Dynamo and Design Computation at Autodesk University

I know many of you have already started the party in Vegas, but here’s a little roundup of what’s happening with Dynamo and Design Computation this week at AU.  I’m afraid most of these events are booked up, but the very nice AU organizers sometimes let more folks into the room if you’re ok with standing.  (That’s the only way I ever got into Fuzzy Math, among others).  If you can’t attend these specific talks and want to talk about any of these topics, please feel free to ping me and we can try and set something up during the week.  

We're also going to be bashing away at codes, nodes, and models at Case's Hackathon on Tuesday night. Hope to see you there!

Computational BIM Workshop
Monday, Dec 2, 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Learn to combine computational design and BIM with Dynamo visual programming and DesignScript. Use computational design to drive an Autodesk® Revit®-based software model. No programming experience necessary.
Ian Keough, Luke Church, Patrick Tierney, Matt Jezyk

FB1952 - Leapfrogging Rhino Grasshopper®: Project Dynamo and Autodesk® 123D® Make for Digital Fabrication

Tuesday, Dec 3, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

– Delfino 4004

Project Dynamo is an experimental "wire diagram"-style scripting environment for Autodesk® Revit®-based software and Autodesk® Vasari software. Autodesk 123D Make software takes 3D models and decomposes them into easy-to-fabricate forms. Combine them together, and you've got a powerful solution for conceptual architectural design, form finding, and fast digital fabrication. In this class we present these new free tools, teach the basics on how to work with them, and show just how quickly they can generate, rationalize, and fabricate form.

60 Minutes Lecture

Jeffrey Mcgrew, Because We Can

AB2586 - Design Computation Symposium

Wednesday, Dec 4, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM

– Lido 3103

This year’s theme is “Computational BIM” and will explore how advanced firms are bridging the gap between Computational Design and Building Information Modeling. We have seen the development of different specializations inside firms and would like to explore the bridges and points of interconnection between the two. There are three areas of interest under this theme:
• Incorporating performance-based design, simulation and analysis.
• Digital fabrication and other modifications to streamline the construction process.
• Lastly, leveraging sensor data both for post-occupancy study and as an input into the design process.
  More . . . 

Symposium

Matt Jezyk, emcee

• Session 1
• Jonatan Schumacher - Thornton Tomasetti
• Greig Paterson - AEDAS R&D
• Juan Betancur / Anthony Viola – Adrian Smith Gordon Gill
• Phil Bernstein - Autodesk
• Session 2
• Nathan Miller / Daniel Davis – CASE
• Scott Crawford - LMN Tech Studio
• Jeff Vaglio - ENCLOS Studio
• Keynote Speaker- Enric Ruiz-Geli  - Cloud 9

AB2551 - Enhanced Parametric Design with Dynamo Visual Programming for Autodesk® Revit® and Autodesk® Vasari™.
Thursday, Dec 5, 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM
– Marcello 4404
This lecture introduces participants to the fundamentals of visual programming within the Autodesk Vasari and Autodesk Revit conceptual design environment. Custom code gives users the ability to efficiently automate many design tasks while also enabling new generative design capabilities. This lecture shows how to compose useful scripts using Dynamo Visual Programming for Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Vasari software. The lecture provides users with resources and step-by-step examples for automating geometry creation, adjusting family parameters using external data, and sharing information with different design platforms.
90 Minutes Lecture
Zach Kron

AB3362-L - Enhanced Parametric Design with Dynamo Visual Programming for Autodesk® Revit® and Autodesk® Vasari™
Thursday Dec 5, 2:30 PM
- Marcello 4505
This Hands-on Lab introduces participants to the fundamentals of visual programming within the Autodesk Vasari and Autodesk Revit conceptual design environment. Custom code gives users the ability to efficiently automate many design tasks while also enabling new generative design capabilities.  Users will try out resources and step-by-step examples for automating geometry creation, adjusting family parameters using external data, and sharing information with different design platforms.
75 Minutes Hands-on Lab
Zach Kron

Dynamo 0.6.2 update release

Dynamo is getting bigger, stronger, and faster by the day.  Check out the 0.6.2 build here. As always we have a truckload of fixes and improvments, here are some:

New Samples and updated documentation
While we are very psyched to have some time with folks at AU to talk about design computation, we've also prepared some new documentations for those who can't make it out to Vegas.  Our written tutorial has been in need of an update for some time.  Now called Dynamo Visual Programming for Design (previously Programming for non-programmers), we have revised a number of the existing tutorials, but also have brand new sections on Lists, Color, and Data Interop.  We have also done some cleanup and expansion of the samples that are available in the Help, Samples dropdown menu.   In particular, we have more datasets around lists, color, data import/export, and file sharing (Package Manager).  If you have been hesitant to get involved in Dynamo in the past, start with these documents and we'll have you up and running in no time.

