We Can Make Dreams Come True

DAVID TAYLOR: This is a session called we can make dreams come true. And hopefully, everybody's in the correct place, correct time-- right?

Just a little quick disclaimer that any video or audio or show off is going to be just for teaching purposes. And some of the versions that I'm showing here might differ from the versions that you use or that you get-- some of the functions and some of the look and feel of things. And some of the things I'm showing are just generic data sets and not confidential.

So about me-- my name's David Taylor. And I work for Metso Minerals Industries, as a global system specialist. And I'm on the engineering applications team so we roll out software-- we deploy software to everyone. And we help support and train everyone.

I'm also, kind of, a person that likes to do the R&D of new engineering products and processes. So working with that with Autodesk generative design, 3D scanning, laser scanning, reconstruction-- things like that.

And then also, I have a side business for Dvelopd, LLP. And I'm a co-founder of that and a chief development officer. So anything that goes to market has to go through me. And what that, we do mobile and digital apps and rapid prototyping, too.

So some of the things that we're doing are just generative design. I work in professional life and around my side business also, with the 3D printing and manufacturing.

So before we start, I have a little bit of trivia here, just to get everybody involved. And if you guess it right, you get one of the Hershey's candy bars here. So raise your hand real quick, if you know the answer and then, I'll try to get you the bar.

So what movie had the quote, "we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams?" You'll see a whole theme about this. Anybody know? Was it-- hold on-- was it The Matrix, The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Godfather, or I have no clue, you crazy fool? Who knows, anybody?

AUDIENCE: Willy Wonka.

DAVID TAYLOR: Willy Wonka, yes. You get your chocolate bar. So come see me afterwards, you a chocolate bar. So that's going to be the theme for today so remember that. Yeah, Willy Wonka with your golden ticket. You got the golden ticket-- hopefully, there's a golden ticket in there, maybe.

And why my fascination with this movie and this theme? The Willy Wonka factory looked a lot like the place I grew up near, Hershey, Pennsylvania. You can see the resemblance. As a little kid going there, I thought, oh man, it's got this great chocolate factory on the inside. I can go eat everything in there. And when you actually visit the place, they do have a little tour you can go visit. Ever since I was a little kid, I've always been fascinated with that movie and with everything like that.

AUDIENCE: I'm older than you were. When I was younger, they took me to the real chocolate factory.

DAVID TAYLOR: Really? OK. I think you can sign up for some tours for that that still go. If you ever get a chance to go there, it's great. You get to smell the chocolate, eat all the chocolate you want. All right. Now you know a little bit about me. Let's move along. About all of us-- we're going to have a model for the session, that we are the dreamers. Autodesk makes it plausible, and Generative Design makes it possible. OK. So everybody knows the clip from Willy Wonka, right?

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Well, well, well. Two naughty, nasty, little children gone. Three good, sweet, little children left. Hurry, please. Long way to go yet. Wait a minute. I must show you this. Lickable wallpaper for nursery walls. Lick an orange, it tastes like an orange. Lick a pineapple, it tastes like a pineapple. Go ahead, try it.

- I got a plum.

- Grandpa, this banana is fantastic. It tastes so real.

- Try some more. The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries!

- Snozberries? Whoever heard of a snozberry?

- We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

[END PLAYBACK]

DAVID TAYLOR: Boom. And there was the quote that I like, at the very end there. People really don't know that there's an actual poem that that's from. It's a poem from 1863. It's, "We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; World losers and world forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems."

So I like to think of us as the movers and shakers of dreaming up designs and making designs for our companies, or for our personal lives. So moving from that, everybody's here for Generative design, right? So what is Generative Design? If you just think about it, nature has been perfecting and adapting design for millions of years.

Close-ups of butterfly wings, dragonfly wings, mushrooms, eggshell. Just look at the structure, how it's formed. Not many people think of this when they think of the products around us. Here's a couple more. Bone structure, broccoli, anybody ever think broccoli looked like that? Shells, leaves, beehives.

