18 Highlights From Autodesk University 2024
Oct 21, 2024
After skipping last year's event in Las Vegas, I returned to Autodesk University. This year, the event was in San Diego, my first time in the city. I enjoyed the pleasant weather, walked along the port, visited the gorgeous Balboa Park, and experienced the Comic-Con museum.
Here are my highlights and lessons learned from the event, in no particular order.
Note: eventually, Autodesk will open on-demand videos for all the sessions. That should be available on the session link provided for each session below.
1- General Keynote: AI and Olympics
Andrew Anagnost took the stage to share Autodesk's vision. The general session felt similar to last year: AI, AI, AI.
For the AEC industry, Autodesk announced that you'll be able to use an AI chatbot inside Autodesk Construction Cloud and query data inside all your projects. We haven't got many details, though.
We've also heard about Autodesk's involvement as a sponsor of the LA 2028 Olympics.
Some moments in these keynotes reminded me of Paul Wintour's post about Honesty in the AEC industry. It can be hard to distinguish between corporate hype and actual innovation.
2- BIM as a Contract Document with The Revit Kid
It was good to see Jeff, aka the Revit Kid, in person again. He also delivered an amazing session. Jeff has been working for Turner Construction in Connecticut. We've learned insights about a massive project in which BIM is used for contractual documents.
I like Jeff's thinking: the standard workflow is to go from 2D to 3D (design to BIM) to 2D (CDs) to 3D again (construction). This process doesn't make that much sense. What if we skipped a step and went straight from 3D (BIM) to 3D (Construction)?
This is always a contentious topic: what about the legal aspect? Jeff explained how they dealt with it and shared the results of this experiment.
Another quote that resonated: "Until you model it, you don't know the issue exists."
Overall, the session was a love letter to high-quality modeling.
3- Pirros: Content Management for Details
On the expo floor, a specific platform caught my attention: Pirros. It is a Revit plugin for managing content, similar to tools such as Kinship, AVAIL, and UNIFI.
But there is a twist: it's for details only.
My first question to the team was: why should I use this over a plugin that manages all content?
The Pirros team believes details differ from other content and should be organized in specific ways.
Pirros tracks all projects where specific details are being used. If a detail is updated somewhere, you can decide to push the update to all projects. Or you can only select individual ones.
4- The European Invasion
Most of my favorite talks this year were by design technology specialists and BIM managers from Europe, including BIG, 3XN/3GN, Heatherwick, Zaha, and Herzog & de Meuron.
A commonality between all these firms is that they design with Rhino and use plugins such as Rhino Inside and BEAM to recreate the geometry in Revit for documentation. You can see the interoperability workflow of Heatherwick, as showcased by Alfonso Monedero:
European studios also seem to have a stronger culture of sharing and exploring open-source tools.
5- The Circular Economy with Sam Sweeney of 3XN/GXN
Sam Sweeney delivered an absolutely phenomenal talk, explaining how the Copenhagen-based architecture studio 3XN/GXN implements Design Technology.
It was impressive to see how all phases of the design process have been systematized. Similar to Heatherwick, they also use Rhino Inside and BEAM to link Rhino + Revit.
As we sometimes think of BIM as its own little beast, 3XN sees it as one part of the design technology stack that intertwines with design tools.
Sam also showcased their extremely neat and gorgeous BIM standards book.
It's not the first time 3XN/GXN has blown me away. Last year, Alex Ritivoi came to BIM Pure Live to demonstrate the use of ChatGPT with pyRevit to automate project-specific tasks quickly.
It's worth watching the presentation, but the handout also includes additional technical references for BIM managers.
I like this quote from the handout:
"BIM is a tool to facilitate amazing architecture, not the end goal (we must always remember this)—for us, architecture should always come first."
6- Lifecycle Assessment & Carbon with Herzog & de Meuron
This session by Michael Drobnik and Aida Ramirez Marrujoo blew me away.
I've been a longtime H&DM fan, visiting many of their buildings as an architecture student. Beyond creating great architecture, they are also leaders in design technology innovation.
Herzog & de Meuron wanted to calculate carbon accurately using live Revit projects.
Their LCA (Lifecycle Assessment) custom Revit tool accurately counts the C02e of each Revit assembly, allowing users to make informed decisions at multiple points in a project's life.
If you are interested in carbon emissions, this is a must-see. They've shared the code of their Calc plugin on GitHub.
7- BIG Presents AI-Boosted D5 Renders
Jens Majdal-Kaarlsholm from BIG and Jeffrey Espinoza came in to discuss D5 render, an emerging rendering tool compatible with Rhino and Revit.
