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Thursday, February 21, 2019

FormIt v17 – Includes New Dynamo Experience

From the FormIt website:

Introducing FormIt v17

by Josh Goldstein
February 20, 2019

The FormIt team is pleased to announce FormIt v17 is available now!

We're kicking off this release with FormIt for Web and Windows. We'll shortly release FormIt for iOS, and FormIt for Windows will also soon be available from the Autodesk Desktop App.

This FormIt update is huge, with dozens of new features, service changes, and general fixes and improvements. Read about the biggest changes below, and head over to the Release Notes for complete details on all the changes.

Enhancements

A New FormIt + Dynamo Experience

Dynamo is now integrated with FormIt for Windows as a desktop application, enabling graph authoring and execution from inside FormIt using your local Dynamo files. (FormIt for Windows only)


A New Geometry Type: Meshes

Meshes are great for improving the performance of high-polygon entourage like furniture, trees, people, and signage, as well as complex DWG files. Objects can be converted to Meshes and back with no data loss. We also added Meshes to the Selection Filter on all platforms.


FormIt JavaScript Plugins

Plugins enable custom 3D workflows and bespoke modeling functionality using the FormIt API. Use the built-in Plugin Manager to easily install plugins from the FormIt team, and learn how to make your own plugins. (FormIt for Windows only)


Orthographic Elevation Views

View your FormIt model in 2D orthographic elevation, and combine with Section Planes to create section-elevations.


More Visual Styles Customizations

Customize more Visual Styles than ever before! Tweak overall scene brightness and contrast, shadow intensity, and background/sky/ground plane colors. (FormIt for Windows only)


Adjust Material Placement on Faces

Override the default Material position, scale, and orientation on a per-face basis using the Adjust Material Placement dialog. (FormIt for Windows only)

Non-Uniform Scale

Stretch and skew objects in 1, 2, or 3 dimensions using Non-Uniform Scale.

Standalone Vertices

You can now copy and paste standalone vertices to identify important points in space, which can be useful when working with other applications. Also, modify shapes with smooth edges like never before by using the Vertices option in the Selection Filter menu.

Sun Editor

Visualize the sun's placement in the sky, and move the sun directly by dragging it along its path to change the time of day.

Easier Dimension Editing

Skip the Tab key by typing dimensions in directly when a dimension box is visible. (FormIt for Windows only)

Service Changes

BIM 360 Docs

BIM 360 Docs is replacing A360 Drive for cloud file storage. Open, Save, and Export your FormIt data to multiple BIM 360 Docs accounts and projects for better collaboration, and take advantage of BIM 360 Docs features never before available to FormIt

Bing Maps

Bing Maps is replacing Google Maps for location and satellite imagery in all FormIt platforms. Existing models will automatically use Bing Maps for location and satellite imagery, and the Set Location experience has changed slightly for Web and Windows.

With this change, FormIt will no longer obscure/remove satellite imagery data when exporting images. Hooray!

FormIt for Windows Login

 We've switched to a new system for logging in to FormIt for Windows. This should generally improve login reliability, especially for customers using SSO logins.

Energy Analysis

The Energy Analysis service should be more reliable thanks to a new pipeline, and running an Energy Analysis twice on the same file with the same name will no longer fail.

Want to know more? See the full list of enhancements, service changes, and fixes for all platforms.

Going Forward

Our work here is not done! With v17, we added many features but had to temporarily remove others. We're working to restore some functionality and add polish to some of the new features, so bear with us! Specifically, you can read about known issues and future improvements related to Dynamo and BIM 360 Docs.

We work tirelessly to improve FormIt and introduce new features based on customer feedback. Have a feature request or a specific issue with our latest update? Reach out to us on the forums.

Stay tuned for more improvements in the near future!



FormIt is brought to you by Autodesk. There are Free and Pro versions. The Pro version is part of the Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection.

There's more information available on the FormIt website »

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