Visualization
Knowing what you are making and seeing the relationship between nodes and data is supremely important.  With Dynamo working on top of Revit, there is a distinction between making geometry and making Revit elements.  By visualizing any geometric entity in the background of your Dynamo canvas, we are hoping to make the distinction more fluid, but it also gives us the opportunity to increase the quality of the information.  For instance, selecting nodes highlights the geometry that is created, and selecting the geometry highlights the nodes that created it.  We are going to continue to expand how we handle this sort of information and welcome your feedback on what works and what doesn't.
- Increased speed of display
- Background Preview elements highlight when nodes are selected
- Selection of Solids in background highlights nodes
- Resizable Watch 3d windows
- Point and Curve numbering available in node right click "Show Label"

Geometric Operations
- More forgiving inputs for Solid Geometry creation
- Solid Primitives: Boxes, Cylinder, Sphere, Torus
- extraction of Data from Revit elements.  Use Get Family Location to get single origin location from regular families and all placement points from panels and adaptive components.
- XYZ and Vector improvements:  Normalize, Dot product, components, polar and spherical coordinates.  Extract Transform Basis for x, y, and z vector components. XYZ by distance offset from origin.
- Curve Plane Intersection
- transform origin node
- plane from reference plane.
- line by start point direction and length
- More!

General User Interface and Navigation improvements
- Drag and Drop dyn files into canvas to open
- Mouse-less navigation
- No limit to the size of canvas
- Preview data bubbles on nodes
- Browser reorganization
- Search Improvements

Other new nodes and node enhancements
- List handling.  Most nodes now can take lists and lists of lists.  In the past, many nodes needed data to be flattened.  Now nodes will inspect their input and automatically dig deeper into the contents to find the data they need.
RaaS - Cloud based Daylighting Analysis.  More on this later, but we now how the infrastructure to execute cloud based daylighting analysis, retrieve the data and drive it back into the model.
- Added an interval node to Web Request
- Equal can now compare all data types
- Updates to Arduino. Use delimiter instead of new lines.
- Get Family Location now takes single origin and multi-pick placement families
- Asin, Acos, Atan
- Wall and Floor Creation nodes.  WARNING!  Recreated, not modified on change.
- integer slider
- STL export (from file menu)
- Default values added to many nodes
- Separate nodes for solid boolean operations

More Dynamo Sample files

Are you looking for more examples of how to wire stuff up in Dynamo?  There is a large collection of samples available on the Github repository that we use for testing the tools and making sure everything still works as we continue developing.

https://github.com/ikeough/Dynamo/tree/master/test

This folder is divided up into core, pkgs, and Revit.

The core functionality deals with nodes and operations that are independent of Revit, things like list management, math, conditional statements.  You may also note that there are samples here that deal with geometry.  These examples are using the Autodesk Shape Manager geometry kernel (ASM), and reflect development we are working on to be able to expand beyond the geometric capabilities of Revit.  This geometry is still pretty experimental, so it does not yet connect up to Revit (although you can export to SAT.)

Pkgs folder is entirely concerned with making sure that the package manager continues to work. You can download any samples here from the package manager anyway

The Revit folder houses samples that are entirely about operations specific to Revit.  Revit solids creation, family placements, view manipulations, etc.  All of these tests involve some amount of interaction with the Revit document.

In theory, we should have samples that reference EVERY node that is available in Dynamo . . . we aren't there yet, but we are working on it.  If you are looking for a particular node and you can't find an sample for it in this repo, please drop us a note.  You need it, and we need a test to cover it.

Thanks
Z

Let's do some (more) Dynamo at AU

Were you unable to get a seat for the Thursday afternoon Dynamo class?  We added a lecture Thursday morning with essentially the same content, so bring your laptop with Dynamo installed and we'll drop some parametric knowledge!

