Through the Interface

About Bristlebots

My world seems to be filled with robots, these days, whether seeing how they can be used in architecture and construction, animating them inside Forge, or seeing them 3D print steel bridges (I’m at MX3D again, this week). It makes me think I should probably dust off my HoloLens app for making robots dance in mixed reality: once we’re using data inside the Forge viewer-powered Dasher 360 to show the position of a robot at a particular moment in time, it’s hardly a huge leap to show that in XR. Anyway, I should get to the point… Given this... Read more →

Animating robots in the Forge viewer

The inspiration for this post has come from a variety of sources. (Feel free to skip this preamble where I talk about the history of the project: as much as anything it’s so I remember myself how things happened when I come back to this post at some point in the future. ;-) My colleague, Simon Breslav, worked on an initial implementation in Dasher 360 that animated robots – and even mapped stress information to their surfaces – for a demo shown at AU 2017, back when I was travelling around the world with my family. One of the... Read more →

When in Rome

It’s been a great few days in Rome, at the Forge team’s first ever Roman accelerator. Things kicked off on Monday morning, as we occupied the conference room at Rimond’s office in Rome’s Trastevere district. As is usual at these events, there are a number of companies doing really interesting things: several of them have specifically mentioned Dasher 360 as their inspiration for visualizing additional (even IoT) data in the Forge viewer. Very cool. Yesterday I joined Peter Schlipf to visit Roma Tre University, where we spent some time with Stefano Converso from the Architectural Design department, as well... Read more →

Counting down to Forge DevCon Europe

We’re just a few weeks away from the 2nd European edition of the Forge DevCon. It’s being held in Darmstadt on October 16th, the day before this year’s AU Germany. This is a free, English-language* event where you can learn all about the capabilities that are currently (and will soon be) available through the Forge platform. (* I’ve seen a number of emails asking whether the event will be in German or English, presumably due to its proximity with a German-language event. I can confirm that the entire program will be in English.) Here are some “reasons to attend”,... Read more →

Rob|Arch 2018

I spent the latter half of last week at ETH Zurich, attending a conference entitled “Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art and Design 2018”, or Rob|Arch 2018 for short. This is the biennial conference where luminaries in the AEC industry get together and plot how robots will replace millions of construction jobs over the years to come. Not really, of course: the big thrust of this conference is to work out how robotic fabrication technology might (or must) be applied to meet the housing needs of a planet whose population is expected to increase by nearly 30% over the coming... Read more →

The Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK and importing custom point clouds into AutoCAD

This isn’t exactly new news, but it was to me. Today I found out we’ve made a very useful component, the Autodesk Reality Solutions SDK, available to the public. This is a C++ library that allows you to read and write Autodesk’s RCP and RCS formats, as well as to create custom plugins for new point cloud definition formats. ADN members can log in today and download the SDK and accompanying samples. Non-members can send an email and get access to it that way. There’s a particular reason I find this to be important news: it will enable developers... Read more →

Displaying streamlines in the Forge viewer

The integration of the MeshLine library into the Forge viewer – which we’re using for the display of skeleton data, as we saw last time – has opened the door to displaying all kinds of other cool stuff. Back in 2014 colleagues in Autodesk Research published a SimAUD paper entitled “Towards Visualization of Simulated Occupants and their Interactions with Buildings at Multiple Time Scales”. It explored the use of various visualization techniques to display how a building’s simulated occupants interact with it. One of these techniques was called Speedlines (we also use the term Streamline): The original visualizations were... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 3

Right then… now it’s time for the really fun stuff. Looking back over this series of posts, we introduced it then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons and animated skeletons with fixed meshes attached. Today we’ll dig into making our animated skeletons properly visible. Having given up on using a SkinnedMesh, the remaining option was to tweak the underlying display of the SkeletonHelper object. This proved challenging for all sorts of reasons. Back in Chrome 55, it seems the ability to show lines with widths broke in three.js. This was fixed in... Read more →

Don’t miss these sessions at the Forge DevCon in Las Vegas

The Forge DevCon is a great place to dive deeply into what’s possible – and what will soon be possible – with the Forge platform. I’m involved in the organisation of the Las Vegas DevCon – being held on November 12-13, 2018 – in that I help lead one of the tracks. When the first DevCon took place, back in 2016, I was track-lead for the AR/VR track… these days I’m co-track-lead with my old friend Cyrille Fauvel for the Complementary Technologies track, which incorporates topics such as AR/VR, AI and robotics. All the really fun stuff, basically. ;-)... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 2

We introduced the series, then looked at adding simple geometry to the Forge viewer, followed by animated skeletons. Now it’s time to look at approaches for making these skeletons more visible. As mentioned last time, today’s post is a bit of a “non-post”: it talks about adding a SkinnedMesh to be animated alongside an underlying skeleton, which we already know doesn’t currently work inside the Forge viewer. But it’s instructive to see the process in case either the situation changes or someone wants the code for a pure three.js application. Basically it’s possible to add a SkinnedMesh into a... Read more →

