Using the Dynamo Player in Alias to Solve Problems and Automate Processes

MICHAEL GUNTHER-GEFFERS: Hello, and welcome to our class using the Dynamo player in areas to solve problems and automate processes which will hopefully help you to use areas more efficiently. The main question we would like to answer in this session is why you should know Dynamo even if you are just a regular Alias user. Dynamo can improve all kinds of workflows in Alias. It is much more than just a patterning tool.

You can write Alias tools with it to create or alter construction elements, notes data, or subdivision objects. It also allows you to solve or help on mathematical or dimensional problems you might have in Alias. Only when you know what Dynamo can do, you can identify potential areas of its applications during your daily work and only if you recognize them and point them out and there's the potential of someone to act on this. This could either be yourself, a Dynamo-skilled coworker, contractor employed by your company, or even I myself.

At the same point in time, you want to know dynamos limitations to be able to judge on a continuous basis. Is that what I'm trying to achieve here-- something where Dynamo can help or not. This limits the noise on the side of the people you would ask for Dynamo assistance.

I will keep it short and only give you the information you really need to know. First thing is my name, which allows you to contact me and speak to me so I can answer your questions. My name is Michael Gunther-Geffers, but I'm mostly called GG. I'm a Dynamo enthusiast, which means I can most likely answer all your questions you can possibly have about Dynamo. And even in case, I don't know the answer, I can at least find the answer for you.

The last thing you need to know about me-- I'm a Dynamo script author, which means I can potentially write scripts which can help you to improve your daily workflows. And I can answer questions about the sample scripts which ship with Alias. And with that, I'll hand it over to Andrzej, my co-speaker in this session.

ANDRZEJ SAMSONOWICZ: Good morning, everyone. My name is Andrzej Samsonowicz. And actually, I come from a little bit different industry than Michael because I come from actually building industry.

But this didn't stop me from learning Dynamo and becoming enthusiast like Michael. Also, building information and building industry is actually where Dynamo has started, right? So I had this opportunity to work with this tool for a very, very long time. And since the beginning, I was fascinated by its potential, by its capabilities. And as I just said, I was exploring it already for a couple of years, which also gave me access and contact with automotive industry and Alias users. Back to you. Thank you.

MICHAEL GUNTHER-GEFFERS: Thanks, Andrzej. We would like to give you a brief overview over the evolution of Dynamo in Alias. Paired with the information you have about which Alias version you are using, you can understand what features of Dynamo are available to you today.

In Alias 2019.0, Dynamo was added for Alias Studio, surface, and concept. So it's available in all flavors of Alias. It was made available in the Transform tab of the palette. Dynamo's potential in Alias grew a lot in version 2021.2 when the Dynamo player was added.

Since then, these two icons now define the two possible entry points for various users-- the Dynamo player for normal areas users who just want to use Dynamo Player tools like any other Alias tool and the regular Dynamo icon for people who write the Dynamo scripts. So how does this work? The Dynamo Player allows you to browse for Dynamo Player script.

Once selected, the Dynamo player tool window changes its layout and options according to the input of this script. This way, you can create your own Alias tools, and the people using them have no need at all to know anything about Dynamo. This tool window can then be dragged and dropped onto a shelf like any other tool in Alias. You can even create and use your own icons for it to improve its recognizability.

Over the last years, we kept adding Dynamo Player sample scripts to our Alias releases. As those new tools disappeared from the What's New shelf after a year, we needed a way to permanently display these tools in the alias UI. That's why we added the Dynamo toolbox to Alias 2022.2.

It is accessible via the Dynamo toolbox button and the Dynamo player tool window as well as the Help menu and there under the entry Dynamo Resources. It provides you a visual overview over each Dynamo Player sample script which ships with Alias. Similar to the Alias pallet, this shelf cannot be edited by the user. It is important for users to know that these additional tools exist in Alias.

So for example, the user shouldn't not just focus on the subdivision [INAUDIBLE] in the pellet when they are looking for a subdivision tool. The Dynamo toolbox can also provide several of them. In Alias 2023.0, we added the option to create dropdown menus and radio buttons in the Dynamo player tool window. These options allow your tools to be much more understandable than before. In older versions, number sliders or checkboxes had to be used to fulfill this functionality.

Also, in 2023.0 the keep original option has been added. Before, when you only wanted to modify a certain object instead of creating a new one-- for example, like in the subdivision perpendicular line tool-- the user had to manually delete the original input after being done with the Dynamo player tool. With this option, you can now do that automatically so it behaves much more like a normal Alias tool.

