Through the Interface

Connecting Refinery to VR

It’s time to talk about a little project I started over the holiday break: connecting Project Refinery – the optimization engine for Dynamo that will help drive Generative Design workflows – to Virtual Reality. It’s a project I’ve been thinking about for some time, now, and was originally inspired by two things: the workflow Van Wijnen uses Refinery for makes heavy use of VR for visualization – to evaluate designs with internal stakeholders – but right now they export the geometry from Dynamo to Revit and then use Enscape to visualize the scenes. It’s not a complicated process, but... Read more →

Controlling Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts showing how to query information about Hue lights via a Philips Hue bridge from Dynamo Studio, it’s time for the really fun stuff: controlling lights from Dynamo. To make this happen some changes were needed to the zero-touch node that talks to the Philips Hue API on behalf of Dynamo, mainly to allow the setting of a light’s properties. The Philips Hue API allows this to be done either via Hue, Saturation and Brightness or by the XY offset in the CIE colour space. I ended up exposing the ability to... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 2

In the last post we looked at some initial code to get basic information about the lights connected to a Philips Hue bridge. In this post we’re going to extend the code to expose more information but also to query the bridge repeatedly, allowing the graph to display the latest light colours as they change. Here’s a view of the updated graph. A few things have changed: firstly the Bridge object exposes some new information – in our case we can see the names of the lights, but we could also access the names and IDs of the various... Read more →

Accessing Philips Hue lights from Dynamo Studio – Part 1

I mentioned in a recent post that I was chewing on how design apps might connect with building automation systems to display data via lights. My first step along this path was to see how Dynamo Studio might connect into my home’s Philips Hue bridge and get information about the “smart” lights it contains. To do this I created a zero-touch node in C# that calls into the Philips Hue API exposed by my local bridge. (To make this piece work you need to follow the steps on this page that show how to create an authorised user ID... Read more →

Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 4

Now that we’ve introduced how the CRX will be loaded by AutoCAD I/O – via an Autoloader bundle – we’re going to take a look at the code needed to create and test our Activity using it. As a starting point – and as mentioned last time – you should get hold of the code in this sample on GitHub and copy & paste the (C# & XML) code we’ve seen in the last two posts into their respective files. The code we’re going to see in today’s post belongs in Client\Program.cs. We’re very much tailoring the existing implementation,... Read more →

3 things I learned at last week’s Technical Summit

The Autodesk Technical Summit is an annual, internal, 2-day technical conference for members of Autodesk’s engineering staff. I’ve been lucky enough to attend since 2011 (the first was held in 2010), and have seen the event grow both in breadth and attendance, over the years: this year there were 500 attendees from around the world and some really excellent presentations. Most years I’ve been at the event as a presenter (I talked about F# in 2011, Kinect in 2012 and then both Kinect Fusion and Leap Motion in 2013): this is the first time I was there purely as... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Isometric views of 3D solids

After introducing the series and looking at a sample 2D JavaScript application, it’s time to go 3D. Well, 2.5D, anyway. We’re going to implement a simple sample using the Isomer library that extracts bounding box information about 3D solids – which could be extended to get more detailed topological information, albeit with quite some work – and displays them in an isometric view in the HTML canvas. This time we’re only going to have a single button in our UI allowing model updates to be refreshed in our isometric view. I decided to leave this as a manual operation,... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Revision clouds using Paper.js

Having introduced this series, it’s time to look at some code. This first sample shows how to create and host a web-page that uses an external graphics library – in our case Paper.js – within an AutoCAD application. The main “trick” to this is going to be getting the data from the HTML page into AutoCAD, which we’ll do by extending AutoCAD’s shaping layer. Bear in mind that this code will work with AutoCAD 2015, but I can’t guarantee it will do so with 2014 (the JavaScript API was very much a “preview” in that release). Something I should... Read more →

Raster to vector conversion on the iPad

I was happy to see Scott’s announcement that a tool I’d seen demoed back at AU – and during my recent trip to Israel – has now been published to the iOS App Store (even if it’s really a Labs release, at this stage). It was developed by the Applied Research group in our Tel Aviv office, the team that brought you ShapeShifter. It’s an iPad app called Vectorize It that allows you to generate vectors from raster images – whether taken by the iPad’s camera or picked from its image gallery – with the capability of opening the... Read more →

Ray-tracing Apollonian packings

Over the weekend I managed to complete the BerkeleyX Foundations of Computer Graphics class. This was really an excellent class, both in terms of the structure of the lectures and the homework assignments, which actually scaled in a non-linear way (the last assignment took as much time to complete as the previous three combined). But you were eased into it and didn’t strictly need to do the last piece of homework (which was to write a ray-tracer from scratch) to get a “pass” on the course. What’s nice about these MOOCs is that – in order to scale, putting... Read more →

