It’s time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to VR. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It’s not a complicated process, but it takes a little time for each iteration.
The second inspiration came when I realised that Refinery had started capturing the 3D geometry for each solution, as you can see here in the Design Grid. Each of the below graphic thumbnails is actually a full 3D view you can zoom and rotate.
Digging around, I realised that the captured geometry was stored on the local file-system (currently under…