Today is the third and final conference day. My day started with a class led by Lillian Smith and Matt Jezyk. I wasn't sure what to think of the class before going because the description made it sound like it was just going to cover some conceptual energy modeling stuff. Well, in short, it did. But on a whole different level.
Matt and Lillian are some of the original team that helped develop Revit (before Autodesk acquired it) and now their jobs inside of Autodesk are to test, tune, and push all kinds of cool new things to the limits. With the assistance of dynamo, Lillian illustrated some examples of iterating through conceptual masses rotations and parameters to find optimal sizes, shapes, and footprint based on the suns location. Very cool.
Then, Matt demonstrated how he is exploring exterior hardware (such as Raspberry pi) with simple sensors to control parameters inside Revit. The possibilities of these types of experiments are exciting to think about. Imagine when retrofitting a building you can collect data in a single room and know the perfect size and shape of a window... Or maybe the exact distance your sun shading should be... And that's just the tip of the ice berg.
My next class was a lab demonstration by
Zach Kron. Those of you who have followed my blog may know who Zach is and the cool stuff he does. Minus the sub-freezing temperature in the lab and all the tweets about how crazy Marcello's class was next door Zach's lab was pretty awesome. He went through the different ways of moving from Revit to fabrication. And not just CNC machines and crazy 3D printers but simple cost effective ways of "printing" your model.
I'm pretty excited to explore deeper into some of the methods Zach showed us because I think it will be super valuable for students. I have seen, and have used, so many different methods for creating physical models out of my Revit models. I know for a fact some of my methods and others I have seen are no where near as easy as Zach's.
My last and final class (before the Glorious Gadgets presentation) is a class on Lumion. Again, if you have followed the blog over the years you'd know that I am constantly looking at different visualization options for Revit (especially "real time" visualization methods). I have played around with Lumion in the past and was excited to see someone who really knows how to use it demonstrate it.
What I concluded out of the Lumion class was two-fold:
1. Lumion free is worthless and doesn't give you enough stuff to really understand how powerful it is.
2. There is not a single good looking real time rendering solution that can go directly from Revit without passing through Max or reconstructions materials.
It's a damn shame but if you want high quality renderings like ones produced
using VRay, or real time visualization with the quality and
effects of CryEngine, you will be managing two sets of materials or more. The ones inside Revit and the ones inside of Max... Maybe even more after you leave Max....
The final presentation before the gala dinner was "glorious gadgets". Here is a brief list of what was displayed... (I was going to link them all but linking on an iPad and Blogger is not fun..)
- 3d printing materials.
- MIT smart sand
- electronic nails
- 3D doodler
- DPR robot layout
- project cyborg : 4d printing... Ted talks
- sphere-o
- robo bees
- robotic dragonfly
- aerial laser scanner - penn state
- crazy Russian with quadrocopter
- kuratis
- pivothead glasses
- leap motion
- paper tab
- initions ar
- holographic immersion technology
- optical zoom contact lens
- IBM movie with atoms
- illumi room: Microsoft
Last, but not least, mark your calendars for June 19-21st, 2014.... Revit Technology Conference will be in Chicago!