Zooming to an AutoCAD entity using JavaScript

As promised in yesterday’s post, here’s my first attempt at writing a simple JavaScript app for AutoCAD. This app is purely JavaScript – no HTML to be seen, anywhere – and implements a command inside AutoCAD that will zoom to the extents of an entity selected by the user. Let’s start by looking at the source code, which has been posted here. // Command to zoom to the extents of a selected entity function zoomEntity() { try { // Set the options for our user prompt var peo = new Acad.PromptEntityOptions(); peo.setMessageAndKeywords("\nSelect an entity", ""); peo.allowObjectOnLockedLayer = true; //... Read more →

A gamification experiment: Apollonian Obliteration

Gamification is happening all over the place. In case you’ve missed what it’s all about, this short video should help. To get even more background, here’s another from the same source on augmented reality games, which is a follow-on from this video on alternate reality games. After having managed to get Apollonian Packings brought into the very cool PointCloud Browser, I thought it’d be fun to integrate some of the code from another of the PointCloud Browser sample apps, creating a little augmented reality game. Here’s the basic idea: each level consists of a packing brought into PointCloud Browser... Read more →

An augmented reality view of an Apollonian packing using PointCloud Browser

After my initial (only partially successful) attempt, earlier in the week, to get 3D geometry from the Apollonian web-service into a PointCloud Browser session, I finally managed to get it working properly. Given the currently fairly light documentation available – especially for the Viper JavaScript namespace which gives access to the 3D rendering capabilities in the browser – I ended up posting a question to the PointCloud forum. The answer was very instructive – I was able not only to get spheres of different radii displayed using the same mesh… … but also to apply different colours to the... Read more →

Using SLAM-based Augmented Reality to visualize 3D geometry

I first became aware of the work being done by 13th Lab a couple of years ago, but just last week someone pinged me about it again and re-triggered my interest (thanks, Jim :-). 13th Lab is a small Swedish company that has created some really interesting Augmented Reality technology. Many AR systems make use of fiduciary markers (which often look like sections of QR codes) to make it easier to determine where the 3D content should be positioned and visualized in the 2D image of the scene being fed from your device’s camera. Ideally, though, you want a... Read more →

Cloud & mobile series summary

As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the “desktop” application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 3

After starting the sub-series focused on iOS, I held off completing it until I could actually test the code on a physical iOS device. A big thanks to Andy Chang from our Toronto office for getting me set up with the ADP membership and my iPad 2 added to the list of usable development devices. I won’t talk about the steps needed to provision apps for iOS devices – there seems to be enough information available on the web for that – but I will say it ended up being less complicated than I expected. That’s not to say... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using WinRT – Part 2

In the previous post in this series, we saw the code for an initial, basic implementation of a 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service developed for Windows 8 using WinRT. In this post, we extend that code to provide support for a few basic gestures, particularly swipe-spin, pinch-zoom and tap-pause. To properly show the gestures in action, I recorded the app working inside the Windows 8 emulator (which in turn was running inside Windows 8 running inside a Parallels VM, so fairly far from “the metal”, as it were). Here’s a quick video of the updated app in action:... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using WinRT – Part 1

After tackling the implementation of a basic 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service using a variety of technology stacks – AutoCAD, Unity3D, Android, iOS & HTML5/WebGL – I felt as though I really needed to give it a try with WinRT, the new runtime powering Windows 8. All of the previous stacks had some “object” layer I could use above the base graphics engine – Rajawali provided it for Android/OpenGL ES, iSGL3D for iOS and Three.js for HTML5/WebGL – but for WinRT all bets were off. The general guidance for developing Metro-style 3D applications (typically that means games) is... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 3

To finish off our look at developing an HTML5-based 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service, today’s post integrates the trackball capability of the Three.js library. Many thanks to Jeff Geer for once again pointing me in the right direction on this. :-) The trackball capability allows you not to worry about manual implementation of 3D navigation inside your viewer: you simply set up some basic parameters to indicate the size of your model and the speed with which you want navigation to occur – as well as the keys for rotate, zoom and pan – and then you just... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 2

In the last post, we created another, basic 3D viewer for the data from our Apollonian web-service – this time using HTML5 via Three.js. In this post, we’ll extend the code to listen for keyboard events and manipulate the model according to user-input, as well as enabling feature detection of WebGL (allowing the same implementation to call into the canvas rendering code when WebGL isn’t present). We’re introducing keyboard-based commands to enable zoom, rotate (meaning spin, although not continuously) and the change of levels: + Zoom in - Zoom out , or % Rotate left . or / Rotate... Read more →