Autodesk is proud to announce it is the lead sponsor of Smartgeometry 2014, an annual event that brings together the world’s leading experts in architectural design with computational tools – from architectural and engineering practices, as well as educational institutions. 

This year’s Smartgeometry  workshops (July 14-17 in Hong Kong at the Chinese University) will focus on “urban compaction”, which is all about complex issues at play in concentrating population and built infrastructure in contemporary high-rise cities. Keynote speakers will showcase major projects and research, sharing opinions on how computational design is helping to reshape today’s cities.

Autodesk will play a key role in the workshops by demonstrating how Building Information Modeling (BIM) empowers designers and architects to use intelligent information earlier in the design process by taking advantage of significant advancements now available for the open source Dynamo technology. After four intense days of workshops, conference attendees will leave with an understanding of how computational BIM enabled by solutions including Dynamo, can help projects back in the office today as well as those yet to come. 

"In my role as the Director of Design Technology at Woods Bagot, I have the opportunity to witness the significant benefits Autodesk software provides our Global Studio as part of our agile design and delivery process,” said Shane Burger of Woods Bagot, a top global design firm and longtime Smartgeometry Workshop organizer. “With Autodesk's commitment to the Smartgeometry Workshops, we will experience a partnership between cutting-edge computational tools like Dynamo and Revit.”

The Latest Advancements for Dynamo

As one of the most active contributors to the open source Dynamo project, Autodesk is excited to share several key advancements to the visual programming environment at sg2014.

For those who are not familiar with Dynamo it provides a visual programming environment that is accessible to designers, allowing them to visually create logic that drives the geometry and behavior of elements and data created within Autodesk Revit. A dedicated team of Autodesk staff actively participates in the open source community for Dynamo and continually adds capabilities to drive the creation of Revit software solutions to help optimize workflows.  

Visual programming tools like Dynamo, shown here, can now be used to script and quantify anything from furniture to buildings and bridges.

Autodesk is demonstrating the new 0.7.1 release of Dynamo at its Smartgeometry exhibit.  New enhancements for Dynamo include:

• A significant refactor of the underlying code to help users expand Dynamo’s capabilities. This new code base has been built from the ground up to encourage exploratory programming, readability and scaling to very large datasets.

Surface Modeling in Dynamo driving Revit elements

• Expansion of geometric capabilities:  Dynamo’s new library of surfacing and solids tools is built upon the same code as Autodesk Fusion and Autodesk Inventor. This code allows for flexibility and versatility of industrial design and manufacturing tools with the rational and exploratory power of computation.

Nodes are nice, but sometimes people want to write code.

• Rich new set of tools for scripting: In addition to Python programming language support in dedicated nodes, Dynamo now allows for direct input of compact and readable code into the graph.  Users can script small or large pieces depending on their comfort level, and interact with the text-based code on the same level as the graph environment.

Dynamo driving an ABB Robot arm after importing the manufacturer’s code library.

• Library Import:  This early stage technology allows for the direct loading of additional tools (such as analysis and extra modeling capabilities) from user-authored libraries of code.  This will help increase the rate at which users can expand the functionality of Dynamo to fit their needs and share workflows with others.  We expect more development here from 3^rd party contributors. For example, check out how participants at a hackathon used this functionality to drive robots!

"We’ve been making software for decades that helps streamline and optimize workflows for architects," said Jim Lynch, vice president, Building & Collaboration Products, Autodesk. "With Dynamo we are pushing into a whole new era of productivity for designers.  We are delighted to be sponsoring Smartgeometry and showcasing Dynamo as a way to enable computational BIM.  Using Dynamo, a designer sets parameters that their project needs to follow, and the computer generates design options that fit the criteria. Designers don’t draw geometry, they make relationships – and ultimately spend more time thinking about and creating the human experience of the building."

For more about Dynamo – open source graphical programming for design – visit http://dynamobim.org.