Through the Interface

Preventing selection of room geometry in the Forge viewer

Some of you may remember this post, which talks about the ability to export to Navisworks from Revit to bring room information into the Forge viewer. One of the side effects of using this technique is that there’s a bunch of semi-transparent room boundary geometry in the resultant model, which can make navigation a little tricky. For instance, here’s what happens when I try to select the wall at the end of a corridor (you can’t see the cursor, but you should get the idea – the invisible room geometry gets selected rather than the wall). To help improve... Read more →

Creating a transparent movable panel inside the Forge viewer

As a follow-up from Tuesday’s post, I wanted to hide the title bar of the dialog showing the legend for our surface shading feature. It turned out to be really easy: we’re deriving from DockingPanel and we simply need to override the initialize() method and choose not to create either the title bar or the close button. All we do in the method is create “move handlers” that allow the dialog to be moved by clicking and dragging anywhere on it: very important if you no longer have a title bar on your dialog. Here’s the TypeScript class I... Read more →

We are furnished!

Our VR room received its finishing touches yesterday, when our furniture was delivered. Even before being officially ready, the room has seen some more usage. A group of our Enterprise Support managers gave it a try recently after one of their meetings in the Neuchatel office, for instance. Tomorrow I’ll host a “drop in” morning for local Autodesk employees to come by and try it out, which should be fun. I expect it’ll be a few weeks before everyone gets to try it, given the interest people have already expressed in what VR can offer Autodesk customers.Before that, though,... Read more →

Scaling HTML canvases for HiDPI screens

I’ve been mocking up some UI additions for Dasher 360, today. A big chunk of my time was spent working out how to make flyouts work for vertical toolbars (something I’ll address in a future post, if there’s interest), but I’ve just been fighting another problem that’s probably not really an issue for anyone using standard DPI (and non-“retina”) screens. I’ve been drawing text to a standard HTML canvas and it’s been really ugly. After some minutes of searching the web, I found out it was probably due to my MacBook Pro’s retina display. Here’s the code I integrated... Read more →

Overlaying a logo on the Forge viewer

Today I was asked to add the ability to place a custom logo onto an instance of the Forge viewer (in my case for Dasher 360, of course). It seemed like an interesting one to share, as I’m sure others have the same requirement. There are probably lots of ways to solve this – for instance by adding the image with its own camera as an overlay inside the Forge viewer’s 3D scene – but I decided to stick to something simple and have the browser overlay the image. There are a few changes needed for this to work.... Read more →

A new Forge developer blog

The Forge team (many of whom I worked with back when I was part of the Autodesk Developer Network organisation) have created a new developer blog focused on all things Forge. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects who contributed to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog (in fact that particular blog’s content has already been migrated across to the new site with the Forge branding). I expect lots of helpful information will be posted during the coming weeks/months/years. Be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. Now if only I could find out how to search the... Read more →

WebVR in Chrome and Forge

There’s a lot happening in the world of WebVR at the moment. Today’s big news is that Chrome 56 has now been released for Android, bringing WebVR support to Daydream phones (other devices to follow). This is an important landmark on the journey towards ubiquitous WebVR-capable devices. At some point we’ll be getting a desktop version of Chrome that has WebVR, too: for now I’m still testing with Chromium, as suggested by the WebVR download instructions. The other noteworthy event – at least from Autodesk’s perspective – is the release of v2.13 of the Forge viewer. This brings some... Read more →

Goodbye, Carl

Yesterday Carl Bass announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Autodesk. The news came with the 9am Pacific press release, followed quickly by Carl’s email to employees (reproduced here). I’m pretty sure that only a handful of people knew about this in advance: the rest of us were completely stunned. Autodesk has had “participation” from activist investors over the last year and a half or so – they were even mentioned in the press release talking about Carl’s departure – so clearly the concern was that Carl was in some way pressured into leaving. At least that... Read more →

VR guinea pigs

On Friday we had our first external visitors to the VR room at Autodesk Neuchatel. Jose and Erich came across from Amstein + Walthert, an engineering firm headquartered in Zurich. Jose had reached out to me – we’ve been in contact a few times, over the years – as he’d read about the VR room on this blog and was curious to try it out. The room still isn’t 100% ready – we’re waiting for some furniture to show up – but it seemed a good opportunity to try out some of our VR demos on live volunteers. Here’s... Read more →

Through the Interface goes Around the World

I have some big news. My wife and I have decided to take our three children out of school for a semester and travel around the world for six months. We’ll be leaving at the beginning of July and spending a month in each of North America, South America, the South Pacific, ANZ, South Asia and South Africa, returning at the beginning of 2018. This is the reason I’m likely to be skipping AU 2017 and this year’s Forge DevCon, by the way. So it goes. During the trip my wife will be “road schooling” the kids for a... Read more →

Enabling Visual Studio Code’s integrated web debugging

Yesterday I finally took the time to work on one of those tasks that had previously never quite bubbled up to the top of my priority list. Since I’ve been working on Dasher 360 I’ve put up with using the developer tools built into Chrome for debugging. While these are pretty good – especially with source-map support, allowing us to debug the source TypeScript code – which is the main reason I haven’t taken the time to do otherwise, they do have their limitations: just for instance, you very often start to edit code in the debugger before realising... Read more →