Usually, we update the version of Dynamo with each Alias release. The update inside Alias 2023.0 is especially worth noting, though, because it not only came with bug fixes and new features such as they allow groups and groups on the Dynamo side-- it also came with a UI refresh. It is a known issue that the new modes are bigger than the old ones. So if you have legacy scripts, those might be hard to read inside the new UI because the notes might overlap.

We do have an automatic solution for that available on the forum. So if you suffer from this problem and need a solution, please reach out to us. We also ship this solution script with the future version of Alias.

So what are the things you can do with Dynamo in Alias? First, it cannot be stressed out enough that anyone could create Dynamo Player tools and a shelf like the Dynamo toolbox. The scripts and icons provided here can come from everybody with the according skill set. There is nothing needed from the area side for this. It could be you, a colleague, or a Dynamo expert hired by your company.

The first class of tools you can create with the Dynamo player are the ones for basic reoccurring shape or setup in your daily routine. A tire is a great example for that. While all of them are different, the basic shape is always similar and follows certain parameters.

The Dynamo player script which ships with Alias creates a Nurbs tire based on several numerical input values. The latest version even allows you to create a 3D tread shape where mount, depth, angle, and distances of the tread can be controlled by the user. In a future version, individual user created curves can serve as a basis for this tread to be generated.

Another Nurbs template allows you to take closed input curves-- for example, like the one created by the Alias text tool-- and create a solid out of the curves. The extruded direction of the solid can be controlled by the user as well as the depth and if it shall be beveled and/or filleted. In a similar way you can write Dynamo Player scripts which create reoccurring subdivision shapes. Alias provides you with a tool which creates a subdivision car body for you.

Input can either-- the input can be either purely numerical values like width, lengths, wheel arch radius, and such, or optionally, two guide curves can provide most of these parameters. The number of subdivision phases to be created for this topology is also user controlled. Templates can also be serving as a guide for the geometry to be created by the user. The package data script is such a case which lets the user know in between, which dimensions these car designs must be created.

The T-Spline library is used in Dynamo for all kinds of subdivision operations. When you read T-Spline in Dynamo, you can basically replace the word with subdivision. T-Spline are a super type of subdivision which are downgraded to normal subdivision objects when they are being sent to Alias. Alias uses the T-Spline library itself in the background for a lot of the subdiv operations inside of Alias.

You can easily make the primitive tools of the T-Spline library in Dynamo available in Alias. In fact, those scripts were some of my first. They include the sphere, the quad pole, the cone, and the [INAUDIBLE] tool.

Beside primitives, the T-Spline library in Dynamo also offers regular tools like, for example, the revolve tool. Also, the subdiv from nerves tool has been created from such a T-Spline library functionality. It allows you to reapproximate any kind of single surface nerves result-- which can be multi-span, though-- in areas with a choosable amount of subdiv faces like, the skin result in this example. There are also some T-Spline library tools which have been enhanced by me on the Dynamo side.

The sweep tool has been improved to allow to create the sweep either at the profile position or at the position of the guide curve. In addition to that, the range of the result can be limited by a given value between 0 and 1 at start and end. The pipe tool which creates a pipe body out of a given curve network has been improved to optionally remove the caps at start and end if wanted.

With the keep original option being available since ages 2023.0, it is now possible to send geometry to Dynamo, modify it there, send the result back to Alias, and then delete the original input once the tool is left. When the original geometry is chosen to be deleted, the tool can then, of course, no longer support history. One example of such a modification tool is the perpendicular line tool for subdivision surfaces.

It takes points of open edges of a subdiv as input and then directs them onto a reference plane or surface. Then, the next row of [INAUDIBLE] is oriented in a perpendicular way to that reference. This allows to build only half of a subdivision object and then apply symmetry of that object to the reference plane by using this tool.

This tool will soon be enhanced to be a complete subdivision aligned tool. Another interesting use of Dynamo is a script which takes two given subdivision bodies as input and creates a third body which has an intermediate shape. User can control with the slider how much impact the design of each input body shall have on the new one. Limitation here is that the input bodies must have originated from the same body, and by that, each have the same number of faces and [INAUDIBLE].

Even though Dynamo is integrated in Alias, it is an independent application. With that, it comes with its own import and export capabilities. Excel sheets are one of the supported formats. They can, for example, be used to drive the inputs for the package data script, which has been mentioned before. In a similar way, text or CSV files could be used for this.

In addition to that, Dynamo can also read and write image files. By that, grayscale images can be used to drive geometry creation. In this example, this grayscale image has been used to define the size of these spikes on the shoe sole. This allows designers to drive the geometry creation in a more intuitive way than the classic areas modeling techniques.

