Ben Storey
Having recently announced our integration with Dynamo, we sat down with Zach Kron, Product Management Lead for Forma, and Sol Amour, Senior Product Manager at Dynamo to explore the many exciting opportunities for Forma users. Dynamo can significantly enhance Forma’s capabilities, enabling you to explore a broader range of design options, craft complex geometries, enhance analyses, and much more. Moreover, this can all be done via a user-friendly visual scripting environment.
Check out the conversation below. To explore the Dynamo integration further, please visit this help center article.
Zach Kron: So we recently announced the combination of Dynamo and Forma into a public beta release. I’m pretty excited about it. I’m very curious to hear what’s on your mind about that recent announcement.
Sol Amour: It’s a really exciting time for us, especially on the Dynamo team, because we get to experience a new environment with new possibility and explore that with our customers. We get to, in essence, supercharge each other’s worlds here. So Dynamo gets to take some of these wonderful analysis routines that Forma has and then start to make meaning from them. And on the inverse, Forma gets to start to work with those complex creation of your own analysis routines, if you will.
Zach Kron: I think that one of a lot of people’s first impressions of Dynamo and the power that brings is like, “Oh, it can make twisty towers.” I’m much more excited to see how we can start analyzing data,
both that’s generated from Forma and generated elsewhere,
in order to understand it better and in order to represent that data in a more comprehensible way.
Sol Amour: The ability to basically break down something that is an out-of-the-box tool, like the 90 % solution, if you will, and then really tweak it to your own niche…
Zach Kron: That’s a really cool thing also about the customization of Dynamo is that by and large, the things that we are doing on the Formus side are we are emphasizing general analysis capabilities that are applicable across many regions and locations. Especially for things like environmental analysis, it becomes very locally relevant. Not just locally relevant in terms of what data are we able to get for local analysis, but how are we representing that analysis for local stakeholders?
Sol Amour: You’ll be able to then take some of these analyzes, maybe layer some of these analyzes together to discover new potentials in your design to give you more information. That is Dynamo’s strength as well. It’s where we excel. People can build anything, therefore
they can address these bespoke problems. They can take something that is very meaningful for them and work in a way that solves that problem today.
Zach Kron: I mean, everybody is talking about AI these days. Forma has a number of out-of-the-box, more preconfigured approaches to AI. A lot of our analyzes, for instance, are run on routines that have been analyzed and patterns have been identified in order to create very, very quick, directionally accurate simulations.
Sol Amour: Yeah, totally, so for Dynamo, we have the ability to take some of those results from some of these rapid analyzes, these AI analyzes inside of Forma, and then to actually make sense to them and say, please, fix this for me in a way that I need at speed.
Maybe in the future, in the not too distant future, we can look at AI actually helping munge that data or clean that data and spread it through in a nice way inside a Dynamo. Today, we have the ability
to build graphs at speed. Now with machine learning empowered, auto complete, that’s about the first step on a long journey to being able to build graphs that do meaningful things at rocket speeds.