HAPPY FEBRUARY!
Its a short month, so let's get right to it!
EVENTS
Our last event was with the Women in Architecture committee on January 28 featuring Nicole Koltick of the Design Futures Lab at Drexel University. Nicole presented a number of projects from her lab, utilizing computationally designed geometries, novel material research, and number of different digital fabrication techniques. If you didn't get a chance to make it to the event, you can still check out their projects and publications at the Design Futures Lab website. Thanks again to Nicole, to WIA for co-hosting, and to Microsol for their sponsorship.
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Back by popular demand, our next meeting will be another session of Dynamo 101: Getting Started with Dynamo on Thursday February 27. Whether you've been using Dynamo for years or are just starting to dip your toes into visual programming, having an understanding of the fundamentals is key. Come learn the basics with Uchenna Okere, founder and CEO of RevitGods, and former PDUG co-lead. Uchenna will take us through a few step-by-step tutorials for common Dynamo tasks, as well as show where to go to continue expanding your Dynamo horizons. This month, we'll be hosted by the Diversified Lighting Resource Center, located in the Bourse, right off of Independence Mall. Food and beverages will be provided by our sponsor Microsol. For more information or to register, check out the Dynamo 101 Eventbrite page. This event will be worth 1 AIA Learning Unit.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
PDUG NEEDS YOUR HELP TO GROW:
As you may be aware, PDUG is entirely volunteer run, which means that all of the great content we bring to you throughout the year couldn't happen without individuals giving their time to help organize, plan, and present. We love providing this service to our digital design community, but we could use your help to grow our membership and expand our offerings. That's why we're putting out a general call for volunteers. If you're interested in helping us to find new content and speakers, organize meetings and events, or get the word out about our community, let us know! More information will be coming out soon on our website and at the next few meetings, but please drop us a line if this is something you think you can help us out with.
DYNAMO TIPS OF THE MONTH
WHAT THE L: LISTS, LACING, AND LEVELS:
Understanding and manipulating data structures is one of the fundamental tasks in creating effective Dynamo scripts, but there can be a lot of complexity involved in these basic building blocks. The Dynamo Primer section on Lists has some good descriptions of the general functions of lists, however, people often get confused by two nuances: lacing, and levels. Lacing is the way you tell Dynamo how two lists interact with each other, such as when drawing a line between a list of start points and a list of end points. Levels are the way lists are nested inside of other lists, which can be controlled using 'List @ Level'. These three articles from the Simply Complex blog give great examples of how to use the List @ Level functions in nodes. This article from Azoros gives a good demonstration of how lacing and levels can interact in a number of different ways.
AUTOMATING VIEW CREATION:
If you attended our November Show and Tell meeting at L2P, you saw PDUG member Joe Walton present his workflow for automating documentation of panelized facades using Dynamo and Excel scripting. Recently, Konrad Sobon of archi+lab began posting a series of articles outlining a similar workflow for documenting curtain walls using Dynamo with some archi-lab.net package custom nodes. This first article demonstrates how to automate the creation of individual plans for each wall, name each view logically, and crop the plans to a bounding box around the wall. Future articles promise to demonstrate creation of corresponding elevations and automated dimensioning of elements. This is a great tutorial that could give you some ideas for automating your own view and sheet creation.