Using the T-Spline file format of .tsm, it was also possible to exchange subdivision data between areas in Fusion before it became officially available in Alias. Dynamo also allows you to solve small math or dimensioning problems yourself without having to wait for a fix in Alias at some point in the future. The customer had the problem that the center pivot operation in areas would take the center of the control vertices as a basis for the computation instead of the actual geometry dimension.

As in this example of a [INAUDIBLE] surface, the outcome differs. While waiting for a solution to become available in Alias, providing them a Dynamo player script helped them to resolve the problem in the currently deployed version of Alias. Another problem a customer had was the one of having a high number of construction points which several of them being duplicates.

Dynamo can take those points as input and then return a set of points where each position is only occupied by a single point.

The Dynamo player rim tool falls into this category of workflow improvements too. It is meant to assist for symmetrical spoke design.

In the first step, it creates your bounding box geometry where you can choose the size of the sector in which area you want to design a subdivision spoke. The script also allows you to optionally create construction planes at the right places in case you want to be symmetrical to neighbor sectors or inside of your sector. Once you created your subdivision spoke, the script takes care to create the rotated copies.

This all still has history. So if you change the spoke design or want more or less spokes, the script takes care of the updates and ensures that the subdivision body is scaled accordingly so that it does not interfere with its neighbors. The day before today I was talking to a customer about some translation options. In the end of the-- in the end of that meeting, a user asked me to stay on the call for a few minutes to answer a Dynamo question.

He told me that he was using Alias for 20 years and by that would be totally into Nurbs modeling. And while he loves subdivision modeling, everything there feels different for him. The tools are lacking some options in the control of the Nurbs modeling world. He said that he could build a box model much faster with Nurbs obstacles then he could with our subdivision tools using explicit control, a degree of 1, and multi-span.

So he asked me if there would be a way to transfer this box Nurbs model into a subdiv. It took me less than an hour to write the according tool. In fact, once I got inspiration from a colleague on what the easiest way would be to achieve this, it was a question of minutes.

Within less than one single working day, we got from the task to the finished tool being sent to the user, which makes this daily modeling work now easier for him.

Finally, Dynamo is, of course, also capable of generative modeling. A colleague of mine has created a script to create a subdivision hexagon pattern on a single surface.

The script is also part of the Alias installation. This example shows the result of it being used inside of the spaceship model of my colleague Florian [INAUDIBLE]. This sample shows the same script but this time using an uncreased result instead of a creased one in the example before. It uses an attractor point to control the size of the holes.

In a similar way, you can use a script which creates a Nurbs diamond pattern on a surface instead of a subdivision result. We are, of course, aware that most of our customers would like to create pattern across multiple surfaces. This brings us to the second to last topic of the session, which is multi-surface patterning. And with that, we are coming to the topic of multi-surface patterning, which my colleague Andrzej will cover. Andrzej, can you please take it over?

ANDRZEJ SAMSONOWICZ: OK, so what is actually multi-surface patterning here? Most of you probably will already somehow guess. But for those of you who do not understand what we're talking about, it's, of course, a situation in which we are dealing with a shape, which is something which is super frequent amongst modeling in Alias. It's made of several surfaces which, of course, in most cases are trimmed. So their topology is pretty, let's say, different between each other.

And of course, the goal of this part is to-- my part in this presentation is to explain you how can we get to the such result in which we cover, we use, multi-surface shape to place a pattern, parametric pattern, which you have, as a user, full control over. But before explaining or-- yeah, basically, why is it so challenging, right? Because if we look at a single surface which makes up a shape like you see here in this picture, you'll notice that, as I mentioned before, is that each of them are trimmed, and they have completely different topology.

If you start using Dynamo to place any pattern, you will notice that even if you have a single surface, you still, of course, can start placing a grid of points which later will be serving as a placeholder for the pattern. Like, here in this example, you see that there is 30 times 10 rows of points which later you can transform in this kind of a structure which, later in the further steps, you can transform in a very different pattern.

But of course, when we start to think about the shape that you've seen before, which is made of different surfaces which are all trimmed, then the situation becomes really, really, really difficult, very difficult to handle, and very difficult to-- nearly impossible with standard tools to cover with the pattern which you could control and which you could somehow iterate and find different solutions.

How to solve it-- of course, we have a solution. We have basically a method to create such pattern Which is basically somehow allowing a user to-- of course, Dynamo is the fundamental part here, but you will also need to have some auxiliary elements or a guide, guide curve, in Alias.

So you need to create a guide curve in Alias which will indicate how this pattern will be basically displaying on that surface, on that shape made of surfaces. And of course, this curve, you will create using standard Alias tools.

