Through the Interface

A high-tech glitter bomb designed with Fusion 360

There’s a video that’s currently going viral on YouTube – with 35 million views and at #4 on the trending list – wherein a former NASA engineer turned professional YouTuber (sigh) shows how he designed and deployed a super-cool glitter bomb to counter local parcel thieves. It was picked up a few days ago by the BBC, back when it had a mere 6 million views. The video is genuinely fascinating, especially towards the end where it shows footage captured by the integrated mobile phones of various thieves opening it up and triggering explosions of glitter followed by releases... Read more →

Animating robots in the Forge viewer

The inspiration for this post has come from a variety of sources. (Feel free to skip this preamble where I talk about the history of the project: as much as anything it’s so I remember myself how things happened when I come back to this post at some point in the future. ;-) My colleague, Simon Breslav, worked on an initial implementation in Dasher 360 that animated robots – and even mapped stress information to their surfaces – for a demo shown at AU 2017, back when I was travelling around the world with my family. One of the... Read more →

Micro16, AAG and Monolith

On Saturday I gave a couple of VR presentations at Micro16, an exhibition and conference held at Microcity, a (relatively) new technical hub in Neuchatel that houses part of EPFL. [I always pronounce Microcity with stress on the second syllable, much as Will Ferrel does when pronouncing “Metrocity” in the movie Megamind (so that it rhymes with “atrocity”). Anyway – it’s just a (formerly) private joke shared with my wife and kids.] I’d been invited by a local organisation called Enigma & Indicium, which organises vocational workshops for young adults. The two sessions were attended by people aged from... Read more →

JPF-DUCRET: Rebuilding CERN’s Globe using AutoCAD and hsbcad

When I was in Prague recently I spent some time with Alex Vinckier and Kris Riemslagh from hsbcad, an ADN member and provider of software for the offsite construction industry. I’ve corresponded and spoken with Alex and Kris a number of times during my time at Autodesk, but this was my first opportunity to meet them in person. They suggested I coordinate with another member of the hsbcad team – Alex’s twin brother, Karel – to visit to one of their best customers, who happens to be based just 40km from my home. So it was that Karel and... Read more →

Testing whether a point is inside or above an AutoCAD solid using .NET

Today’s post resulted from an internal discussion: Miroslav Schonauer – with the help of Jan Liska – put together some code for a recent consulting engagement that they felt was important to share with the community. They wanted to test point containment for a particular 3D solid, but also to test whether the selected point – if outside the solid – was above it. They achieved this using AutoCAD’s Brep API. Here is the C# they put together (with some minor, cosmetic edits from my side): using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.BoundaryRepresentation; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using... Read more →

Integrating physics into AutoCAD using JavaScript

My esteemed colleagues over in the ADN team, Philippe and Balaji, have been working their magic, creating samples to show how to make use of JavaScript-based physics engines within Autodesk software. They’ve inspired me to have a go myself. Philippe’s sample – which carried on from his preliminary research into JavaScript-based physics engines – shows how you can integrate ammo.js with the View & Data API to add some gravity to an A360 model. Really fun stuff! [Side note: I love that ammo.js stands for “Avoid Making My Own physics engine” as well as being an emscripten port of... Read more →

Building a Death Star with AutoCAD and 123D Make at the Fab Lab

So yes, I like Star Wars. And my kids like Star Wars, too. In my office downstairs at home, I have the pride and joy of my modest collection of Star Wars-related goodies, a LEGO Death Star: It pains me to leave it downstairs and only let the kids play with it under supervision, but it was a hassle (albeit a very enjoyable hassle) to build and I’d hate to see it damaged. And if anyone thinks that makes me sound like Will Ferrell’s character in the LEGO Movie, they’d be right: there’s a lot that resonated in that... Read more →

Connecting Three.js to an AutoCAD model – Part 2

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re going to look at two C# source files that work with the HTML page – and referenced JavaScript files – which I will leave online rather than reproducing here. As a brief reminder of the functionality – if you haven’t yet watched the screencast shown last time – this version of the app shows an embedded 3D view that reacts to the creation – and deletion – of geometry from the associated AutoCAD model. You will see the bounding boxes for geometry appear in the WebGL view (powered by Three.js) as... Read more →

Connecting Three.js to an AutoCAD model – Part 1

As part of my preparations for AU, I’ve been extending this Three.js integration sample to make it more responsive to model changes: I went ahead and implemented event handlers in .NET – much as we saw in the last post – to send interaction information through to JavaScript so that it can update the HTML palette view. The code is in pretty good shape, but I still need to decide whether to post it separately or with the other JavaScript samples I’m working on (I’ll also be showing Paper.js and Isomer integrations during my AU talk, as well as... Read more →

