One more feature inspired by Project Dasher has made its way into the Forge viewer’s Data Visualization Extension (Project Hyperion): streamlines. This is something I’ve talked about a few times in the past, and I’m happy to see it make its way into the Forge platform. Streamlines are a great mechanism for indicating movement – of people or assets – through an architectural space, or perhaps something like a toolpath in a manufacturing context.
The way we implemented them originally inside Dasher wasn’t ideal, in all fairness: I used the MeshLine.js library to be able to display lines with thickness in the Forge viewer. The Hyperion team implemented their own shader to do the work for this, which is much better.
The new StreamLine object is quite easy to use – it adds itself to an appropriate overlay scene when you create it via the StreamLineBuilder object, and then removes itself from said scene when you destroy it. I had a particular use for this shiny new feature,…