So we can dream, but what if we could reference nature for the basis of our design? Generative Design mimics nature's evolutionary approach to design. It's design with a purpose. Just like nature has a purpose to build their items, we have a purpose to design and build.

Next will come in a little video that Autodesk us put out. I think everybody's seen it, maybe last year. But we can take a look at it.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- What if you could come up with thousands of options for a single design, without drawing, all of which meet specific goals set by the designer? And from those options, pick the one design that delivers on the most important criteria, the design you couldn't possibly have imagined. This is generative design, a technology that harnesses massive computing power, creating forms with precise amounts of material only where needed, achieving maximum performance while wasting nothing.

But generative design can be about much more than simply turning out alternatives. Prototypes can be scanned and equipped with sensors that provide real-time performance data that can be looped back into the design process, so the object, in effect, co-designs itself. And, depending on the material and method of manufacturer chosen, the software can optimize the design for those choices.

In its search for the optimal design, generative design creates complex forms that would otherwise be impossible to make using traditional manufacturing methods. Now with advancements in material science and the ability of 3D printers to print metal, companies like Airbus can create forms like this airplane partition panel that's half as light and just as strong. The result? Significant reduction in fuel costs and CO2 emissions.

The things that have limited us in the past-- software, materials, manufacturing-- no longer do so. With generative design, the world can look and perform any way we want it to. This is the next stage in the evolution of design, and it's happening now.

DAVID TAYLOR: Now when you look at that video and you hear it, it says, half as light but just as strong. Or it could even be stronger, just like bone material. We saw the bone structure close-up there. It's really light, but yet, it's really, really strong.

Generative Design is going to help us optimize and create designs that we can only dream about. A human being couldn't design that. But with nature's approach, with their algorithms, we can create designs that we can only dream about.

So everybody's here now for an instructional demo. I'm going to show you how easy it is, how simple it is, to start your project. We'll get some models in there and generate and create some outcomes. So we're going to get started with it. We're going to do the demo, we're going to load projects and models into the software, we're going to set loads and constraints. We're going to set objectives and see how simple it is. And we want you to use it and give us feedback about it.

So when I was starting out, I started with this Nemo bracket here. Little motor bracket. And my first try putting this object into Generative Design, I get something like this. Don't laugh. OK? Can I use that in production? I don't think so. No. Looks something like weird antlers or something.

But I learned about the software. I tried more and more, and I got something on my 10th try that I could actually use. So going from the Nemo bracket up here-- this bracket up here-- down to something like this. And if I created that in steel, I could get something just as strong, but half the material-- actually it's more than half the material-- gone. And the weight also was down to about 30%.

So starting with Autodesk Generative Design-- and if I say AGD, it's going to be a little bit simpler, instead of saying Autodesk Generative Design all the time. All right. So if you think about that, just remember.

So we're going to start the Generative Design. We're going to start that. We're going to log into our account, and then select the hub and click our new project. So with that, we'll start the software. We're going to log in.

Now we're in the tool. Now we're going to go up to our profile here, our profile button, and you can see that there's different hubs that you can select from. Different teams. Now if I go over here to the new projects button, this projects button, I can see the different generations I have done in that hub. Or I could go over here and I can switch hubs again, and then see what I have in the other one. So you could create different projects for different themes, different hubs there.

And you click the new project button, and you're ready to get started to go. Now with generative design, there is a user interface and workflow. And Autodesk, recently in the tech review five, just put a new starting video in here to help you out. So once you first start it, it will show you exactly what workflow you have to go through to get your generations and outcomes, and see what you can do to filter and explore at the very end.

Nice little addition they put in there. There is a user interface, so there are right-click menus. There are different key combinations, control-left-clicks or add to selection. Shift-middle mouse rotates and control-middle mouse will zoom, so it's really similar to CAD programs you have already. It's pretty familiar. And you can also do the quick tour button there. If you ever have to do it again or look at it again, there's a quick tour button in the question mark icon in the top right.

