Through the Interface

Using VASA with Forma via Dynamo

I’ve been talking quite a bit about our use of VASA inside Forma via our WebAssembly build of the toolkit (which is still not currently available publicly). I’ve done quite a lot of work to improve that particular prototype and I’m happy to say it’s shaping up nicely: the UX is much better than it was, for instance. I’ll be talking about our work on this at an upcoming Autodesk-internal tech conference, and as part of the preparation for this I’ve spent a few days building a pure Dynamo equivalent of the extension. VASA’s Dynamo package is available in... Read more →

A minor makeover – and a lot of core work – for Dasher

Over the last week I’ve been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here’s why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher’s use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren’t any security issues. (This isn’t something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it’s important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries... Read more →

Creating a resizable square panel inside the Forge viewer

In this recent post we looked at a new 2D heatmap capability that we’ve added to Project Dasher. In this post we look at what was needed to make this heatmap resizable – but with a fixed aspect ratio – as well as being movable and displayed with a transparent background. Luckily, this previous post shows how to create a transparent, movable window – which we already use to show our surface shading legend – so we were able to use that as a basis for today’s implementation. Firstly, let’s take a look at it working. Note the fact... Read more →

Implementing a demo mode inside the Forge viewer – Part 3

In this final (for now, anyway) part of the series, we’re going to look at the approach taken in the Dasher 360 kiosk mode to loop the demo indefinitely (although with variations, as mentioned last time) until someone interrupts by moving the mouse. The first piece of this is to track the mouse. We do this by attaching an event handler to ‘mousemove’. Here’s the TypeScript code we’re using: onMouseMove = (event: any): void => { this._canvasX = event.canvasX || event.clientX; this._canvasY = event.canvasY || event.clientY; if (this._startX !== null && this._startY !== null && this._inKioskMode && (Math.abs(this._canvasX -... Read more →

Implementing a demo mode inside the Forge viewer – Part 2

Now that we’ve seen how to move a fake cursor across the screen, let’s talk about how best to use this technique to implement a demo mode for your Forge viewer-based application. Something I mentioned last time was that – for our purposes – this code needs to be fairly adaptable, whether for different views, models or screen configurations. It also needs to be easy for us to modify or extend. Inside Dasher 360 we’ve implemented a number of different extensions. Many of these have their own UI, typically launched by a button. One of the first things I... Read more →

Creating a transparent movable panel inside the Forge viewer

As a follow-up from Tuesday’s post, I wanted to hide the title bar of the dialog showing the legend for our surface shading feature. It turned out to be really easy: we’re deriving from DockingPanel and we simply need to override the initialize() method and choose not to create either the title bar or the close button. All we do in the method is create “move handlers” that allow the dialog to be moved by clicking and dragging anywhere on it: very important if you no longer have a title bar on your dialog. Here’s the TypeScript class I... Read more →

Scaling HTML canvases for HiDPI screens

I’ve been mocking up some UI additions for Dasher 360, today. A big chunk of my time was spent working out how to make flyouts work for vertical toolbars (something I’ll address in a future post, if there’s interest), but I’ve just been fighting another problem that’s probably not really an issue for anyone using standard DPI (and non-“retina”) screens. I’ve been drawing text to a standard HTML canvas and it’s been really ugly. After some minutes of searching the web, I found out it was probably due to my MacBook Pro’s retina display. Here’s the code I integrated... Read more →

Overlaying a logo on the Forge viewer

Today I was asked to add the ability to place a custom logo onto an instance of the Forge viewer (in my case for Dasher 360, of course). It seemed like an interesting one to share, as I’m sure others have the same requirement. There are probably lots of ways to solve this – for instance by adding the image with its own camera as an overlay inside the Forge viewer’s 3D scene – but I decided to stick to something simple and have the browser overlay the image. There are a few changes needed for this to work.... Read more →

Implementing tooltips for individual points in a point cloud in the Forge viewer

In the last post we talked about a recent optimization to Dasher 360, where we implemented a point cloud rather than individual SVG-based markers for our various sensors. As mentioned, last time, this was pretty straightforward to get working, but did add some complexity: rather than having seperate DOM-resident markers – which can easily have separate tooltips assigned – we now have a single object and need to be able to display tooltips when individual points in the cloud are hovered over. Here’s the basic algorithm we used to determine when an individual sensor was being hovered over: Implement... Read more →

Google Earth VR | 3D Rudder

It’s Friday – and a holiday in the US – so it’s time for some fun… Some weeks ago I received an interesting device through the post. It’s called the 3D Rudder and is made by a startup in Marseille. They’ve basically created a foot-controlled joystick with three degrees of freedom, so you can control roll, pitch and yaw, all while keeping your hands free. The makers of the 3D Rudder originally intended it for navigating in 3D design applications – one of the founders is an architect by background – so their interest in me playing with it... 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 →

