Through the Interface

What’s next with Forge? We’re about to tell you!

Many of you have been using Forge services to good effect, whether the Forge viewer or the Data Management, Model Derivative and Design Automation APIs. There’s lots of really cool stuff you can do with Forge – we use it heavily in Dasher 360, for instance – but the existing services are largely engineered to deal with data created by existing desktop technology, i.e. they’re file-centric. The next generation of Forge web-services will help you and your customers move beyond files. Here’s a class from last year’s Forge DevCon that gives an introduction to two key technologies in this... Read more →

Forge and AWS: tell us what you need!

For most of the week – while at the Forge Accelerator in Barcelona – I sat next to an acquaintance (I’m happy to now call a friend) from Amazon Web Services: Tom “Elvis” Jones. Tom is a solution architect at AWS and has been to a number of Forge-related events over the last year or so. Autodesk has tightened its relationship with AWS in recent years, one of the reasons for Tom’s presence at Forge events. From talking to Tom, it’s clear he’s interested in helping Forge developers get started more quickly with the AWS platform, something that’s going... Read more →

Fixing pinch-zoom in Forge viewer applications

Over the last few days I’ve been working to improve support for touch devices in Dasher 360: the primary focus is on touch-enabled TVs and monitors, but I’ve been doing much of the testing for this on my mobile phone. Which means things are steadily getting better for people wanting to use phones and tablets to access the site, too. It turns out – and this may not come as a surprise to many of you – that the default pinch behaviour in the Forge viewer is to do an unconstrained orbit. No zoom, just the orbit mode that... Read more →

HoloLens and Forge at the Munich Accelerator

It’s been a challenging few days of “acceleration” in Munich. We’ve had a large, highly motivated crowd, which has definitely been a highlight. On the lowlight side, during the last 24 hours we’ve had our first major outage of the Forge platform. A core service, ACM – our Access Control Manager – went down early yesterday morning (for us here in Europe). This impacted both the Data Management and Model Derivative APIs, without which you can’t really use the Forge viewer, for example, as well as various other cloud-connected products such as Fusion 360 and Collaboration for Revit. Thankfully... Read more →

Removing context menu commands in the Forge Viewer

During last week’s Forge Accelerator, a developer wanted to strip the standard items from the context menu in his Forge Viewer application. We both searched for a while, until we found the answer: he’d been using this approach to add his own menu items – of course – but it turns out the exact same approach can be used to strip out unwanted items, too. The “context menu callback” receives a menu object that contains its various items: you can inspect them and remove the ones you don’t want, or even adopt a more brute-force approach as we’ve done... Read more →

It’s time to Play!

There’s a new WebGL-based technology being developed by Autodesk and it’s completely awesome. And you can request access to it today. Project Play has been in development for some time. It has some shared lineage with the Smithsonian X 3D Explorer – although I’m not sure to what extent, if any, they share code – and it’s the viewing technology used by millions (?) around the world to explore the ReCapped Apollo 11 Command Module. But this technology is about way more than just viewing static models. It’s a full node-based editor that allows you to create rich 3D... Read more →

Caching the results of long browser-based operations in Local Storage

In the IoT-related (and Forge Viewer-based) prototype I’m spending most of my time working on, we have a long startup operation that instantiates a number of arrays of data with information derived from the BIM. This operation only really needs to be done once per model – every user will get exactly the same information from the model that’s loaded in their own browser instance – but we were calculating it on every load of the model in the Forge Viewer. The question I’d like to look at in this post is the appropriate method for memoization of this... Read more →

Adding a context menu command to objects in the Forge Viewer

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time working on our “Dasher 360” prototype, recently. Which is, of course, based on the Forge Viewer. A simple – but handy – feature I added today is to add a context menu item to be displayed when objects are selected – and right-clicked – inside the Viewer. In my case I wanted to prototype a possible workflow for a “Send to HoloLens” capability: the feature itself isn’t ready (that’s what you might call an extreme understatement), but I thought I’d add the menu item in preparation for something being implemented. Here’s... Read more →

Getting room information for Revit models in the Forge Viewer

This question has come up more than a few times over the last year or so: I remember a number of Revit developers hitting it when creating Viewer applications at the accelerators in Munich and Prague, for instance. The problem appears to be that RVT files – when translated and loaded into the Viewer – do not have the concept of room objects: they’re just spaces. Which presents a challenge for developers who want to work at the room level. Last week I showed a demo during our “Autodesk Research and IoT” session, which showed room-centric navigation built into... Read more →

Second day at the Forge DevCon

With such a great first day at the Forge DevCon, how would the second (and final) day compare? Here it is, in pictures. :-) As for the first day, Jim Quanci, my long-time friend and former boss, acted as Master of Ceremonies. The first external presenter was Chris Anderson – who I mentioned yesterday. Chris is a very entertaining presenter, and talked about the evolution of the UAV industry. I love Chris’s vision for how drones should evolve: it aligns perfectly with mine. I was very happy to see Thiago da Costa speaking next. Thiago was co-founder of Lagoa,... Read more →

