Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Knowledge Pattern - Game Changer

Just got back from a 3 day intensive workshop with Gehry Technologies at the pre-acadia sessions.  It was a session led by Nuri Miller and Neil Meredith and it was focused on knowledge patterns.  Imagine being able to script the insertion of powercopies and change the count or modify the replicated part and have the software re-insert the new part in seconds.  Your wish has been granted, and I know how to do it now.  For anyone that has inserted hundreds of parts 'by hand' before you appreciate this.  For others, I am way off in tech-geek land.  Knowledge pattern tutorials will proliferate paramod.net!

While I appreciated the workshop, I must say that the ACADIA planning leaves much to be desired.  Next time you advertise the workshop in Chicago make note that Evanston is NOT Chicago and is a 1 hour public transportation trek.  Everything was downtown but the Digital Project and EcoTech sessions.  Maybe Rhino bribed the ACADIA planner?  In any case, I would like to get a refund for the 6 hours I spent on a crowded train.  Or if you organize a shuttle bus, maybe it should pick people up at the conference hotel not 4 miles away.  Maybe I should also request a refund for the difference between a hotel in Evanston and the expensive conference hotel I booked in Chicago where I thought the conference was.  I am feeling a bit better, deep breaths.  I was starting to like the seclusion offered by our sequestered location until today when the classroom above us was also being used by a different conference group that was demo-ing hammer drills into the concrete slab.  I'll stop now for fear of coming off like an international cry-baby.  I just don't understand the thinking.  Every participant had their own laptops so it was not that the software was only available outside the city limits.

I met a bunch of great people all using the same tools in different ways, clamoring to share stories and approaches.  I sat next to an old friend (Mark Weston) so that was fun too.  It was fun to watch Mark drive the instructors crazy with his desires to make his parts use random numbers and pull in information from the stock market to produce curves.  AEC Industry software meets Mr. Wizard!  Not to mention his own special brand of names for variables and files.

Here are a couple of images from the part I was working on today.  The color is produced by the script that color codes the panels based on location and aperature depth.


1 comment:

John Marshall said...

I would like to add that Shaumburg, Illinois is also not Chicago. "Progress Through Thoughtful Planning" is the byline for the City of Shaumburg, Illinois. This actually means "build Logan's Run-like conference venues near a major metropolis and they will come - often and repeatedly, like lemmings".