Through the Interface

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using WinRT – Part 2

In the previous post in this series, we saw the code for an initial, basic implementation of a 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service developed for Windows 8 using WinRT. In this post, we extend that code to provide support for a few basic gestures, particularly swipe-spin, pinch-zoom and tap-pause. To properly show the gestures in action, I recorded the app working inside the Windows 8 emulator (which in turn was running inside Windows 8 running inside a Parallels VM, so fairly far from “the metal”, as it were). Here’s a quick video of the updated app in action:... Read more →

Heading for San Francisco

It’s a beautiful Whit Monday, here in Switzerland – and will probably be a beautiful Memorial Day, when I arrive in San Francisco, this afternoon. I’m heading across the pond to attend an internal technical conference and spend time with other members of my team over the coming fortnight. I have a couple of posts to finish up – one on WinRT, another on iOS, now that I’m able to deploy that version to my iPad 2 – before I wrap up the somewhat epic “cloud & mobile” series with a summary post. I’ll see what I can get... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using WinRT – Part 1

After tackling the implementation of a basic 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service using a variety of technology stacks – AutoCAD, Unity3D, Android, iOS & HTML5/WebGL – I felt as though I really needed to give it a try with WinRT, the new runtime powering Windows 8. All of the previous stacks had some “object” layer I could use above the base graphics engine – Rajawali provided it for Android/OpenGL ES, iSGL3D for iOS and Three.js for HTML5/WebGL – but for WinRT all bets were off. The general guidance for developing Metro-style 3D applications (typically that means games) is... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 3

To finish off our look at developing an HTML5-based 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service, today’s post integrates the trackball capability of the Three.js library. Many thanks to Jeff Geer for once again pointing me in the right direction on this. :-) The trackball capability allows you not to worry about manual implementation of 3D navigation inside your viewer: you simply set up some basic parameters to indicate the size of your model and the speed with which you want navigation to occur – as well as the keys for rotate, zoom and pan – and then you just... Read more →

Manufacturing DevBlog

Some time ago I mentioned the launch of ADN's DevBlogs, and followed up, last week, with the announcement that the AEC version had launched. Now that we have DevBlogs covering AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling and our AEC products, it’s only natural that we launch a Manufacturing DevBlog. Brian has mentioned it, over on his blog, too. Those of you working with Inventor, in particular, should be sure to bookmark Brian & Wayne’s Mod the Machine blog as well as the Manufacturing DevBlog (after a period of relatively low activity, things have definitely picked up over at MtM). It’s great to... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 2

In the last post, we created another, basic 3D viewer for the data from our Apollonian web-service – this time using HTML5 via Three.js. In this post, we’ll extend the code to listen for keyboard events and manipulate the model according to user-input, as well as enabling feature detection of WebGL (allowing the same implementation to call into the canvas rendering code when WebGL isn’t present). We’re introducing keyboard-based commands to enable zoom, rotate (meaning spin, although not continuously) and the change of levels: + Zoom in - Zoom out , or % Rotate left . or / Rotate... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 1

After looking at how to bring data from our Apollonian web-service into Unity3D, Android and iOS over the last few weeks, it seemed natural to extend this series to cover HTML. A big thanks to Jeff Geer for suggesting Three.js, which is the HTML5-based framework I ended up adopting for this project. I like Three.js for a number of reasons: just as jQuery (another library I’ve used in this project, to good effect) attempts to abstract away the messiness inherent in supporting multiple browsers, Three.js does the same for the world of browser-resident 3D. The other main reason I... Read more →

AEC DevBlog & a month to go until DevCamps

As announced previously on this blog, the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team is in the process of launching a series of DevBlogs, publishing material publicly that would previously only have been made available to ADN members. I see some fantastic material being posted there: more than I can keep up with, personally, but I expect that will settle down once the team has created posts from the bulk of the DevNotes published on the ADN web-site. Following the availability of those for AutoCAD and Infrastructure Modeling, I’m pleased to announce the AEC DevBlog is now live. If you’re [considering]... Read more →

New versions of 123D Catch for web and iPad

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about our “reality capture” (or 3D reconstruction) technologies, but I still like to play around with them, when I get the chance. My previous projects have all been with the PC version of 123D Catch (previously known as the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly), but I’ve just spent a few hours messing around with the new web and iPad versions of this tool (Shaan has already spent some time talking about these new versions over on his blog, in case). Thinking about it, these two new versions have been made possible... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 2

In the last post, we saw some code to implement a simple 3D viewer of data coming from our Apollonian web-service on iOS. In this post, we’ll add support for touch gestures, as well as a simple message box announcing when the web-service is unavailable. When compared with Android, iOS provides much higher-level gesture information via its UIKit framework: you basically get callbacks to indicate when the screen has been tapped or swiped, or when pinch or rotate gestures have been performed. This is all very helpful, in the sense that you don’t have to do so much low-level... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 1

Last week, it was all about Android. This week, I’ve started taking the plunge into the world of iOS. I’ve been using a Mac for some time – mainly to wean myself away from being so Windows-centric, but also with a view to working more with AutoCAD for Mac from a development perspective – but this was the first time I’d actually forced myself to write anything for either OS X or iOS. It all came as a bit of a shock, initially, even though I was generally aware of the strangeness of Objective-C with respect to its message-passing... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 3

I hadn’t actually planned a 3rd part to this series, but Dennis Ippel kindly spent some time looking at the code posted in the last post, to see where optimisations might be made to increase the sphere count. Consequently, Dennis made some changes to the Rajawali framework to support batch rendering of objects, as well as suggesting some client-side changes that make use of object cloning to avoid the need for replicated vertex buffers, index buffers, textures, etc. – all properties/dependent objects that the code was previously creating per sphere. The results were stunning: with really a modest change... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 2

In the last post, we took a quick look at some basics around developing application for Android, while today we’re going to see the code for our Apollonian Viewer application. Or, as my 5 year-old likes to call it, the “sweetie planet” app :-). Last time, I mentioned Dennis Ippel as the author of the Rajawali framework I’ve used in this app. What I didn’t mention is how helpful he has been with getting this app working: Dennis gave hints that unblocked my efforts on a number of occasions, and even implemented new capabilities in Rajawali to enable several... Read more →