Thursday, Dec 5, 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM

AB2551 - Enhanced Parametric Design with Dynamo Visual Programming for Autodesk® Revit® and Autodesk® Vasari™.

·        Zach Kron - Principal Design Strategist, Autodesk

This lecture introduces participants to the fundamentals of visual programming within the Autodesk Vasari and Autodesk Revit conceptual design environment. Custom code gives users the ability to efficiently automate many design tasks while also enabling new generative design capabilities. This lecture shows how to compose useful scripts using Dynamo Visual Programming for Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Vasari software. The lecture provides users with resources and step-by-step examples for automating geometry creation, adjusting family parameters using external data, and sharing information with different design platforms.

Additional Information

Top of Form

Class Discipline:

Architecture, Structural Engineering, Education

Conferences:

Autodesk University

Bottom of Form

Class Format:

Lecture

Class Length:

1h 30m

Happy Halloween V

(Ritchie Jackson, in solidarity with the Boston Red Sox, submitted the proper interpretation of a pumpkin carving.  I'm under slept, so it took me a little while to figure that one out.)

But on to the BIMkins!  A lovely batch again this year, with segmented orange harvest season parametric goodness.

The Goodest

This years award for the pumpkin that shows all that is harmonious and ordered, hack free and quantifiable in a parametric pumpkin goes to Alfredo Medina.
Alfredo Medina's MEP pumpkin asks the question "have you ever scheduled a pumpkin?"

And what exactly are we scheduling?  All MEP fixtures!  Ducts, connectors, conduits, all counted and measured.
And you don't have to look too closely before asking . . . is that a commode nose?

Yes . . .. yes it is.
Download Alfredo's pumpkin from here.

The Baddest

Kelvin Tam's PumPin
The award for the pumpkin embodying uncanny scariness, a serious and terrifying aspect.

Something happened to the staff at Buildz in the late 80's.  We all uniformly have a debilitating terror associated with the Pinhead character from Hellraiser.
Don't get us wrong Kelvin.  We appreciate the deft handling of surface normals, and the satisfying bounce and spring in the resizable and pleasingly rounded aspect of this submission.  All masterful.

But Manni, the summer intern (who thinks we are still paying into his direct deposit and hasn't gone back to school) hasn't been able to sleep in his nest in the server room since seeing this.  And Franz, our web guru, LEED expert, and coffee gopher, has been completely useless . . . just rocking back and forth muttering "come to daddy"  So, thanks for that, Kelvin.

Download Kelvin's PumPin from here

The Mostest Parametric

Philip Chan's the Nightmare Before Halloween.
Remember those little rubber squeezy toys that, when you sat on it, or gave it to your dog, the eyes would pop out like a chihuahua on amphetamines?

Exactly!
Well, unlike the chihuahua, this one has a an actual check box to pop out the eyes.
The scale factor can go any size 1 or below, which changes the head size. You can control the smile length (mouth_length) as well as the teeth number. It's also hella big . . . coming in at a hefty 241mb, which Philip attributes to the rather elaborate eyelashes

We tend to agree.  (Also, since when do pumpkins have eyelashes?)

Philip also gives a shout out to Kelvin Tam and Andy Milburn for the tips and tricks he has learned from them to make this pumpkin.

Download Philip's pumpkin from here.

Best in Breed/Off topic

We really don't know what to do with Andy Milburn's fabulous stuff anymore. Last year it was close enough to pumpkin based that we welcomed his Sleeping Beauty/Archimboldo extravaganza of harvest vegetables into the general arena of pumpkin carving.  This year we are treated to another BIM opera of taste, color, form, and visual excitement . . . and once again it is a stunning tour of the parametric capabilities of Revit.

But it just isn't a pumpkin carving!
It is however an 11 blog post long study in proportion, perspective, perception, art history and MEP hash pipes.   Words fail, yet again Andy.  Thanks so much for being you. And dear readers, please please please frequent Andy's site for some profound insights.
Read more about this work and download the models from here.

A final heartfelt thank you to all our contestants.  Philip, Kelvin, Alfredo, and Andy, please send in your mailing addresses and shirt sizes!

Late Pumpkins

The team at Buildz is extending the deadline for pumpkin submissions!  Please submit before dawn (approx at 7am eastern standard) Oct 29!

4 days to Pumpkin!

Structure your weekend accordingly!
(and check out the Giant Pumpkin Wikispace if you are looking for inspiration)