What you should know - Dynamo Studio Tutorial

- [Instructor] What should you know before watching this course? Well, you don't really need to know that much. I'm assuming that you're a Revit user, and I'm also assuming that you've at least used Dynamo a little bit. But even if this is your first time using Dynamo, you're still welcome to watch this course, and I think you'll get a lot out of it. If you'd rather watch something that's a little more foundational first, then you might want to jump out to the library and perhaps watch Dynamo Essential Training. Now, assuming that this is your first time with Dynamo or you're fairly new to it, I thought it would be a good idea to just quickly give you the lay of the land. So, the Dynamo interface looks something like this. And you'll have menus and toolbars across the top of the screen, which is pretty common in many software packages. On the left we have the library, which you'll spend a lot of time in. It's organized into branches that contain nodes. When you find a node, you can hover over it to get a tooltip with more information. If you're not sure where a node is, you can search for it up here at the top or right-click in the workspace to search. When you want to navigate the workspace, you can icons over here on the right hand side. The main workspace or canvas is the main part of the screen, and it's got both a 2D aspect and a 3D aspect that you can toggle through. We've got nodes that make up your graph. These are the little predefined bits of code. They get wired together, and that happens with ports. So you have inputs and outputs, and we wire between those to create a graph, and it will perform some function. Finally, when you're ready to execute your graph, you have two modes of execution, either manual or automatic, and you choose between those down at the bottom of the screen. So that's a really quick tour of the user interface, and now I would like to talk about the mindset that you need to be in when working with Dynamo. Dynamo is visual programming, but don't let that fool you. Just because it's visual doesn't mean it's not programming. So we do need to understand some basic logic and a little bit of strategy when it comes to programming, and there's an awful lot of lingo as well that we'll have to learn along the way. So, what might help you in understanding what will be expected of you when working in Dynamo is to think about some everyday task, like making coffee. So, when was the last time you really thought about what it takes to make coffee? So, you have to walk into the room, and then there's a series of steps that you perform that you've probably internalized, but let's go through them. There are certain inputs required. So, in the case of coffee, it involves water, of course. Maybe you've got one of those pod brewers, so there's some sort of a pod, but otherwise it'd be a filter and some coffee grounds. You have to decide how much coffee you want. So, perhaps there's a size setting. And then, of course, you need something to put your coffee in, so a mug or some other sort of container. Now, the next step is to take all of those inputs and process them in some way, so to do something to those inputs. So, we need to put power to the machine, we need to heat it up, and of course go through the brewing process. Now, that's largely automated for the most part and happens inside the machine, and there's not much for us to do there. Now, then there's some options. Once we get our coffee, we can optionally add cream or sugar or any kind of flavoring. So, do you want any of those options, yes or no? And then finally, you get some output, so you'll have a nice cup of coffee that you can enjoy. So, if you think about an everyday process like this and literally walk through all the steps that are required, the input, what processing needs to take place, are there any options, and then finally the output, that's essentially the same workflow that we're going to use in every Dynamo graph we create. So, keep that in the back of your mind as we move forward, and with that I welcome you to jump in and start building your first Dynamo graph with me.