Through the Interface

15 years of this blog

If you’re going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn’t miss it by much). It’s been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that’s dropped back to 2 or... Read more →

The light at the end of the… smart bridge

This weekend I had a very strange task to perform: I had to book travel for work. Remembering how our corporate travel system worked was just one hurdle to cross – beyond that I had to deal with getting the appropriate management and travel department approvals, along with the fact I’ve booked a separate ticket for my 16-year old son to come along, and wanted to be 100% sure that we’re on the same flight. Was life really this complicated pre-pandemic? I’m sure I’ll get used to it all again, before long. The reason I’m travelling is pretty exciting,... Read more →

Floppy Friday #35

In this week’s episode we play YALNG (Yet Another Last Ninja Game), The Last Ninja 3, followed by Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior and Shanghai (a version of mahjong). Many thanks to Martin Griffin for the inspiration to dig up TLN3. As usual I did what I could to play these games without any advance preparation, so the mileage definitely varied. Here’s the cover art for this week’s games: See you next week! Read more →

Applying heatmap power to single-sensor volumes

I’ve been heads-down on a side project to integrate a C++ library into Forge using Web Assembly (hopefully I’ll share more on this sometime soon). Thankfully while I’ve been busy on that, the Hyperion team has been beavering away on some changes to their core shader. Last week I realised – now that we have controls to adjust the confidence and power settings in the shader – that rooms with just one sensor have a uniform shading style. This was a deliberate choice we made, back when we initially implemented the shader, as we felt it would help highlight... Read more →

Floppy Friday #34

In this week’s episode we take a look at three classic Commodore 64 games. The first game, The Last Ninja 2, is a sequel to a game we played last week, of course. The second game, Ghostbusters, is one I used to play on my ZX Spectrum as a child, although the C64 version looks quite different. The last game, Fighter Pilot, was basically incomprehensible, but there you go. Here’s the cover art for these three games (although I’m not completely sure about the last one). One of these days I’m going to have a “ZX Spectrum classics” episode,... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 2

In the first post in this series we looked at how a heatmap can be used to shade an object using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension – or Project Hyperion. In our case we shaded the surface of the MX3D bridge. In this post we look at a slightly different use-case for this mechanism, where we want to shade a piece of geometry inside the model based on the value of a particular sensor. To be clear: this is about shading the entire object a uniform colour that varies based on the value of the sensor that’s providing... Read more →

Enjoying an early summer quiet period? Attend next week’s Forge Accelerator!

Summer has finally started kicking in, here in Switzerland, which is wonderful. I saw this field of poppies, yesterday, which was simply stunning: the majority of the field was purple with a small border of red ones near the edges (although this doesn’t really come across in the photo). I hadn’t seen these poppies before, so did 30 seconds of Internet research to find out they were Papaver somniferum, commonly called the opium poppy. (It seems more likely that the field is being used for edible poppyseeds than being a hotbed of Swiss opium production, though.) Anyway, as the... Read more →

Floppy Friday #33

This week’s episode looks at three games I’d checked out briefly yesterday, as I’d been getting a little fed-up with editing out games that didn’t load. As it was I had to load the first game – The Last Ninja – three times before it worked properly (I did edit that bit out). After that we played Die Hard and Gee Bee Air Rally. All this week’s games were fun to play: The Last Ninja is considered a real classic, it seems, and while Die Hard starts slow, it apparently gets more interesting later on. Here are the Zzap!64... Read more →

Setting the vertical position of planar heatmaps

In a recent post we talked about the integration of Hyperion’s planar heatmap capability into Dasher. Towards the end of that post, I mentioned that the Hyperion team was looking into exposing some way to place planar heatmaps not only at the minimum and maximum vertical locations in the bounding box, but at levels in-between. The team has delivered this more quickly than I expected, and you’ll be able to try it for yourselves in v7.45 of the Forge viewer. While I was adding the sliders needed for the capabilities shown in the last post, I went ahead and... Read more →

Integrating Hyperion’s object shading into Dasher – Part 1

Over the next few posts – in this series, anyway – we’re going to take a look at the shading of objects (actually meshes) using the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion). This is something we’ve done in Dasher for some time, and I was excited that using Hyperion would once again allow us not only to rip out some of our old code but also to go in new directions and explore interesting new capabilities. Let’s first explain how this type of shading differs from what we’ve seen in previous posts, namely volumetric room and planar shading:... Read more →

Floppy Friday #32

That’s it – we’re halfway there! I was hoping to make a bigger splash with my 2^5th episode, but between my first vaccine jab and my first foray into team sports in 8 months (yes, perhaps not the wisest combo, but there you go), I had neither the time nor the energy to make something fancy. I was actually hoping that some good friends would come through with a Commodore SX-64 they have in their attic, but it turned out to be harder to uncover than expected. Hopefully still one for a future episode. We covered a few games... Read more →

DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

The material for this year’s online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here’s the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from... Read more →