I have a quick update to share on Dasher, today: I’ve just pushed live a version to the main Dasher site that enables a core Forge viewer extension to perform visual clustering of model contents.
I talked about this back at the beginning of the year, but there was a core change needed to the Forge viewer to make it work for Dasher: specific details are in the blog post I just linked to, but it relates to the fact we rely on the Navisworks format for our models, and these have a different property structure when loaded through Forge. Passing in a “searchAncestors” option as true when you load the extension will allow it to work with models published to NWC, for Forge developers interested in doing so.
I’m proud to say it’s a little piece of my code that allows this feature to work with Navisworks models. Many thanks to Henrik Buchholz for his help guiding me through the process of getting a code submission accepted in the Forge viewer (my first!) as well as to the rest of the BIM 360 Design for their work on this very cool feature.
You can give this feature a try for yourself on the demo page for Dasher, by clicking on the button in the main Forge viewer toolbar:
Here’s an animation of the feature being used (although bear in mind that you’ll almost certainly see some lag after you click the button that isn’t reflected in this animation):
While this perhaps doesn’t directly relate to the core IoT-centric features of Dasher, it is likely to be relevant to features we build into Dasher longer-term. And in the near-term it’s an opportunity for people to take a look at how it works and see whether it’s of any immediate value.
A few more changes have been made recently in Dasher that I’ll describe in more detail before too long.