First day at the Forge DevCon

It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day’s session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner – colleagues in the Office of the CTO – provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here’s the crew getting... Read more →

Arrived in SF for the Forge DevCon

It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk’s annual tournament – this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The Neuchâtel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the “group of death” – two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper – and our rock-solid defence – didn’t concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes... Read more →

Updates to the Forge platform in advance of the DevCon

In anticipation of next week’s first Forge DevCon, the Forge platform has just been updated. Here’s a quick look at what’s new and changed: You’ll notice there’s a new Data Management API, which allows you to access data stored in A360, Fusion 360 and Autodesk’s Object Storage Service. This is going to make it much easier to keep things simple and consistent when developing applications requiring access to design data. The Model Derivative API is another new API that does a few different things. Firstly it allows you to translate models into SVF – which is consumed by the... Read more →

Autodesk Research and IoT

One of the projects I’ve been working on – alongside Simon Breslav, a colleague from Autodesk Research Toronto – is a prototype, web-based client for our IoT back-end. I’ll be demoing it next week at the Forge DevCon. It uses Forge’s viewer component to provide access to sensor readings from within a 3D model. Here are a few sequences of images to give you an idea of what it does. It’s still early days, but we’re steadily working towards feature parity with the desktop-based Project Dasher. The first sequence shows how you can view the sensors in a building... Read more →

Creating a vertical toolbar extension for the Autodesk viewer

As mentioned in the last post, we’re now going to take a closer look at writing extensions for the Autodesk View & Data API. To start with, we’re going to create an extension which displays a vertical toolbar docked to the left of the Autodesk viewer. This toolbar will be centred on the viewer area and only contain three buttons: two will be toggles – with events assigned to when they’re both clicked and unclicked – while the third will simply launch an action. Here’s the JavaScript for this extension: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar // /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AutodeskNamespace('Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension'); Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar = function... Read more →

Creating extensions for the Autodesk viewer

I’ve been working on a prototype implementation of a research project that makes use of the View & Data API for its visualization. It’s interesting to get back into using this API, especially as it’s a fundamental piece of the Forge platform. As we expect this particular application to grow, over time, we’re using extensions to house logically separate parts of the UI implementation. Extensions are a great mechanism for encapsulating functionality: they’re basically JavaScript objects that have load() and unload() methods that are called when the viewer loads/unloads them. A number of samples in the Autodesk samples repository... Read more →

Accelerating in Munich

It’s been a hectic – but very fun – few days in Munich, working with a group of 60-70 developers from all over Europe who are getting started with Autodesk’s cloud services. I’m particularly focused on those working with AutoCAD I/O, which means probably 5-6 companies in total. Here’s a quick summary of some of the problems that have come up, many of which are for pure AutoCAD… Draw Order warning One developer has a long-running custom operation that presents the following message: AutoCAD Warning: This operation may take a long time. To greatly improve performance, the system can... Read more →

Call for proposals: Autodesk Forge Accelerator

Autodesk is holding its first Autodesk Forge Accelerator from March 14-18, 2016 in San Francisco. I say it’s the first, but it’s really a rebranding of the Autodesk Cloud Accelerators that were held earlier this year to have the same moniker as the recently announced developer platform, fund and conference. The “call for proposals” started just before the holiday break, and will remain open until January 31, 2016. So there are just over 3 weeks left to submit your sub-2,000 word proposal on how you intend to use an Autodesk web-service API during the accelerator. These currently include View... Read more →

Autodesk gets serious about web-services: Forge

I’m finally on my way home from AU 2015. As usual, the three days of AU were a completely whirlwind: I feel like someone pressed the fast-forward button and I entered into some kind of hyperlapse state. So not much chance to blog and tweet, sadly: too much time spent interacting IRL. Which is very welcome, of course: these interactions are so very valuable, and help drive activities through the rest of the year. Anyway, as alluded to in the last post, I wanted to make sure people were aware about one of the big announcements from this year’s... Read more →

AU 2015 handout: Integrating .NET Code with AutoCAD I/O to Add Design Intelligence to Your Website

With the clock ticking before next week’s AU 2015, here’s the second of my class handouts (here’s a link to the first). For those of you lucky enough to be heading to this year’s event, see you in Vegas! Introduction During the course of this session, we’re going to look at the steps required to implement a web-site for turning pictures into jigsaw puzzles. We’re not going to go quite as far as creating the puzzles, themselves, but rather the DWG or DWF files that can be used to drive a laser cutter to do the work. The premise... Read more →