It is somewhat similar to Enscape, but it has a few interesting extra AI-enabled features:
AI Automatic Seamless Textures: D5 takes a texture image and automatically removes the seams. No more boring tinkering in Photoshop.
AI Atmosphere Sky: Want specific color tones and vibes in the background and lighting? Pick any image, and AI finds the best skybox for a similar lighting scheme.
AI Scene Improvement: This automatically improves details of a scene, such as adding more realistic faces and vegetation. Instead of adding more detailed HQ assets in the 3D model, it can be improved in post-production.
It was also great to finally meet Jens in person!
8- My Session: Share your Elephant
This is the room in which I spoke.
This year, I had a talk called: "Hosting the BIM Titans: Lessons from 80+ live episodes and 700k views."
This was not about Revit or Dynamo workflows, which I think surprised some people in the audience.
It was a look behind the scenes at BIM Pure Live, the series of live events I host on YouTube. I shared my insights about the process of hosting live events and creating content for our industry, hopefully inspiring others to do so.
Here is the key takeaway from the session:
Share your elephant 🐘
You might be familiar with Marcello Sgambelluri, the award-winning speaker Revit and Dynamo master. His work garnered attention after sharing an elephant he modeled inside Revit. That opened the door not only to speaking at multiple BIM events but also inspired other people in the industry to start creating and sharing their own elephants.
Sharing is obviously great for the growth and evolution of architecture. But it also makes your world larger and can unlock new opportunities in your career.
9- Meeting Everyone
The best part of AU is the people.
After hosting so many live events online, it was great to meet many speakers in person and reconnect with old friends.
I am always happy to chat with everyone!
10- The Secret Revit Influencer Dinner
I was invited to the super-secret Revit influencer dinner by Harlan, Kimberly, and Rebecca from Autodesk. It was great to hang out with everyone!
11- BIM at Tesla
Kristin Lorentzen and Clinton Giles showcased how they use Revit to manage Tesla factories. The workflow relies on the smart use of Revit links and worksets. Users must carefully select which worksets are being opened to improve model performance.
They also rely on the use of Ideate tools such as "Clone" to make their workflows efficient.
If you want to use Revit to both manage facilities and create documents for upcoming renovations, this is a great resource.
12- The BIM Pure Socks
This year, I had a bunch of socks to give away. They included the colored blue and pink version, and a black version. Picking the pair is somewhat of a personality test. Which one is your favorite?
13- The Volterra Experience
The fascinating Voltera project had a big booth to showcase their great work. I first heard of Volterra from Paul Aubin. Their goal is to digitally reconstruct and preserve many of the historically significant architectural and artistic treasures of the ancient city of Volterra, Italy. Each year, there is a 2-weeks workshop where various architects and AEC enthusiasts scan and model the historic architecture. This is part of the Volterra-Detroit Foundation.
Autodesk worked with Volterra to help promote their effort, enough to create a short film about the project.
14- More expensive booths
Vendors told me the cost of a booth skyrocketed to 25k this year. It felt we were missing some of our smaller friends and small businesses, such as Team Parallax. I'm not sure if the booths were sold out or not, but the expo room felt less crowded than in previous years.
15- Practical AI with Joachim from Reope
Joachim Viktil of Reope gave a great talk about AI and invited us to imagine what it could look like in practical workflows. I enjoyed the fantasy that you could receive a Revit warning recommending design outcomes instead of blabbing about conflicting geometry. This assistant could have knowledge of your previous projects.
16- Building a Company-Wide Data Browser with IMEG
Jasmine Lee and Michael Kilkelly showcased the creation of a searchable database for all their Revit projects. They demonstrated the use of GraphQL, PowerBI, the AEC data model API, and more.
Imagine if you could have a menu where you could search for families and content in all projects, without the need to manually open the project first.
17- Kristina's energetic ACC Publishing 101 session
CIMA+ BIM Coordinator and former BIM Pure Live guest Kristina Youngblut is among the most energetic and enthusiastic people I've ever met. She did a great job in her first year as a speaker, talking about ACC Publishing 101.
18- AU 2025 will be in Nashville
Autodesk University 2025 will take place in Nashville, TN, from September 15-18.
Thanks to everyone!
It was an absolute thrill to see everyone in person! Thanks to everyone who spoke to me. It's the best part of AU. Of course, I couldn't attend all the sessions. Anything significant that I missed? Let us know in the comments below.
