Happy Holidays all,
The Factory is closed this week for the holidays. One thing that usually means is that in addition to normal holiday family visiting and merriment we have a little time to take a deep breath, collect our thoughts and think about doing something creative (i.e. hacking!). Note there is a long tradition of holiday hacks at autodesk, check out John Walker’s site if you have not seen these. We call these efforts more generically ‘Recharge Time’ as they can happen any time of year, and for me it helps expand the thinking and boost creativity.
It’s quiet now that Christmas day is over. Family comes first, but 1) now that our kids are quietly playing in the basement with new toys and 2) it’s snowing outside and too wet to start the construction I was planning on. That means it’s a good time to start thinking about hacks!
A few of us are working on some cool new nodes in Dynamo recently. Note these are not in the released installer exe yet but are in the github repository.
– Ian is working on a Watch3d node that can draw points and lines into a 3d preview in the node itself. This is really cool and quite useful for doing things that really need to be dynamic like Voronoi diagrams, tessellations and even form-finding relaxations. We have been challenged with getting Revit/Vasari to update the model fast enough to see these updates at a reasonable frame rate. In a nice conversation last Friday amidst holiday shopping and other preparations we talked about creating a 3d watch node and just use openGL to update a preview in the node. Ian then had a revelation: This could even let us show non-visible revit API objects like XYZs and geometry curves and incur even less revit-transaction overhead (hence, even faster processing). Here is what he’s hacked together so far: Watch3d node
– Stephen is doing some cool work under the covers one the F#/Scheme foundation of Dynamo. He has also set up a new blog, http://steellworks.blogspot.com/ to talk about Dynamo underpinnings and other fun topics.
– I did some recent hacking on allowing the internal planes in ReferencePoints to be used as sketchplanes via Dynamo. This allows you to take a cuve, subdivide into nodes, then add profile curves on the perpendicular YZ plane for example. This involved working around a bug in shipping Revit 2013 and Vasari Beta 2 APIs. I’ve also cleaned up some of the other sketchplane and curve nodes to be more generic.
– Tom and I are also hacking on Ardiuno related projects. More on that later in a separate post.
Anyway, hopefully a few more hacks will come out this week. Family comes first of course, but there are always more hours at the beginning or end of the day and visual studio and github will always be there if and when an idea strikes.
Are there specific things missing from Dynamo that you would like to see?
Happy holidays from the factory and the few ragtag members of our group hacking on Dynamo.
-matt