APS (Forge)
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I've been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I'm hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we're not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a "conduit" that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but it…
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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 if…
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On Wednesday I was back at the NEST building on Empa's Dübendorf campus. I've posted about NEST lots of times over the last few years, but these are the main two tours in case you want to track its evolution. I was there to meet Brian Glancy – visiting from Kingspan in Ireland – and Reto Largo from NEST. NEST and Kingspan are two of the main ongoing pilots of Dasher, so it was great to get everyone in the same place to discuss possibilities. Reto started the tour in the media room in NEST, with it's 16-screen media wall.…
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Not everyone can make it to the Forge team's annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here's a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn't work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays Keynotes…
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An interesting thing happened when I tried Dasher 360 with the latest production version of the Forge viewer: no sensor dots appeared. As Dasher without sensors is a glorified 3D viewer, this was a bit of a problem. Digging into things a little, I worked out that our custom WebGL shader wasn't working properly in this latest version. At this point I reached out to my friend Elias Cohenca in Tel Aviv for a quick sanity check: he confirmed that this latest version of the Forge viewer is now defaulting to WebGL 2.0. This was confirmed in the Forge viewer…
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Bright and early, yesterday morning, I hopped on a train (well, a couple of trains) to get across to Basel for this year's Swissbau, the bienniel construction-related trade show held in Switzerland, and apparently one of the largest in Europe. I'd never been before, but thanks to social media I'd compiled a list of people to see there, and had even coordinated to meet up with my friend and fellow blogger, Jeremy Tammik. There was quite a bit going on at Swissbau, even outside the exhibition hall. At one point I saw some people performing while suspended from a building.…
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Some of you may already have seen Augusto's tweet showing the "Visual Clusters" Forge viewer extension that has been developed by the BIM 360 Design team. It really is super-cool: the extension takes the content of the model loaded in the Forge viewer and clusters it spatially based on the value of the various items' category property. The extension was first published in v7.6 of the Forge viewer, so it's been around a little while. If you don't have a Forge viewer application to test it out with, fear not! Petr Broz has added the capability to load extensions into…
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I mentioned in the last post that I had a fun topic to share to help get the new decade started. Well, here it is! I've been collaborating with Elias Cohenca from our Tel Aviv office on and off over the last few years: Elias managed to port the THREE.MeshLine JavaScript library to work with THREE.js r71, making it compatible with the current releases of the Forge viewer. We've made heavy use of this library in Dasher 360 to represent skeletons and streamlines, for instance. I've also been mentoring Elias, something I mentioned in this post from the middle of…
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After getting back to Bangalore from Pune, I did end up having to spend the best part of Wednesday morning dealing with more Indian bureaucracy. The bank I was in was going through its annual archival process, which meant the floor soon filled with papers… … and then boxes containing them. This brought back memories, as it was Writer Relocations who handled our move to India, back in 2003. After this I was able to head across Bangalore to meet with an old friend, Lokessh, for lunch. Lokessh works just off Queen's Road, in the old centre of the city.…
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On Sunday morning I booked an Uber to get across to Bangalore airport for my flight to Pune. It was still early, so the only other being in the street was a cow. It was busier when I arrived at Bangalore airport. And more Christmassy, too. I got myself some idli sambar (the breakfast is better at the domestic terminal than the international one, by all accounts), and then waited by the gate for my SpiceJet flight. The flight was slightly delayed, but basically uneventful – it takes a little over an hour to get from Bangalore to Pune. This…