Displaying skeletons in the Forge viewer – Part 1

After introducing the series and seeing how we can add simple vertex and edge geometry to a scene, today we’re going to start digging into the guts of the problem of how to display skeletons in the Forge viewer. This proved to be a really interesting process: I ended up learning a lot about how the Forge viewer and the three.js library it uses both work. I don’t recall the full history of the Forge viewer’s use of three.js, but recent releases have all depended on r71. This can present challenges, largely because three.js is (at the time of... Read more →

Adding 3D geometry to a scene in the Forge viewer

In the last post I introduced the series where I’ll be talking about the journey I’ve been going through to add skeletion data inside Dasher 360 (which is, of course, based on the Forge viewer). The first step I took along this path was to find a way to add simple 3D geometry into an existing scene inside the viewer. This is something we do in a limited way inside Dasher – we use point clouds to represent the locations of sensors, for instance – but I wanted to work out the right approach for doing this for data... Read more →

Forge skeletons and disappearing signs

It’s been a strange few days. It’s the very last week anyone will be working from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office. This really hit home when the Autodesk name and logo were removed from the building, last Friday. Photo credit: Estelle Ormrod I salvaged an A (the were signs on the front and back of the building, so this wasn’t the only one) for my daughter’s bedroom. It’ll be some kind of reminder of the wonderful years we’ve all spent here. The staff departures have been staggered, over the last 6 months or so: there have been leaving aperos for people... Read more →

A visit to regenHU and farewell to Philippe

I had the pleasure of a visit from Peter Schlipf of the Forge Partner Development team, this week. Peter had come across for a number of reasons, but the first “task” was to catch up with Philippe Leefsma and wish him well for the next stage in his career. We met for an “apero” and then headed into Neuchatel for a lovely farewell dinner at the historic Cardinal brasserie. It was a lovely evening, but bittersweet: I’m very happy to see Philippe moving into an interesting role at an Autodesk customer, but sad that we won’t be working together... Read more →

From Neuchatel to Appenzell

On August 1st we celebrated my first Swiss National Day as a Swiss National. After clearing up, on the 2nd, we packed our camping gear into a couple of trailers and started cycling across Switzerland, from Neuchatel towards Appenzell. Our aim for the first day was fairly modest: to go from our home to a campsite on the shore of the Lac de Bienne. We ended up fighting a couple of fierce inclines (by the side of a lake, no less!) so made much slower progress than Google Maps had predicted. (This did help us recalibrate expectations for the... Read more →

BrickBot – an Autodesk Research project exploring the future of manufacturing

Last month Fast Company published an article about an interesting project Autodesk Research has been working on for a number of years: internally the project was known as LEGOBot, but now that it’s being talked about publicly it has understandably been renamed to BrickBot. BrickBot is a really cool project that’s built on two core ideas: robots are stupid and engineering is expensive. Robots need a lot of help to be told what to do, but telling them what to do is neither straightforward (today) nor flexible: you need to code for specific conditions, and if those conditions change... Read more →

Registration is now open for Autodesk University, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct 2018

Last Thursday registration opened for the latest edition of Autodesk University and its pre-conference events, Forge DevCon and Connect & Construct. I’ve just gone ahead and registered: I’ll arrive in Las Vegas on Saturday November 10th (to give myself a fighting chance of handling my jetlag before things kick off properly on Monday the 12th) and head home on the Thursday evening. My classes, this year, fall during the pre-conference and the first day of AU proper, which is nice, especially as it means you won’t need a full AU pass to attend (you can find pricing of Monday... Read more →

Happy August 1st!

Today is the Swiss National Day, commemorating the creation of the Old Swiss Confederacy back in 1291. It’s an important one for me, as it’s my first as a Swiss citizen. My kids have presented me with this fine creation: Yesterday we stopped down by the lake to watch fireworks and eat some traditional pea soup (or watch others eating it, in my case, as I don’t eat meat). Today the garden has been appropriately Swissified, and we’ll soon be roasting cervelas and melting raclette. After that I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off work (and blogging, although... Read more →

Introducing Warnamo, a Dynamo package for managing warnings and errors

One of the highlights of last weekend’s AEC Hackathon in Berlin was getting to meet Michael and Keith from the Dynamo team. They’d delivered a pre-event workshop on the Friday and stayed on to tutor the many Dynamo-centric teams participating in the weekend’s Hackathon. On afternoon on Saturday Keith and Michael presented an additional session that briefly mentioned Refinery (the optimization engine for Dynamo that’s currently in Beta) but focused mainly on the API infrastructure that enabled its integration into Dynamo: the View Extension API. It was really helpful for me to see how it’s possible to extend Dynamo... Read more →

My AU 2018 classes… all about Generative Design for AEC

I’ve seen a few of these postings via LinkedIn, and thought it was time to post something of my own. As mentioned previously, I submitted three class proposals for this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. Two out of three have been accepted: the ones focused on Generative Design for AEC. I’m really excited about the first one, in particular, and it seems like it may also be featured in one of the pre-conference events (more on this once things get confirmed). I think it’ll be really cool to look at the project we’ve been working on with Van... Read more →