Digging into Dynamo custom nodes

As mentioned in a recent post, I’m currently working on a project using Dynamo Studio. It’s fun getting back into Dynamo and DesignScript: I helped prototype the initial implementation of DesignScript inside AutoCAD about a decade ago, and I love seeing how the technology has evolved in the meantime.

There are a few of us from Autodesk Research working on the project, which is also fun, but in a less literal way. Dynamo doesn’t work especially well with source control, as far as I can tell, so there’s a fair amount of manual merging of nodes into the master graph. One way to mitigate this – and to simplify the overall graph – is to use custom nodes. These are sub-graphs with inputs and outputs that can encapsulate repeated operations, hiding complexity.

To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, here’s a quick view of the overall graph we’re working on:

The Dynamo graph I'm currently working on

There are some limitations when working with custom nodes, however. So far I’ve found that it’s not…

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