Dynamo Version 1.1 Released

From the Dynamo blog...

By ZACH KRON

Greetings Dynamo Community,

We are pleased to announced the latest release of Dynamo for Revit and Dynamo Studio.  This incremental release features a truckload of bug fixes, a few new features, and some “experimental” tools.  A little something for everyone we hope.

Release 1.1 represents the first update release since we moved to “semantic versioning”, wherein we have defined a stable API to preserve forwards and backwards compatibility within major releases.  What does this mean in human words?  It means that your 1.0 packages and graphs will move smoothly to 1.1, and that graphs made in 1.1 will also open and work in 1.0.

While maintaining this stability does slow down development a little, we think it is is well worth the effort to maintain the integrity of work that is being contributed all the time via the package manager.  It hopefully will also encourage everyone to move up to the latest and greatest builds without fear of having to rebuild files, as well as being able to communicate with those who have not yet moved forwards

And speaking of the Package Manager, between 1.0 and 1.1, the PM passed a quarter million served!

Thanks so much to our stellar community, the generosity you’ve shown in your contributions, and your trust and feedback when receiving these little gems.  The Package Manager has become such a central part of many Dynamo user’s workflows, and we are actively working on enhancements to both the back end infrastructure as well as the user interface.  Stay tuned on this topic.

What’s new in 1.1

T-Splines (Experimental)

T-Splines modelling technology is now exposed in Dynamo to enable new organic and free form geometry creation tools. There are approximately 150 new nodes that are a subset of the existing geometry library. The new functionality offers a wide range of capabilities to create and edit T-Spline surfaces and also conversion to and from NURBS and meshes. Whether you are into organic or more orthogonal geometry, T-splines offers a tremendously powerful set of tools for understanding topological relationship and surface continuity issues.  This will be the subject of follow-up documentation and discussion, keep an eye on this site for more details.

We are still trying out some different ideas around HOW to expose the nodes (package, out of the box, filtered . . .) but in the meantime we wanted to get some feedback on the raw functionality. To expose the tools, go to the Settings > Experimental menu and check “T-Splines”, then restart your Dynamo instance.  You will now find the nodes available in the Geometry menu.  We are still figuring out how to organize, name, and categorize them, so don’t get too hung up the particulars, but we wanted to get your reactions while we sorted that out.   Since this is an advanced functionality that may be useful only in certain non-standard workflows, these nodes by default will be hidden in the library and will not interfere in node search results unless explicitly turned on.  For the moment, this functionality will not be available when Sent to Web from Dynamo Studio.

Export Workspace as Image

We have addressed the long awaited issue of Screen Capture! Now it doesn’t matter how big your graph is, everything will be visible  at whatever zoom level you are at when you use Export Workspace as Image.  The behavior is “what you see is what you get”, so if you are seeing blurred nodes, you will export an image of the whole graphat that resolution.  If you zoom way in you will see all the details of the whole graph.

Overloads

Regarding consistency backwards and forwards, there are some minor changes in node names, as we have heard a number of problems from folks who are running into nodes that seem to have the same functionality and no differentiation.  Mostly these are nodes with “overloads” or nodes with the same name that do slightly different things based on the context.  These are nodes like the many varieties of Geometry.ExportToSAT which has one version that expects to operate on a list of geometries, and another that expects single items.

We have reduced the number of nodes to simply show the one that expects a list of inputs, as in most cases the results are the same.  In the context of Visual Programming, we have found that the flexibility in the variety of nodes is rendered useless and confusing by the small differences in the behaviors.  For a complete list of this reduction, please see here.

Application settings

• New notification center provides you with more details on system crashes and errors, such as when DLL incompatibilities between Dynamo and other Revit Addins are detected at startup
• New Settings menu option to Show or Hide Preview Bubbles

Important Bug Fixes

• Element Binding (the ability of Dynamo to track and modify rather than duplicate or replace elements in Revit) had some regressions in Revit 2017.  These are fixed.
• Freeze does not delete elements created in Revit anymore.
• Speed and Stability enhancements to Dynamo graphs sent to web.
• Fixed issue related to FamilyInstance.SetRotation, now you can use this node with Run Automatic mode as well and your first instance won’t get placed randomly in a different location and crash issues have been addressed
• Fixed long pending issue with Importing series of Swept Solids, Now while after importing all Surfaces are there.
• Localization crash fixes with Norwegian, German and French
• Dynamo for Revit no longer crashes at startup with non-compliant Views (not 3D)
• When selecting any labeled item only that item’s label gets displayed, no additional labels are displayed
• Fixed errors on Code Block Nodes and String Nodes that are published to Web and accessed from the Customizer view
• Read-only nodes and directories can now be loaded in Dynamo.
• Using List.Map with flatten nodes and using flatten on single values no longer replaces data with null values
• Arc.ByStartPointEndPointStartTangent no longer fails using a normalized vector
• Direct Shape now recognizes material input properly
• /verysilent install of Dynamo for Revit now completes without user interaction
• Fixed crash with closed curve as input to Surface.ByLoft
• Dot product no longer returning erroneous scalars
• Zero radius and related bad geometry errors no longer create crash
• Turning off “Revit Background Preview” no longer turns off “Background Preview” on relaunch of Dynamo.

Other Changes

• Now once you add a new path for Package location then all the packages from the new path will get loaded without relaunching Dynamo.
• We have improved the preview bubble for its Pin and hover over related issues.
• Updated the compact view of the preview bubble to display information about the number of items in an output list.
• Quick Access to “Getting Started” from Help menu
• From this release, we stopped migrating of 0.6.3 and 0.7.0 files. If your old files contain nodes from above two releases then you have to open those files on an earlier version (till 1.0.0) and the save them.

Known Issues

• Installation of Dynamo For Revit 1.1 over an existing version of Dynamo Studio 1.x WHILE Dynamo Studio 1.x is still running will result in an automatic reboot.  Dynamo for Revit will need to be re-installed after reboot.  Workaround:  make sure all Dynamo applications are closed before installing another Dynamo.
• Installing Dynamo 4 Revit 1.1 Will require a upgrade of Dynamo Studio 1.0 to Dynamo Studio 1.1 (e.g. 1.0 and 1.1 cannot co-habitate).  This issue will not happen in the future, when future Dynamo Core installation will work with older versions of Products.
• Simplification of some overload methods will result in minor changes in behavior.  Please see this document for specific nodes affected.

There's more information available on the Dynamo blog.