Hands-free Generative Design with Project Dreamcatcher

Regular readers of this blog will have heard mention of Project Dreamcatcher and how Autodesk Research is using it to explore the future of design. It’s a generative design technology that goes beyond the current “state of the art” – which means combinations of tools such as Revit + Dynamo or Rhino + Grasshopper – as it works backwards from goals stated by the user, rather than expanding and evaluating options that have been programmed in. One great way for people with a programming background to “get their heads around this” is to relate it to the world of... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

I wasn’t planning on posting to this blog again, this week – three times per week is enough, I find, so I tend to save any leftovers for the week after – but this question James Maeding asked is very much related to this week’s posts, and – in any case – I already have three fun posts planned for next week. :-) Here’s the question James asked, again: wish I had something to make tooltips disappear when needed. I like them on for many things, but then they get in the way sometimes, and you have to cancel... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD’s complete UI using .NET

In the first post in this series, we saw how to disable AutoCAD’s ribbon. In the second post, we saw how to make (with some caveats) AutoCAD’s toolbars disappear. In this post we’re going to throw all that away and show how to get better results with a single line of code. But before all that, a big “thanks” to both James Meading and Alexander Rivilis, who have helped us get to this point. James pointed out a fairly significant flaw in yesterday’s toolbar-hiding code (hence the mention of caveats, above), in that it didn’t place toolbars on... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD’s toolbars using .NET

It turns out that the forum request I attempted to cover in the last post – handily re-interpreted to deal with something I knew how to do ;-) – was in fact about toolbars, rather than the ribbon. In this post we’re going to look at how to disable toolbars – and re-enable them – using .NET, so that Pete’s original request is dealt with. To start with, there’s no real way to grey out toolbars via the API – at least not at the toolbar level, perhaps it can be done per toolbar item – so I’ve opted... Read more →

Disabling the AutoCAD ribbon using .NET

I came across this interesting question on the AutoCAD .NET forum, posted by Pete Elliott: When AutoCAD is loading, I see that my toolbars are disabled (grayed-out) until the loading has finished. Our company does some additional data loading after AutoCAD has become idle. But if the user clicks certain custom toolbar buttons while our additional data is loading, AutoCAD fatal errors. Is there a way we can disable the toolbars (like AutoCAD does) until our loading is finished, and then enable them? I haven't been able to locate an API that provides this capability. Any suggestions greatly appreciated!... Read more →

Determining AutoCAD’s status bar coordinates using .NET

This came up during an internal discussion and I thought it worth sharing here. It’s easy enough to use a point monitor in AutoCAD to determine the current cursor location, but how do we make sure it’s in the current User Coordinate System (UCS) and that we adjust for object snapping (osnap)? To keep the code simple I’ve been a little lazy: I’m just adding an event handler as a lambda, without worrying about removing it. Also, to avoid a crash when you switch to the New Tab page or a new document and back, the code swallows an... Read more →

At the Autodesk X Summit in San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco again for the Autodesk X Summit 2015. The event is targeted on User eXperience (UX), but is being attended by a very diverse set of Autodesk employees. It’s the first such summit since Maria Giudice joined the company from Facebook, which many of us hope (believe!) will usher in a new era for our products. I’ll be presenting a session on Wednesday regarding my experiments around UX for VR, particularly with respect to my View & Data API samples for Google Cardboard, culminating in a widescale demo of Vrok-It. Should be a lot of fun! Read more →

Creating an AutoCAD palette dynamically to launch commands and methods tagged using .NET

I needed to run some code from a modeless dialog, the other day, and found it was a bit of a pain to generate something quickly to do so. So I thought it might be a good idea to populate a palette dynamically with buttons that call commands and methods that were somehow tagged in the current project. The first step was to work out how to tag them: the obvious choice being some kind of method-level designation (much as we have with the CommandMethod() attribute). I created a command – named PC, for PaletteCommands – that uses reflection... Read more →

Extracting help IDs for AutoCAD’s UI Finder

In the last post we looked at some simple JavaScript code to automate AutoCAD’s UI Finder, locating a sequence of commands in the ribbon. In this post we’re going to look at how to generate a more extensive list directly from AutoCAD’s documentation. The first step I took was to download and install the offline help for AutoCAD 2016. This gives us a set of HTML and JavaScript files in a local folder (c:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2016 Help/English/Help on my system). To parse the files I ended up using some old-school UNIX commands via my OS X environment (which shares... Read more →