Exporting Minecraft data from AutoCAD

After last week’s post on importing Minecraft data – in this case from Tinkercad – into AutoCAD, in today’s post we’re going to focus on the ultimately more interesting use case of generating Minecraft data from AutoCAD. We’re going to see some code to dice up 3D AutoCAD geometry and generate blocks in a .schematics file using Substrate. Our “dicing” process – a term I’ve just coined for iterating through a 3D space, chunk by chunk – is going to use a couple of different approaches for determining there’s any 3D geometry in each grid location. Firstly, though, we... Read more →

Importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD

A mere 2 among 100 million registered users, my boys are crazy about Minecraft. I’ve been looking into how I might be able to help them use Autodesk tools (well, AutoCAD) to generate Minecraft content. In this post we’ll take a look at importing Minecraft data into AutoCAD, but ultimately the creation/export story is clearly more interesting (something we’ll look at in the next post, I expect). To investigate dealing with Minecraft data – bearing in mind I didn’t actually know anything much about its file formats – I took a look at the Minecraft export you can perform... Read more →

Steampunking a Morgan 3 Wheeler using Fusion 360

My friends in the Autodesk Developer Network team asked me to get involved with creating a sample for the API we’re planning to launch soon for the new Autodesk 360 viewer. They were quite specific about the requirements, which was very helpful: something fun, perhaps with a steampunk theme, that shows some interesting possibilities around both the HTML5 container and the embedded viewer. I was also suggested the Morgan 3 Wheeler as a possible model to look into hosting, so I really didn’t need to be asked twice. ;-) I started by tracking down a model: I ended up... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Viewing 3D solids using Three.js

After introducing the series and looking at sample applications for 2D graphics using Paper.js and 2.5D graphics using Isomer, it’s now really time to go 3D. We’re going to use much of the same code we saw in the last post – with some simplification as we no longer need to sort the solids by distance – but this time we’re going to feed data into an HTML client app that’s fundamentally similar in nature to the one seen in this series of posts using Three.js. I’m happy to have some experience using Three.js, because it happens to be... 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 →

Getting the length of the pipe centrelines in an AutoCAD drawing – Part 3

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re taking a look at a more interactive – and iterative – approach to getting the length of a pipe (defined by a surface generated from an imported SAT file, we’re not talking about native Plant 3D objects). This is the second task discussed in the introductory post in this series. We’re going to add a CTRLINES2 command that asks the user to select pipe section after pipe section, and will only generate the centreline for a newly-selected section if it’s contiguous to the section of pipe that’s being “managed” (i.e. whose... Read more →

Getting the length of the pipe centrelines in an AutoCAD drawing – Part 1

Since publishing this recent post to simplify the process of generating centrelines for surfaces representing pipes – as imported from an external piping system that only generates SAT files – I’ve been thinking on and off about how best to simplify the process of measuring the lengths of these various “pipes”. Greg Robinson’s comment over the weekend spurred me on even further (thanks, Greg! :-): I'm musing on how one might code up the logic of creating a single continuous 3D poly from the horrid collection of surfaces the step file (.sat) make. This is a daunting logic issue.... Read more →

Extracting pipe centrelines from AutoCAD surfaces using .NET

This was an interesting one. I received an email from someone working on a significant BIM project that required external validation of some piping data coming from a competitive system. This system generates SAT files that – when imported into AutoCAD – represent pipes as surfaces rather than native AutoCAD (meaning Plant 3D or MEP) pipe objects. The challenge was to determine the length of these pipes inside AutoCAD, despite the fact they aren’t pipes at all. Fun! :-) The first thing I did was to take a look at the DWG data, to see what the pipes look... Read more →

Previewing geometry as it streams into AutoCAD using .NET

While developing the prototype ShapeShifter-AutoCAD integration, last week, it became clear that the user really needed something to look at as geometry was being marshalled across between the JavaScript hosting process and AutoCAD’s address space. We might have used a standard progress bar, of course, but decided to do something a bit different: implement a mechanism to take the vertices of a mesh as they are being streamed/decoded and display them inside the drawing. For us this proved to be a 2-stage process: the vertices were brought in and displayed as red, and these same vertices – as referenced... Read more →

Merry Christmas!

During the general wind-down before Autodesk’s annual “week of rest”, I’ve been spending some time this week getting more of my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples working with the pre-release Kinect for Windows 2.0 device and SDK. Things are actually working pretty well: all samples – barring those that rely on capabilities that aren’t yet part of the SDK – are functional and some have even been enhanced based on new capabilities of the 2.0 device. For instance, I’ve reworked the “piping” sample (the one that extrudes a circular profile through 3D space) to make use of the distance between the... Read more →

An interview with Ian Bell

I recently sailed past my 18-year anniversary at Autodesk. Part of me finds this scary – in this world of post-millennial job-hopping – but then I really enjoy what I do. Long may it last. The company has grown a great deal since I joined (I had to look it up, but it seems that over this period we’ve gone from around 1,800 employees to around 7,500, with an additional 1,000 or so temps and contractors), so it should go without saying that I haven’t met or interacted with the vast majority of the people who work at Autodesk.... Read more →