Imagine My City, a not-for-profit organization driven to enable and increase productive and meaningful community-based collaboration in issues related to our built environment, has been working with a number of partners including Autodesk and George Brown College to create a virtual reality model of Toronto. The City VR project showcases the use of mobile and immersive technologies to empower citizens to reimagine and share their aspirations about the kind of city they would like to inhabit.
Autodesk Research will be at Autodesk University 2014 and the theme this year is the Future of How Things are Made.
The Research team will be displaying some of their work and views on the future in the Exhibit Hall and you are cordially invited to come by, have a look, be inspired and share your feedback.
In the Exhibit Hall, you'll find people and displays for the following projects:
Cyborg
Draco and Kitty
Dreamcatcher
Hy-Fi
Cyborg
Autodesk is researching how design tools can be applied to synthetic biology, problems like fighting diseases, such as cancer, and improving drug discovery.
Draco and Kitty
Answering the challenge to make animation (Draco) and authoring interactive content (Kitty) as easy as drawing, you not only see this in action but try out it out for yourself.
Dreamcatcher
Showing that computers can help you design - not just produce design documentation - structurally sound and interesting pieces based on your specified goals.
Hy-Fi
If you missed Hy-Fi on display at New York's MoMA, you can get a little taste of it at AU. Haven't heard of Hy-Fi or its creators The Living? Check out this video showing Hy-Fi and some of what The Living are doing.
The Autodesk University Exhibit Hall will be open at the following times:
Tuesday, December 2: 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. for the Community Reception
Wednesday, December 3: 11:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Wednesday, December 3: 6:30 p.m. - 9:30 p.m. for the AUGI Reception
Thursday, December 4: 11:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Beyond the Exhibit Hall, there will be a number of presentations from Research team members:
The Design Computation Symposium will explore how advanced firms are bridging the gap between Computational Design and Building Information Modeling. Speaker topics will include both pragmatic aspects of digital design in daily practice, and forward thinking ideas and research. There are three main areas of interest under this theme:
Performance-based design, simulation and analysis.
Three experts from the Office of the CTO will talk about some unbelievable developments in the fields of synthetic biology, advanced MFG design, and infinite computing.
Would you like to get your designs out of the screen and into your hands? While 3D printing has become an exceedingly useful tool for demonstrating and prototyping design ideas, preparing files for 3D printing can be frustrating and time consuming. In this 90-minute course we will generate a complex surface in the Fusion 360 3D CAD design app that takes advantage of the T-Splines modeling technology. We will bring this model into Revit software where it will serve as the base for a panelized solid form using the Dynamo visual programming language extension. Once we have generated the complex parametric model to the required specifications, we will export the model to a STL file for 3D printing. A 2-step process of healing the mesh for optimal printing is described with the meshmixer tool and Project Miller. Finally, we will inspect the mesh and prepare it for output to various 3D printing platforms.
Great news! Autodesk Research was awarded a Best Talk Award at the 2014 User Interface Software and Technology Syposium (UIST) for Kitty, a tool that makes it possible to draw interactive experiences.
The team was very happy to present their research throughout the week, as you can in the photos below:
Afterwards, the team celebrates with an awesome display of their fire dancing skills (as a researcher it is important to have many varied interests and abilities)
Some members of the team enjoy simpler pursuits
Beyond the awards and activities, there was food. Team members who didn't get to attend UIST were sad to miss the fancy breakfasts this year.
At least one UIST attendee found a new use for Oculus - making food better :-)
Hopefully you're familiar with Project Draco, our answer to the question:
Can animation be made as easy as drawing?
We've discussed Draco here on the blog and have a video overview of what we were showing at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver to catch you up.
Kitty builds on Draco and looks into the animation question and asks:
Can we make Draco interactive?
In the image above you'll see two interactions happening:
the user can move the dragon's head into the frame
the user can move the baby dragon into the pot
With the egg going into the pot, you'll notice that the monster's eyesfollow the egg and that the egg causes a particle splash as it enters the pot.
This opens up a lot of possibilities for iteractive storytelling.
How would children like this for an ebook on a tablet?
Does it make web content more dynamic?
Could it be useful for game authoring?
Is it useful for training and instructions?
Kitty builds on Draco but how does it work?
We've introduced a simple node network to define the relationships between objects. Let's look at the picture below of a different egg going into a different pot - yes we like cooking here at Autodesk Research.
We've set up the scene as you would in Draco with steam and splashing particles coming from the pot. In the following image you can see that we have a simple node graph that gets overlaid on the picture. This helps reduce UI while keeping the events and relationships in context.
You can see the path the egg takes to get into the pot as well as two blue circles representing the particle events. The user is making a connection from the egg to the circle on the right to tell the splash to only happen when the egg is close.
When the connection is made between the nodes, the egg path and the splash, the user can then choose how to link the events. In this case the movement of the egg is connected to the emission of the particles. The inlaid square defines the timing of the event.
The curve can be redrawn to control what happens. The horizontal axis represents the object that triggers the event (the egg). The vertical axis represents the object that is being driven (the particle splash). When the line is flat, there are no particles being emitted.
In this image below we explore using Kitty to explain how an electric doorbell works.
You can learn more about Kitty and see how easy it is to author these kinds of behaviours in the video below. More information is available on the Draco project page.
We'll be presenting this latest research at this year's UIST, the ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium, in Hawaii in October. If you are there, stop by to see the demo or attend the talk.
Whether you are at UIST or not, please let us know what you think about these tools and the possibilities that they open up for you.
We've done a bunch of work with 3D printing. Some of the most notable work has been the work with Meshmixer, geometry preparation and creating branching support structures so that your objects come out faster, with less waste and no drooping. In the image below, our example support structure uses 75% less plastic than the manufacturer-provided supports, which also reduces print time by one hour.
There's another nice benefit to these branching support structures - they break off your print really easily for fast finishing and clean-up. If you haven't worked with them, you should get a copy of the latest Meshmixer and try them out. While you're at it, you can also play with some interesting tools to subtract components of your model for a more interesting statue, like we used in our example above.
Beyond researching 3D printing things, it's important to play and explore what is possible with 3D printing.
Part of the fun in 3D printing is creating something unique. Autodesk Research was fortunate to be involved in providing 3D printed awards for the Real Time Live! event at SIGGRAPH 2014. Real-Time Live! is:
An interactive extravaganza that celebrates the real-time achievements of evil geniuses, mad scientists, and creative computer gods! Real-Time Live! shows off the latest trends and techniques for pushing the boundaries of interactive visuals.
The Real-Time Live! logo looks like this:
The 2D artwork was taken into Autodesk Maya and turned into a printable 3D model.
Here are a couple photos of the awards as they came out of our Objet printer and then drying off after being cleaned with the water jet.
The finished awards look quite nice and are a goood compliment to the cool things that the Real-Time Live! participants showed this year, from video game technology, to film production to flying and helping vision impaired people see better. Like all of SIGGRAPH, it was very inspiring. Congratulations to everyone involved!