There's also preferences in generative design. There are Global Unit preferences and Project Unit preferences. And the Project Units will only show up if you have a project started. So if you start the tool and you look in there, it's only going to show the Global Units. And there's priority over the Global Units with the Project Units there.

There's a clear workflow. So if you watch the video, there's a clear workflow from left to right. From importing your geometry and setting loads and constraints and objectives, then generating it. So here's the tool, and you can actually see some of the buttons and the workflow. All the way to generate.

And there on the left hand side, there's like a browser tree that you can look at all the parts that you have. You can select the parts, you can click the little eyeball to toggle visibility. You can right-click also. Like I said, the right-click menu is to assign or toggle visibilities. You can also rename the imported CAD objects so that you know what they are. And there's the assigns.

Now there's a clear structure within the AGD file structure here. You start out with the hub. Like I said, you can switch hubs or teams. And within that hub, there's a project. So you start out with a project, and then you assign a study, and loads, and objectives within that study. So just like here on the browser tree, which is broken down here.

So our first task that we have in the AGD software, it's importing and assigning geometry. We need something to start out with. We can't just say, hey, push the button and create stuff because it doesn't know what to do. So we have to import geometry.

The supported formats for import are your Mesh and Standard formats, which are like your it's .sat files, your .iges files, .step, .stl files. I think the most used may be .obj.

And since I was using Inventor for a lot of export and importing these meshes into AGD, I found some key things, that if you're using .iges, or .step, or .sat files. When you export from Inventor, it won't include the mesh features. So you have to invent or create a solid body using a mesh enabler add-in or something else. You have got to have that solid body to export from Inventor.

And then, with the .sat's, it will treat the bodies as one entity. So if you have multiple parts in your assembly, it will just come in as one singular part. It won't let you select different parts, different bodies. And with .obj and .stl's, when you export it from Inventor and you import into AGD, it won't show you these little geometries that are inside the other bodies.

So here are just some tips that I have found from working in Inventor and with AGD. So right now, it will show here how to import and what happens. So I'm going to import the motor bracket. That's made for units. You can select the units there. It imports as separate bodies here, from the assembly from Inventor, which you chose there.

And when we're assigning geometry, it's giving instruction to the application. It doesn't really know what to do after you put the geometry in there, so we have to assign some things to it. With the preserved geometry, it will keep the geometry the same as what is designed. So if you select a part as "preserve geometry," it will keep that for the outcome also. The same exact shape.

The obstacle geometry creates a barrier. So you're going to have obstacles within the design that the generative design software is going to build around and butt up against that but not go through it. And then we got starting shapes, which is the part, or the geometry, that we want generative design to modify, to build, to recreate. So there's three different types of geometries you can assign. It tells the software and algorithms what to do.

So you can see here. In this we're going to assign some geometry. We've got the preserve, obstacle, and starting shape. I'm going to assign a starting shape. I want that bracket part, that full part there, to be recreated by the software.

And now I'm going to assign obstacle geometry. So with the holes that I wanted the motor to come through or the bolts to come through, I had to create these extra pieces of these extra bodies. And I'm assigning those now as obstacles so that the software won't make anything through those holes.

And now I'm turning off that full starting shape so that I can see everything underneath and inside. And with these, I want to create the rings that the bolts or the motor goes through. That's my preserved geometry, and it will actually keep those rings in my final shape.

And you can see they change different colors just to denote the different types of geometry that you assigned. And over on the left-hand side and in the browser here, you can see the different geometry that's assigned to the different types.

Some tips for assigning geometry-- when you export your CAD model, you have got to make sure you include your starting geometry, of course, the thing that you want AGD to recreate. And sometimes, you need to define preserve and obstacle geometry from your original CAD software, like Inventor. I had to go and create these extra obstacle geometries and these preserve geometries for the software to build around.

