generative design and dynamo blog by weeklydynamo Newsletter Source

Part 2 of a series — a Dynamo tunnel geometry that was already finished, a 33-sheet Excel workbook it had never been wired to, the web viewer built to referee the two, and the Revit add-in at the end of it. Somewhere in the original graph there is a code block that reads 725+625; . The author did not write 1350 , and that choice tells you everything: 725 and 625 were two separate real dimensions, and they were trying to leave a trail. Dynamo gave them arithmetic and nothing else. This post is about what that cost — measured across 32 .dyn files, 137 numeric literals and one dependency trace nine hops deep — and what the graph looked like when it came out the other side. Hardcoding was the correct decision The right utility detail, fully dimensioned. Given a drawing this complete and a deadline, writing the numbers straight into the graph is the rational first move. Concede this first: typing numbers straight into a code block while prototyping geometry is not a bad habit. A...

Part 1 of a series — a Dynamo tunnel geometry that was already finished, a 33-sheet Excel workbook it had never been wired to, the web viewer built to referee the two, and the Revit add-in at the end of it. A working Dynamo graph already existed. It produced the full 3D geometry of a Korean road tunnel project (NATM), 892 m of it, and it ran without errors. The problem was that nothing inside it knew where its numbers came from. This post is about the two artifacts I inherited: a 617-node graph with zero external data references, and a 39-sheet workbook that is a complete, beautiful drawing set for a human being and an unlit maze for a machine. Everything below is measured from the files themselves — static parsing of the graph JSON and cell-level reads of the workbook. What the original graph was actually building The 892 m tunnel solid the original Dynamo graph already produced, shown in the viewer's 3D mirror. The geometry was never the problem — nothing in it was linked...