The integration of the MeshLine library into the Forge viewer – which we’re using for the display of skeleton data, as we saw last time – has opened the door to displaying all kinds of other cool stuff.
Back in 2014 colleagues in Autodesk Research published a SimAUD paper entitled “Towards Visualization of Simulated Occupants and their Interactions with Buildings at Multiple Time Scales”. It explored the use of various visualization techniques to display how a building’s simulated occupants interact with it. One of these techniques was called Speedlines (we also use the term Streamline):
The original visualizations were created using a custom Maya plugin. Here’s a video that was published as part of the research, to give a better sense of what it was about:
Anyway, once we’d worked out how to use MeshLines inside the Forge viewer, it became clear the mechanism might be used to display Streamlines/Speedlines, too. It wasn’t totally straighforward, though: I went…