And like I said, you might need to go back and do some outcomes, go back and then have to redo it in CAD, and then export and try it again. The AGD software is really quick at creating outcomes so to do that, it's pretty simple to do.

So after we imported the geometry and assigned the different types, we have to set constraints up for it. And with this, we can do a fixed constraint, which we can select bodies, faces, edges, or vertices. And we can set fixed directions of X, Y, Z if we wanted to. We can click those off and on if we want. And here you can see I'm going to assign a constraint.

And there's all the different types of constraints you can assign to the different bodies. I'll select the body. And now, on this, I actually set the constraint around the motor because I wanted that to stay where it was. And also on the bolt holes.

So after we have constraints, we need to set up loads. Because we go with our workflow-- left to right. So we go constraints, now with loads. And there are three different load types. There's a pressure load, a force load, and a moment load. So I like to think of these as squeeze, push, and twist.

We can apply certain loads to selected entities, so depending on the tool being used or the load being used, you can set them to faces, edges, vertices, or bodies. Also, with the Project Units and the Global Units, if it comes up as-- if you can see in these little boxes over here-- if it comes up as newtons or pound force, you can actually type in the different type of unit in there. Just type it in manually, and it will convert it automatically for you.

So right now I'm going to set a load. I'm doing my force load.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Left-click is just to select it, then you can do control-click to add or remove.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: For these? Yeah. It would be face, edge, vertice, or body. Yeah.

And you could see I actually put in pound-foot, lbf, instead of newtons, because I didn't necessarily need it to convert it. I just typed it in and it did it for me. I'm going to now add a force onto this bottom part here. Now I've got my loads on there.

So now I've got my geometry, my constraints, my loads. You can see that the loads show up here, in the browser also. So as we work this way, it's also working and building everything on the left-hand side here. There are multiple ways of doing this, so you can see, as you work with the tool.

Now you've got objectives. The next button over, we've got objectives. Types of objectives are the things that you want to achieve from your design.

You've got minimize mass. So with that, you can specify your safety factors. That will make it the lightest weight possible within that range.

You can also set a mass target. So that's like, I want it 30% different from my original design. I can set that, and it will go within the safety factor that you create.

Also, you can maximize stiffness. So you specify the safety factor, and it gives that an optimum rigidity to weight ratio. And with the maximized stiffness, you can actually create another objective then too. So you can have two different ones going at the same time.

Now next button over would be manufacturing. Manufacturing is the type of way that the object is going to be created. So you can do is unrestricted. So that means it's any type of way that's manufactured. 3D printing, casting, whatever you want.

Then there's additive selection, also. I know I just wanted additive manufacturing. So I'll just click on that and say, I want to do, like, a 3D printed object. And it will actually optimize the design for additive manufacturing.

Next one over is materials. And with materials, you can select a maximum of five materials. There's a materials box that that pops up when you click the button. There's a little red dot there. You can download more. Every week, or every couple of weeks, there's more and more added to the software.

So it's pretty good, pretty quick. And then you can click on each material, also, and see the specifications of the material. So if you don't necessarily know the strengths or the weights, then you can look at that. And one note too, custom materials cannot be added yet, right? Not yet. A lot of people asked for that, but we'll see.

So here's the material box, and you can see I'm now downloading new materials from the cloud. It's adding them directly to the pop-up. Then I can select those too, if I wanted to. So it's as simple as that. Really, really quick and easy.

There, I'm just scrolling down through all the materials that we have available within AGD to use. There's a part at the bottom of the browser tree, and that's called Synthesis. And that is about what topology you have at the very end of your outcomes. So it will give you three options.

You can have a coarse topology, which is reducing the time for generation and will just give you the quick output, outcome. But it's the least accurate, just like a draft.

And then there's a normal selection. That normal selection will optimize the outcomes along the spectrum. And then accurate is the best quality and design for manufacturing. So once you hit generate, it will show you a number of outcomes. If you have a lot, I would try to go with the course, just to see how quick it goes and see what you get on the output. And then, once you have something that you want to use, then you can go with accurate.

