Through the Interface

Autodesk open-sources Aurora, a real-time path tracing renderer for USD

SIGGRAPH 2022 – the pre-eminent computer graphics conference – was held in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and with it came a slew of USD-centric announcements such as this one from NVIDIA about the Metaverse. It’s really impressive to see how computer graphics hardware and software companies are rallying behind this open source initiative. Autodesk is no exception: after having open-sourced a web-based USD viewing implementation, earlier this year, Autodesk’s big USD-centric SIGGRAPH announcement related to the open-sourcing of a real-time path tracing renderer for USD called Aurora. For those who don’t know how path tracing works, here’s... Read more →

Autodesk open-sources web-based USD viewing implementation

I’ve been part of Autodesk’s open source committee – responsible for driving and approving open source contributions by the company – as the representative for Autodesk Research for the last few years. One of the most interesting projects to come through the committee – at least from my perspective – has now been released into the wild: Autodesk’s Visualization team (who also develop the Forge viewer) has open-sourced an implementation of the USD toolkit that targets the web. For those of you unfamiliar with USD – and I’m talking about the file format, not the currency – it stands... 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 →

Introducing Capturefinery, a Dynamo package that creates presentation graphics for Refinery studies

A few weeks ago I posted a GIF on Twitter that showed a few images from an earlier version of the Project Rediscover graph. I created this in a very manual, low-tech way: firstly, I selected a number of designs in Refinery, one-by-one, took a screenshot of each and then used GIMP to build an animated GIF. (This used to be very easy to do with previous versions of OS X, by the way: the Preview tool allowed you to drag images across into a GIF file and create new frames, and you could then use GIMP to adjust... Read more →

Dasher 360 at Autodesk University and the Forge DevCon

If my calculations are correct, I’ll be in Singapore during this year’s Autodesk University in Las Vegas. It’s the first I’ll have missed for many years – and it’s going to feel more than a little strange, when that week comes along – but this trip (and my family) will be taking precedence, for once. While I’m not going to be there myself, my good friend and colleague, Simon Breslav, is stepping in to deliver the class I would be giving if I were there. Although as Simon is the person who developed a great deal of the code... Read more →

Optimizing Dasher 360: using a point cloud to display sensor markers

At the Forge Accelerator in Munich, back in December, while I spent most of my time answering what questions I could about Forge I also showed up with a question of my own. In the original prototype of Dasher 360 we used code from a very helpful sample that showed how to add SVG markers to the DOM inside the Forge viewer. The original sample showed this in the context of adding markup to a model: on our side we wanted it to mark the location of sensors in the model. While this was great for small numbers of... Read more →

An update on Autodesk’s VR activities

I received an email from a development partner yesterday checking in on Autodesk’s VR offerings. It occurred to me that while I’ve spoken about them at the DevDays in the US and Europe, I haven’t posted anything here. So here’s some fairly up-do-date information on what technologies Autodesk has in the VR space. The way I’ve been tending to classify VR offerings in general is around the “distance from the metal”: i.e. how much (relatively speaking) of the software stack does the executing code need to go through to get down to the display hardware. This is a somewhat... Read more →

Capturing an image of the current AutoCAD document using .NET

This is a topic that has been addressed a few times on this blog, whether by posts that use the 3D graphics system to capture screenshots or the series of posts regarding the Screenshot Plugin of the Month from a few years ago. I thought it worth revisiting, though, as I noticed an API that I hadn’t used before and decided to put it through its paces. The API is a simple one – Document.CapturePreviewImage() – and it’s been covered before on the AutoCAD DevBlog. But I thought I’d take some file-selection code from the Screenshot app and see... Read more →

Locking and unlocking AutoCAD layers visibly using .NET

On Friday I visited Munich Airport: not only to catch a flight home to Switzerland but also to take a look at some AutoCAD issues frustrating the developers working on the airport’s facilities management system. During the course of the day we were able to work through a number of problems – such as using COM (SendCommand()) to run a script synchronously as well as to get the fill pattern for MPolygon objects (this is apparently broken in .NET) – but there was one I had to bring home with me: when locking and unlocking layers programmatically, their geometry... Read more →

The Force Awakens in AutoCAD

Some of you may remember this series of posts from the beginning of the year (I also mentioned it in the last post). It showed how you might use AutoCAD and .NET (in this case via F#) to animate the Star Wars opening crawl for the first 6 movies. Back then I said I’d update the video series to include Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, once it was released. Today is that day… due to some bizarre accident of international scheduling, I got to see it two days ago, here in Switzerland. I took a few snaps... Read more →