Then with that, this curve basically will be read by Dynamo, and with the algorithm which we have, me and myself and Michael, that we have created, which we can share with you, this algorithm is capable of creating intersections which will be basically necessary for later for the further steps.

But however, before I will explain how our algorithm works, of course, there are some challenges. The challenges of this situation is that the intersections which are basically appearing here, very often because of the fact that the surfaces have different topology, they have they might have be-- might have different directions and also might have gaps between each other.

These gaps and the fact that they are disordered or they have different direction might prevent us from creating a coherent pattern. So we come up with the algorithm which basically takes these intersections and puts them in order-- moreover, put them in order but also fills up the gaps and also puts them in the correct direction. So all of these-- the result of this algorithm is a polycurve, and all of them are the same direction.

This is a fundamental thing and helps a lot later on to build a pattern on it. Please note that the guide curve that we have created in Alias at the very beginning is basically, of course, leading these curves. And if you move this curve, this intersection, so the placeholder for the future pattern will also move.

So you have already some hybrid approach, we can say that-- the script in Dynamo plus the guide curve in Alias, which in the future might help you control better the result and how the pattern looks. OK, let's study this simple example. With these ordered place holders, ordered curves which our algorithm creates, you can already start creating your pattern on multi-surface.

Here, you can see some very, very simple example, with the diamonds. But you can go further and, for example, start to add some attractors. Here, you can see an attractor which is basically modifying the height of every single diamond based on its distance to either an outer perimeter or this little hole in sight. So, more distant these diamonds are from these edges, the height is increased. And of course, it's based, it is controlled, by the square function.

Going further, of course, you compared with the previous example, you would like to have the pattern sometimes maybe being-- the pattern would go beyond the edges of your surface so you can cut it out later or trim it along the borders of your shape. So this script also allows us to extend the placeholders, so the curves which are all put in order, and they basically form a placeholder for the pattern. So we can also expand and extend your pattern.

Then you can create these bizarre forms because, of course, again, you can also use here these lines on subdivs. What you can also see on the right is that at the same time, when you are searching for the perfect outlook of your pattern, you can see it in both environments. You can see it either in Dynamo, or you can see it also in Alias.

Going further, again, the script also allows us to cut the script, the pattern, along the borders of the shape, trim it. Then you can also think about using the other tools which T-Splines are giving you-- like, for example, to start creasing edges. Then you can really, really start to explore very, very different versions of your pattern if it's a diamond, if the pattern is made of diamonds.

On this slide, you can see nine different examples of pattern made of diamonds. And I'm showing it to you because as you could see in the upper right corner, I also used a tune up add-in in Dynamo which measures the time of how much time does it take to generate every pattern. Well, of course, it's very, very complicated calculations which are standing behind these results.

But you can see that it takes around 2 and 1/2 minutes for each different option, which in total gives you around 23 minutes for all. Imagine how fast you can iterate amongst the different options. Imagine how quicker you can explore very, very bizarre forms and how much time you can spend because you can imagine how much time would it take to create these patterns using the, let's say, traditional, conventional methods.

OK, thank you very much for your attention. That's all from my side. And Michael, the stage is yours back.

MICHAEL GUNTHER-GEFFERS: So let's also talk quickly about some limitations of Dynamo in areas worth knowing. The math kernel of Dynamo does not provide class A quality. Its strength is in the area of solid modeling and Boolean operation.

It achieves accuracy by inserting spans with a degree of 3. I plan to evaluate the order of at least some class A tools can be made available in Dynamo at some near point in the future. This brings us to the next point, which is that there's currently no access to the Alias tools inside from Dynamo.

This is a difficult thing to achieve due to the way the Alias molding kernel is set up. Also, Dynamo has no access to the Alias data model yet. While geometry can be sent, Dynamo can't transfer or create layers, shaders, colors, or similar entities yet.

So to summarize the session we had, everyone who uses areas should be aware of what Dynamo can do. Only then you can identify tasks in your daily work where Dynamo player script could assist you. Being able to identify and address these tasks with Dynamo can save you a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Be aware of the Dynamo toolbox and make other areas users aware of it. If you are sticking to the pellet only, you can easily miss a tool which could make your work life much easier. As you've seen by the slides of my colleague Andrzej, it is definitely possible to apply patterns across multiple surfaces using Dynamo and Alias.

If you have questions, if anything can be done with Dynamo, if you want to report bugs or enhancements or requests, or if you just want to try the latest work in progress scripts, please don't hesitate to reach out to us directly on the forum. And with that, we are coming to our end. Thanks for joining our class today. We hope you found it useful and that we will be in touch with you in person soon. Have a great day.

ANDRZEJ SAMSONOWICZ: Thank you. Have a great day.