And once we have those set up, we can go ahead and generate the job. And with generation, the data is checked first. And there are errors that get shown. So if you have a little red icon next to an item on the browser tree, of course you have to go and fix that. Whether a load is off or constraint is off, you can roll over the icon, and it will tell you what's wrong with it.

And then, once you hit the generate button, if there's any cloud or other messages, they're returned in another little pop-up button there. And then, next to the pop-up button, there's a little status icon. And with that, it gives you the generation status. So uploading the file, going through it, and you can also cancel if you need to stop something and go back and resend it.

So you can see here, I'm going to go ahead and try generating something. And it checked. You can see now I have a little red icon there. So I need to fix something. And it will tell me exactly what I need to fix. So my first couple runs, I had a bunch of these because I didn't really set things up right. So I was trying to work things out and get it clean.

And if your data is good and your specifications are good, the pop-up will come up. And it looks something like this, telling you how many outcomes you're going to have. So the more things that you add in there, the more materials you add in there, the more manufacturing constraints you add in there, and the types of synthesis resolution, the outcome number depends on that.

And after you click the generate button and you hit continue, it will upload your study data to the AGD cloud, and then the magic begins. So you can see here, there's a clean generation once I hit generate. It comes up with a pop-up window, and it tells me how many outcomes I have, right away. I hit continue, and now it's starting to upload and generate my designs.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah so, like, the hole. Where it was bolted in, I didn't want those to move, and I wanted to keep them as the same pattern, pretty much. So I put constraints on those so they wouldn't move, the software wouldn't move them around.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah. Here, you can see now that the outcomes start to pop up in your explorer tab here. OK.

Now some results after that. We have outcome filters within the results. We can filter by status. We can filter by studies and objective ranges. So we can drag these around, just like sliders. Drag them around and get our ranges for mass and volume. And there's different types of views within the Explorer tab.

There's the thumbnails view, which gives you just thumbnails of all the outcomes. That's the simplest view. There's a properties view that will give you all the different types of property details underneath that, underneath the thumbnails.

There's a scatter plot, which is a nice view. So you can set it up by status, whether it's done or not. Or you can set up different criteria on the table. Up and down, left and right. And you can see where they lie on the scatter plot.

And there's also a table. So you can sort and filter out that way too.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: So with the views then, we can see here in the explorer tab. We've got the filters on the left-hand side. And we can view by our processing status. So as it's going, we can take a look at what's done, what's still going, and what's failed. And there's our drag there, on the filters. We can sort and filter that way.

And we can also filter and sort by the dropdown there. And there's our icons for the different types of views. So if you click through those, there's our properties detail, and there's the details underneath.

And here's our scatter plot. As you roll over each one, it shows us the design, and also it shows us the information on the right-hand side. And once I click on one, then I can see the information.

And here's our table view. And by that, you can-- just like an Excel sheet or other tables that you're familiar with-- you can sort by the columns.

If I were to double-click on one of the parts, I can actually open it up in a 3D view and rotate it around and take a look at it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: I'm thinking the software didn't need those holes for the structure because of the strength that it would just need for those back holes to-- with the forces that I put on it.

AUDIENCE: Was this generated with the accurate setting, or the normal setting?

DAVID TAYLOR: The normal setting. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Failed is if the geometry disappears, right?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: And here, opening up-- in the newest tech preview, they show you the stresses on the object. So you can take a look at that, and you can turn those off using the button here. So you can see stresses. And then, also in the newest tech preview, you can have a scatter plot of materials. So you can drop that down and see what types of materials they are on the plot.

So with the example I just showed through here, with steel material, I had my original part, which is heavier and had more material used. And my stress factor, actually, on some of the points, was doubled, compared to this part here. And with this part, it had a higher safety factor, 39% of the mass, compared to this original part here. And it had fewer areas of high stress. And in those areas. It was considerably less stress.