Mapping Zork inside AutoCAD – Part 2

In the last post we saw how we could integrate an HTML and JavaScript palette hosting Cytoscape.js into AutoCAD to map progress made in a text adventure. In today’s post we take the additional step of converting the graph data into AutoCAD geometry. To be clear, there’s a bit more to this post than having fun mapping old-school interactive fiction inside AutoCAD: I can think of lots of scenarios where you might want to use a comparable tool to build a graph of data and lay it out manually before bringing the graph into AutoCAD as native geometry. But... Read more →

Mapping Zork inside AutoCAD – Part 1

I mostly despise jetlag but once in a while manage to harness it for something positive. I remember some great trips to Asia, waking up at strange times to experience the dawn, walking the streets and seeing everyday life starting up around me. These days I typically find jetlag to be a bit of a curse, but this weekend I ended up using it to tackle a fun challenge: generating maps for Z-machine games such as Zork inside AutoCAD. Something I mentioned in a recent blog post but was reminded of last Thursday while catching up with Christer Janson... Read more →

Displaying different entities in AutoCAD viewports using .NET

This is a problem that developers have been struggling with for some time, and it came up again at the recent Cloud Accelerator: how to control the display of AutoCAD geometry at a per-viewport level, perhaps to implement your own “isolate in a viewport” command. It’s certainly possible to control layer visibility at the viewport level, of course, but this is sometimes at odds with how users wish to use layers for their own purposes. An application may want to isolate geometry in a certain location from a number of layers, for instance, and it becomes cumbersome to hijack... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 4

Happy Friday! It’s time to unveil the completed Star Wars opening crawl inside AutoCAD… After an intro and seeing various pieces implemented, in today’s post we’re going to add the crawl text and animate its movement into the distance. The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text As the surprise “bonus” item 6, I decided to add a planet and – at the end of the crawl – shift the view downwards to show its surface: an effect I’ve seen in the opening crawl for at least one of... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 3

Now that we’ve introduced the series and seen how to add some introductory text, theme music and a field of stars, it’s time for the Star Wars logo. The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text The logo came, once again, from the HTML opening crawl, which embeds some SVG content representing it. I copied this into a standalone SVG text file, ran it through a web-service to translate it to DXF and then opened that inside AutoCAD. The outlines of the letters (or groups of letters) were continuous... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 2

After introducing this series in the last post, today we’re going to address the first 3 items on our TODO list: The initial blue text The theme music The star field The disappearing Star Wars logo The crawling text The following two items are fairly significant, in their own right, so they’ll each take a post of their own to complete. Oh, and I’ve thrown in a surprise item 6, which I’ll unveil when we implement the crawling text. Before we dive in, it’s important to make some points about the code: because this is mainly just a bit... Read more →

Recreating the Star Wars opening crawl in AutoCAD using F# – Part 1

Happy New Year, everyone! As mentioned in the last post, I took a couple of weeks off over the holiday period, extending Autodesk’s annual “week of rest” between Christmas and New Year to a full fortnight. This time of year clearly has religious significance for many. Some go to church, to temple or even to Stonehenge, some watch one or more of the Star Wars trilogies – arguably which they choose depends on how devout they are. I only ended up watching one Star Wars film, over the holiday period, and while it was from the Despecialized Edition, I... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 3

After introducing the topic, showing a basic stereoscopic viewer using the Autodesk 360 viewer and then adding full-screen and device-tilt navigation, today we’re going to extend our UI to allow viewing of multiple models. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that for models to be accessible by the viewer that makes use of my client credentials, I also need to upload that content with the same credentials. You can follow the procedure in this previous post to see how you do that, although I believe the ADN team has created some samples that help simplify the process, too. Once you... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 2

I’m heading out the door in a few minutes to take the train to Zurich and a (thankfully direct) flight from there to San Francisco. I’ll have time on the flight to write up the next part in the series, so all will be in place for this weekend’s VR Hackathon. In today’s post we’re going to extend the implementation we saw yesterday (and introduced on Monday) by adding full-screen viewing and device-tilt navigation. Full-screen mode is easy: I borrowed some code from here that works well, the only thing to keep in mind is that the API can... Read more →

Creating a stereoscopic viewer for Google Cardboard using the Autodesk 360 viewer – Part 1

After yesterday’s introduction to this series of posts, today we’re going to dive into some specifics, implementing a basic, web-based, stereoscopic viewer. While this series of posts is really about using Google Cardboard to view Autodesk 360 models in 3D (an interesting topic, I hope you’ll agree ;-), it’s also about how easily you can use the Autodesk 360 viewer to power Google Cardboard: we’ll see it’s a straightforward way to get 3D content into a visualization system that’s really all about 3D. Let’s start with some basics. We clearly need two views in our web-page, one for each... Read more →