generative design and dynamo blog by weeklydynamo Newsletter Source

Over the past year I built five different 3D viewers for AEC work - routing, structural review, tunnel sections, a Revit perspective tool, a spreadsheet-to-3D viewer. Before I trusted my own instincts about how to build them, I did two things: I profiled all five on the same GPU, and I studied how 32 other AEC 3D tools - Autodesk Forma, Speckle, TestFit, xeokit, Bentley iTwin, and more - solve the same problem. This post is both halves: what the industry chose, and then what my own measurements showed. The short version is that rendering is a commodity, and the interesting decisions are everywhere else. Part 1 - What 32 AEC viewers actually chose I expected a mess of proprietary engines. Instead the choices collapse into six patterns, and the deciding question is never "which renderer is best" - it is "what is our actual moat." Pattern Who Why Outcome A. Off-the-shelf web engine (three.js / Babylon) Forma, Speckle, That Open, VIM, Snaptrude "Rendering is a ...

 Part 8 of a series — a Dynamo tunnel geometry that was already finished, a 39-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. On 14 July the AI stopped guessing and wrote a list of things it could not decide. Seven questions, thirteen evidence crops, one document. The answers came back the same night, and one of them — a single sentence about a block of concrete nobody had bothered to name — collapsed three other questions and cleared a month of round trips before dawn. Part 4 summarised those seven questions in a table. That table is the most compressed thing in the whole series, and compression hid the interesting part. The answer to Q2 did not arrive because the engineer suddenly became more forthcoming. It arrived because the question had a shape that made it cheap to answer. This part goes through all seven — the wording, the interim handling, why the machine could not settle it alone, what ...

 Part 3 of a series — a Dynamo tunnel geometry that was already finished, a 39-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. Every drawing carries two kinds of line that look nearly identical to a machine and completely different to a person. One is the edge of real concrete. The other is a graphic whose only job is to say how big that concrete is. This post is about the second kind being easier for a computer to find than the first. That inversion cost more of the 45 days than anything else. 1. Two layers on every sheet Automatic line detection on the left utility detail. Red and blue mark detected segments — and they cover the dimension lines exactly as confidently as they cover the wall of the duct. The same detector on the right detail. Every extension line, witness line and leader is a clean straight segment. Nothing in the raster says which of them is a real edge. The traced outl...