So I have more example outcomes. These are just things I tried putting through and testing within the software. They might look a little strange. Here's a motor bracket. It's supposed to hold a gear guard for that bracket.

This is one of the other results for additive manufacturing from that Nemo bracket. And this was actually a roller I tried doing with the loads and constraints within AGD, building it almost like bone structure that would hold up the other rollers that sat on top of it.

So after we have a product meet an outcome, we can pick that and then we can export it to CADs also, like back to Inventor or to another CAD software. So what we would do is we would pick the outcome we want. And with that, you can take this little dragger, just a little drag down here, and go back iterations, because the software will iterate the design as it goes and as it generates. I go back to different iterations and view those.

I can then click that little button at the top right-hand corner up here. And I can export it as an .stl file, where I could use it in another CAD application. Then I can also go to a different iteration and do the same thing, and save that one also. So as it goes back, I can save the separate ones and I can open them up then-- this is Inventor-- I can open that up in Inventor and use that for design.

Or with Fusion. I can find the object, open it up, and use it as a design. Then, for Fusion too, I can then export that as different file formats also, if I don't want .stl necessarily.

Then there's some further learning and help within the AGD software. There's, like I said, that question mark icon. And that's got some online help. There's a link there. There's also the Autodesk feedback community forums. You could go and check those out. And also today, I will be available if anybody wants to meet me at 5:30, here in this classroom. Just let me know after class and I can talk to you about the software, or if you have any questions, you can come to me about that.

And there's another question, where can I get it? Well, the Idea Exchange. You can sign up through the website. Autodesk, Ideax. Or it's across from the exhibit hall. You can go there and sign up for one of the Autodesk Generative Design sessions, and then you can get a tech preview.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah, and there's David here, who is the person to talk to if you want to sign up for that. Yeah, and with that, you just meet one-on-one with the Idea Exchange. It's about 20 minutes or so, the talk. And you'll get an invitation to the preview.

And now, with that, you have the golden ticket to start your own projects, start your own products. And if you see down on the Casino floor, they had the Willy Wonka stuff too. So I thought that was pretty neat. Sticking with the theme. I got you first. All right. OK. So you got the second one, so see me afterwards.

All right. Another lab going on tomorrow, hands on with Autodesk Generative Design. So if it's already full, just go wait outside. You might have some openings to go through there, to get in there. All right.

One other thing. Fill out your surveys. You can complete them online or on the AU app. OK? Always do that. If there are any questions, we've got Doug here from Autodesk, who knows everything, pretty much, about the software. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask. And we can try to both figure them out. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: So right now, it's a tech preview. So you'd have to register for the tech preview if you wanted to acquire it. I think we just announced, [INAUDIBLE]. We just announced today that it's going to be available to your customers as well. If you're neither of those, you can request access from David himself, and we can take those on a case-by-case basis. So, as far as commercial availability, we can't [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: You there. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah. I think the best one to look at would be the scatter plot.

DOUG: It depends on what your objectives are. So you're putting in your objectives as far as what what you're wanting to achieve. At the end of the day, you, as an engineer, are trying to balance that decision. So surveying all of the problems and choosing it to be [INAUDIBLE]. That's kind of up to you, right? We don't want to take that away from you. [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: Yes. So anything that would not fit those requirements wouldn't be shown to you. Everything that fits your objectives is on the screen.

DAVID TAYLOR: So, like I said too, within the software, for me, the best view to see everything that I want, the optimized designs and everything, was a scatter plot view. Because then I could pick, depending on this would be like safety factor to weight ratio. And then, I can pick on the plot which one I wanted to choose. I would just choose, OK, this has the highest safety factor. I'm going to choose that one, or this one is kind of in the middle of the range I want. I can choose that. So it's really up to you, what you want. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Is there a way to [INAUDIBLE]?

DOUG: I feel like that's going to be an answer for a longer question. [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah I think that's a big question.

