Through the Interface

Automating operations inside Dasher

In the last post I neglected to remind people of Kiosk Mode, a great way to see some of Dasher’s features. Simply click on the filmstrip button at the bottom of Dasher’s vertical toolbar and move the cursor off to the side (this just stops the button from staying highlighted when the cursor gets hidden). Then just sit back and see how Dasher works. Here are some posts talking about how this works. Kiosk Mode knows about various Dasher extensions and can automate their usage. There’s a fair amount of complexity in the mechanism, but it works well enough.... Read more →

Come and try the latest Dasher – now with a new timeline!

After many months of effort, we now have an updated version of Project Dasher available on dasher360.com. (The project is still very much active research, so for now you’re able to try it out with the model of the NEST building, accessible via the Demo button on the main page.) The major feature of this update is the new timeline, which was designed by Autodesk Research and developed by our partner CCTech. This component has been under development for over a year, so it’s really exciting to finally get it into people’s hands. Beyond that, you should really give... Read more →

A significant update to Dasher is on the way

For the last week or so I’ve been busy making sure Dasher works well with multiple themes. You can see the progress across these posts. I’m not quite ready for a full unveiling, but it should go live at some point in the next week, give or take. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main page (you’ll be able to select the theme either as you enter Dasher via the front page or from within the application’s settings UI, which is integrated into the Forge viewer’s). One of the big-ticket items in this coming release will... Read more →

Changing HIG themes at runtime in a Forge application

Despite the unfolding horror of the situation with Covid-19 – and stuff is really starting to hit the fan, here in Switzerland, with schools and non-essential commerces being closed and rumours of an enforced sequestration being considered – I’m at least getting some quality time to work on Dasher. Last week we saw how it was possible to support both dark and light themes from the Autodesk HIG in a Forge viewer application. I mentioned both times my desire to allow Dasher’s theme to be selected by the user at runtime. After searching fruitlessly on the internet for some... Read more →

Using the HIG to implement a light mode in a Forge application

Last time we saw how it’s possible to use Autodesk’s HIG to add different visual themes to a Forge viewer application. When I first started down this path, I thought I’d probably just stop at implementing another dark theme inside Dasher: I suspected it would be a lot of work to implement a light theme. It turns out I was wrong: towards the end of last year I’d spent a few days rationalising our use of styles inside Dasher, by eradicating every use of “hardcoded” colours inside CSS styles and have them stored in SCSS variables. It felt like... Read more →

Supporting multiple visual themes in a Forge application using the Autodesk Human Interface Guidelines

I mentioned in the last post that I’ve been working on integrating a new timeline component into Dasher. By default the component supports a different visual theme than the one we’ve been using in Dasher: in order to make the look & feel consistent, I had to include Autodesk’s HIG toolkit in the Dasher project. HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines, and it’s Autodesk’s effort to increase visual consistency across our products (especially those that are web-based). And the best thing is, it’s open source and available for anyone to integrate in their projects via npm or yarn. And... Read more →

Knowing when operations are complete in the Forge viewer

We have a feature in Dasher called “kiosk mode”. It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer’s progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn’t ever a very good... Read more →

The first Forge Accelerator in London

This week I’ve had the pleasure of spending time at the first Forge Accelerator to be held in Autodesk’s Soho office (in central London). On Monday morning I headed to Geneva, and had a minor panic attack when I saw that so many London-bound flights had been cancelled. My own flight was delayed by about an hour, but only due to late arrival of the plane from Zurich. Nothing related to Storm Dennis, which came as a huge relief after having watched the viral Etihad A380 landing video. In fact it was nice and sunny when I finally arrived... Read more →

Persisting identifiers for objects in the Forge viewer

In Dasher we have some interesting functionality to isolate parts of the building by level. This is increasingly something you can do via “out of the box” Forge viewer functionality, but we’ve found a couple of reasons to go beyond that basic capability: Not all elements or objects are assigned to the correct level. Some elements – such as those belonging to the building facade or perhaps internal pipes – transcend levels, and so don’t behave well. It’s of course possible to split elements/objects that belong to the second category, but we tend to take the approach of allowing... Read more →

