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Friday, December 11, 2015

Dynamo Studio and Dynamo4Revit 0.9.0 Release

From the Dynamo BIM Blog, by Zach Kron...

November 12, 2015

It’s time to warm up with another fresh, hot release of Dynamo.  Despite the jump from 0.8 to 0.9, this represents a relatively modest set of visible changes, and more refinement of the underlying code.  Migration of 0.8 workflows should be seamless and users should see the steady increase in stability,  particularly a more robust handling of different graphics hardware.  We are also setting the stage for an approaching 1.0 release, with API cleanup projects and an upgrade of several underlying components.  This also represents the alignment in release schedules of Dynamo for Revit and Dynamo Studio.  In the near future we are striving to make all Dynamo enabled tools capable of benefiting from the pre-release process, and to streamline the delivery of a consistent set of capabilities to other software that incorporate Dynamo.

Library Enhancements

You spoke, we listened!  Following on the success of in-canvas search (right-click in the workspace if you haven’t found it yet), the library is now organized in a tree-view to make it easier to find the nodes you want. Node types have also been color-coded to make it easier for you to locate create, action, and query nodes in the library.  Search and Browsing functionality is an essential part of Dynamo interaction, and we will continue to enhance these tools.


Manage Custom Node and Package Paths

Further refinements make it easy to add paths to makes nodes and packages show up in the library.  While we love the explosion of publicly shared packages and functionality, we recognize that many people want to share within a smaller workgroup.  Users can now publish packages to a local directory in addition to doing broad public shares via the Package Manager.


Node Layout Cleanup Improvements

Automatic formatting of graphs using “Clean up layouts” now recognizes groups within a larger graph and can also be applied to individual groups.


Background Preview works on Remote Desktop and Parallels

For remote systems with GPUs and virtual machines with hardware-acceleration, background preview is now visible.

Create Categorized Elements in Dynamo4Revit with Direct Shape

You can now wrap meshes, solids, and surfaces in a DirectShape and place it into your Revit Model

Additional Updates and Improvements in 0.9.0
  • New Chapters and expansion of the Dynamo Primer
  • Node to Code Stabilization
  • Improved ‘Canvas Snapshot’ functionality
  • Move to .NET 4.5
  • Lots of bug fixes

A special shout out to the Autodesk Dynamo Studio users in the world

Thanks so much for downloading and using this Dynamo environment and giving us all the great feedback.  We are looking at the stats and noticing that about half of you haven’t hit the little green cloud in the upper corner of your application to update to the latest and greatest version.

The currently available version of Dynamo Studio has all the goodies that went out in the Dynamo releases 0.8.1 and 0.8.2, as well as 0.9.0.  So, to summarize all the additional functionality from the initial release of Dynamo Studio and right now (plus the stuff listed above):

Color

Dynamo Studio now supports for colored geometry for analysis, presentation, and other uses. Check out the Display.ByGeometryColor and Display.BySurfaceColor capabilities. See the documentation at http://dynamoprimer.com/04_The-Building-Blocks-of-Programs/4-5_color.html for more.


Graph Management

You can now add groups to your graph organization from the right-click menu.  Simple but essential functionality to keep track of your ideas, communicate with others, and generally good programming hygiene.


Node2Code

Node2Code allows you to automatically convert a set of nodes into DesignScript.  This can be done to aid in learning DesignScript or simply to reduce larger collections of nodes to concise code snippets.   Select nodes, right click, boom!


Massive Search Improvements

Library Browser has a whole new, more legible design , and right-click to bring up the new In-Canvas Search feature and access nodes without ever having to leave the canvas.


Presets

Save different design options and graph states with different state that can be called back with the click of a button.  Find these controls in the Edit menu.

New Graphics Pipeline

We have modernized geometry visualization capabilities to take more advantage of graphics hardware.

Note for Dynamo software developers

0.9.0 represents a much smaller set of changes relative to other major releases, so I don’t want to alarm anyone by thinking that this is a big shift like in the jumps from 0.6 to 0.7.  We don’t anticipate that you will need to alter anything about your files on upgrade, but here are a couple of notes for Zero Touch package developers in particular.

API namespace changes

Recent namespace changes to Dynamo will require small edits to your code and a recompile. Please see the API Changes document. In particular, these will affect anyone making nodes with special user interface characteristics like dropdown menus.

Please keep in mind that, as we approach Dynamo 1.0, many namespaces will be changing, and you will need to re-compile and re-release to stay up to date. We anticipate that after 1.0 namespace changes will be MUCH less frequent and we will be aligning with semver.

So what are you waiting for?

Existing users can just hit the green cloud inside the application.  Anyone can just download the installer from the links on http://dynamobim.org/download/.  As always, Autodesk Dynamo Studio is FREE to students and educators, available on monthly or yearly subscription, and there is also a 90 day free trial period. Dynamo For Revit is available for anyone with Revit.

There's more information available on the Dynamo BIM blog »

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