AUDIENCE: Do you guys have any way to, like-- I know you can't tell us what it costs for you to make, but small manufacturing costs, so you can sort them by [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: It's a new tool.

DOUG: [INAUDIBLE] knows that that is probably the largest driver for selecting something. We definitely want to be able to plot that on that scatter plot to show you what the relative cost of each of those would be.

AUDIENCE: As you can imagine, you go from a standard, [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: Any other questions? Yes, [INAUDIBLE]?

AUDIENCE: I have a question. Great presentation, by the way. You mentioned there were 10 attempts, 10 trial-and-error attempts to figure out your first project. What we saw just now. So some of it seemed like it could have been tech preview bugs, or issues. But I'm wondering what might be included in the learning experience to reduce the number of iterations to yield the results that you're looking for.

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah. I think it was mostly the obstacle geometry or the preserved geometry, just knowing what exactly to put in there so that the software wouldn't build into that. Like I said, the first one that looked like antlers. It didn't really have any of the preserved geometry or obstacle geometry in that.

And it gave me really nothing I could use. But I think with the 10 different iterations I had, I had to either make the obstacle geometry bigger or smaller, depending on where I wanted the software to build around. I think there's some feedback on that from everybody else, also? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I have this one thing that [INAUDIBLE]. Most of our clients require people to document. For shapes there, you can't document. [INAUDIBLE] yourself, that's fine. [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: You mean putting them in, like, a drawing or something like that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah. And that's where Inventor or something like that comes in. Where I showed you importing into Inventor, and then you can create a drawing right off of that. Place the views into Inventor drawing and then just take dimensions off of that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think with something like that though, you wouldn't be able to make it by just looking at the drawing. You'd have to send almost the CAD model to the factory to make it--

DOUG: Something else that we're working on, again, is the ability to export those directly into the CAD model. Something that we've noticed that really has to happen is, at the end of the day, whatever comes out of there, you're probably going to want to change it, right? So this is more of a guidance kind of thing. Rather than, this is the best kind of thing you could have. That's kind of how we're treating it. Especially for those kinds of situations.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: There's two workflows to this. [INAUDIBLE]. You don't really need the original bracket. You can just go in and say, these are my connection points. [INAUDIBLE]. But the other way to do it, like how David was explaining, is completely valid. What you would find, I think, is that as put your geometry in it, you'd find geometry that didn't need to be there. So, like, how we removed those two [INAUDIBLE]. But it's interesting the way you interact with it. It's a different way of thinking. [INAUDIBLE].

DAVID TAYLOR: And I think with your original design, you also have to deconstruct it as, what do I want to keep? Like the original preserved holes. I had to create those separately of what the original bracket was, because I wanted to keep those only and preserve those. So I had to add extra geometry to my model there for it to keep those. But you can almost take your design that you have, and then just kind of cut it up in different places. And then say, I want to preserve this or I want to make this obstacles or make that change.

AUDIENCE: I think what he was getting at is just the question of how much does your input data, or your input model, affect the outcome. So if you start out with something, [INAUDIBLE].

DOUG: Yeah that's totally true. So the way we set up a problem or define a problem could completely change what it gives you, which is part of the fun.

AUDIENCE: Could you try running the same thing without giving it any geometry?

DAVID TAYLOR: Not in this example, no.

AUDIENCE: I was curious if it would come out the same.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

DAVID TAYLOR: Plus, it probably wouldn't be able to fit in the space that I tried to have for the motor.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: If you want to know the difference between open-- we call it open designed space with no previous geometry and closed design space will starting shape. That hands-on lab tomorrow goes through all those discussions in great detail, so it'll be really fun.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

DOUG: [INAUDIBLE]

DAVID TAYLOR: Yeah and then, like I said, if you want to sign up or take a look at everything else, I'm sure you guys would be happy to sign more people up, get more feedback on things. And then you can be on the forefront and see what's going on and what's getting added all the time. Any other questions? No? OK. Thank you.