More data from the NEST building now available in Project Dasher

I’ve been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I’m hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we’re not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a “conduit” that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but... Read more →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 2

A few posts ago I mentioned some work was needed to migrate our Dasher 360 shaders to the latest version of the Forge viewer (or the one after it). This work is now complete, so I can share a few thoughts and comments on what was needed to make this happen. Before doing that, though, I need to thank Elias Cohenca for his invaluable help during this process: I can honestly say that without his help the migration would either not have happened or would remain a work in progress. Thanks, Elias! Firstly, it’s important to note that even... Read more →

Visiting NEST with Kingspan

On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa’s Dübendorf campus. I’ve posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it’s 16-screen media... Read more →

Join us for DevDays Online

Not everyone can make it to the Forge team’s annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here’s a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn’t work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays... Read more →

Migrating custom Forge viewer shaders to WebGL 2 – Part 1

An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn’t working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge... Read more →

Swissbau 2020

Bright and early, yesterday morning, I hopped on a train (well, a couple of trains) to get across to Basel for this year’s Swissbau, the bienniel construction-related trade show held in Switzerland, and apparently one of the largest in Europe. I’d never been before, but thanks to social media I’d compiled a list of people to see there, and had even coordinated to meet up with my friend and fellow blogger, Jeremy Tammik. There was quite a bit going on at Swissbau, even outside the exhibition hall. At one point I saw some people performing while suspended from a... Read more →

Visually clustering the contents of models in the Forge viewer

Some of you may already have seen Augusto’s tweet showing the “Visual Clusters" Forge viewer extension that has been developed by the BIM 360 Design team. It really is super-cool: the extension takes the content of the model loaded in the Forge viewer and clusters it spatially based on the value of the various items’ category property. The extension was first published in v7.6 of the Forge viewer, so it’s been around a little while. If you don’t have a Forge viewer application to test it out with, fear not! Petr Broz has added the capability to load extensions... Read more →

Additively Manufacturing Music using the Printesizer

I mentioned in the last post that I had a fun topic to share to help get the new decade started. Well, here it is! I’ve been collaborating with Elias Cohenca from our Tel Aviv office on and off over the last few years: Elias managed to port the THREE.MeshLine JavaScript library to work with THREE.js r71, making it compatible with the current releases of the Forge viewer. We’ve made heavy use of this library in Dasher 360 to represent skeletons and streamlines, for instance. I’ve also been mentoring Elias, something I mentioned in this post from the middle... Read more →

Back home and Happy Holidays!

After getting back to Bangalore from Pune, I did end up having to spend the best part of Wednesday morning dealing with more Indian bureaucracy. The bank I was in was going through its annual archival process, which meant the floor soon filled with papers… … and then boxes containing them. This brought back memories, as it was Writer Relocations who handled our move to India, back in 2003. After this I was able to head across Bangalore to meet with an old friend, Lokessh, for lunch. Lokessh works just off Queen’s Road, in the old centre of the... Read more →

Pune

On Sunday morning I booked an Uber to get across to Bangalore airport for my flight to Pune. It was still early, so the only other being in the street was a cow. It was busier when I arrived at Bangalore airport. And more Christmassy, too. I got myself some idli sambar (the breakfast is better at the domestic terminal than the international one, by all accounts), and then waited by the gate for my SpiceJet flight. The flight was slightly delayed, but basically uneventful – it takes a little over an hour to get from Bangalore to Pune.... Read more →

Bangalore

On Wednesday morning I headed off at the crack of dawn to Geneva to fly back out to India. The sun was coming up across the lake – and the Alps behind it – as the train flew towards the airport. I changed flights in Heathrow, heading onwards to Bangalore. For once I had a World Traveller Plus seat – and a bulkhead, to boot – which I definitely enjoyed. The only downside was the combination of my aging Bose noise-cancelling headphones giving up the ghost partway through the flight with a tantruming toddler across the aisle from me.... Read more →