s the recording published by the Swiss Data Science Center for last week’s SDSC-Connect event. I’ve set it to start at the beginning of my session – which in 30 minutes takes a whirlwind look at four generative design projects run by Autodesk Research – but the other sessions are also likely to be of interest to people, so feel free to scrub backwards! Next week I’ll be busy recording my AU 2020 session and finishing up the handout. Here’s a teaser for this year’s all-digital event: I’m supposed to be on holiday,... Read more →

A sneak peek at Dasher’s new Types By Level UI

This week has been a little crazy in terms of presentations. On Monday it kicked off with an internal project review followed by a presentation to a class of Masters students from the University of Southern California (it was a lunchtime session for them, so it was a late evening one for me). It wrapped up yesterday with the generative design session for the Swiss Data Science Center, which despite a few technical hitches (not on my side, thankfully) seemed to go pretty well. I was told there were upwards of 400 attendees registered for the event, but I... Read more →

Register for Thursday’s SDSC-Connect event for free

Earlier this year, the Swiss Data Science Center kindly invited me to deliver a session on generative design at their October 1st SDSC-Connect event, entitled “Enhancing discovery and creativity with AI”. A perfect umbrella topic for a session on GD! The event was originally going to be held in-person in Zurich, but with recent developments it became clear that it would have to be held online. This is bad and good, of course: it’s bad because I won’t get to meet attendees in person – and they sound like a really interesting group of people – and it’s good... Read more →

Dynamo 2.8 is well worth a look!

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Adding building systems to Dasher’s 2D heatmaps

As a recap, so far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, adding lots of them inside Project Dasher, and then making them pinnable per-level. There are two main tasks left for the completed feature – which will form the core of my upcoming class for AU2020 – which are to add information on building systems and to implement a UI to make these new views easier to access. Today we’re focusing on adding building system information. Let’s first step back and talk about why this is important… One of the key insights we’ve... Read more →

Register now for Autodesk University 2020!

It’s been a crazy year, but there’s comfort to be had in certain things going ahead despite the craziness. For me Autodesk University is one of these things: my first AU was back in the year 2000, and I’ve probably only missed a few in the last two decades. This year’s AU experience will be 100% virtual but also 100% free, so I’m really excited that so many more people will be able to experience AU! As of Wednesday, registration is now open for this year’s AU. It’s quick and easy – no need to fill out credit card... Read more →

Get the latest information on Project Dasher at this week’s KEA BIM Café Talk

I’ve been invited to talk about Project Dasher at the KEA BIM Café Talk on Wednesday of this week. Many thanks to Aske Strandberg for organising and moderating this event. It’s being held online (of course) at 4pm CET on Wednesday September 16th. The session is primarily targeted at students from KEA – the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology – but guests are very welcome. If you’d like to join, feel free to sign up here. I’ll be sharing a number of really cool enhancements I’ve been making to Dasher during the pandemic-related travel ban – only some... Read more →

Pinning 2D heatmaps per-level in Project Dasher

So far in this series we’ve looked at creating 2D heatmaps, making them resizable, and then adding lots of them inside Project Dasher. I’ve mentioned a few times – and I’ve seen the same commented via LinkedIn – that viewing data from multiple building floors at the same time would be beneficial. As a reminder, here’s what happens when you change floors with the current implementation: The UX to implement some kind of “pinning” mechanism was non-trivial, but possible. The way I ended up thinking about this was as follows: We still want generic panels that will show data... Read more →

Viewing multiple heatmaps inside Project Dasher

In the last couple of posts in this series, we looked at how we’ve been able to include a 2D heatmap view inside Project Dasher and make it resizable via a square, transparent panel. This post is really just to let you know that we’ve now extended the capability to support multiple heatmaps, which is particularly interesting if you want to compare data from different sensor types across the floor of a building. (I often say that the value in a tool like Dasher is in its ability to correlate multiple streams of data – such as occupancy with... Read more →

25 years with Autodesk

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of my joining Autodesk. The years have literally flown by. To bathe in the nostalgia of the event, I decided to go up into the loft and dig through my old photos, to see what I could find. Here’s one of me that was probably taken around the time I joined Autodesk (at a guess, anyway). Yes, I had long hair, although it was usually tied back: it was only this curly just after it had just been washed (so not very often, ahem). If you could travel back in time and tell my... Read more →

Creating a resizable square panel inside the Forge viewer

In this recent post we looked at a new 2D heatmap capability that we’ve added to Project Dasher. In this post we look at what was needed to make this heatmap resizable – but with a fixed aspect ratio – as well as being movable and displayed with a transparent background. Luckily, this previous post shows how to create a transparent, movable window – which we already use to show our surface shading legend – so we were able to use that as a basis for today’s implementation. Firstly, let’s take a look at it working. Note the fact... Read more →

Project Dasher at Kingspan’s IKON building

A nice article was published recently on Redshift regarding Kingspan’s new IKON building. The article focuses particularly on describing how IKON furthers Kingspan’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. In this post I thought we’d look in a bit more detail at how Autodesk Research has been involved in the IKON project, specifically regarding the deployment of sensor and camera technology to help create a digital twin of IKON inside Project Dasher. IKON is Kingspan’s new headquarters and global innovation centre at Kingscourt in County Cavan, Ireland. Here’s an introductory video that talks about this project and shows a couple... Read more →

Displaying a 2D heatmap when surface shading inside Dasher

A week or two ago, I had a meeting with some colleagues to discuss future needs for Project Dasher. One of these requirements related to an exhibit where we’re going to want to ignore all the 3D visualization of sensor data, and focus on the 2D case (I.e. where we shade a 2D floorplan with the sensor values). When this came up I thought to myself “oh, this could be a good driver for us implementing a 2D workflow inside Dasher”, something I’ve chewed on in the past. This time around, I started off thinking about whether to use... Read more →