Gridlines in the Viewer

Features & Ideas
1

Hello dear Specklers,
besides the improvements of dimensions in the viewer (I cannot wait to get my hands dirty), the most crucial reference of coordination are the gridlines in order to have a commonality for reference to talk about. Drawings will not vanish soon and the grids are the anchor point between 2D and 3D. It would be good to have something like this in Speckle too … sooner or later :slight_smile:

Screenshot from the web

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Best,
Alex

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2

Dear Speckle Community,

please give this post a vote … grids are super important to orient yourself. Please give it a vote

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Just a nuance for the idea:

  1. Would you want the ability to toggle grids on and off??
  2. If multiple models are appended would that toggle want to be on each model?
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Some additions for substance :slight_smile: … it would be cool to have it like this

  • Switch on/off grids for all, Dropdown for the submodels where you can select what to show or not …
    image

  • Visualization of the label can happen in the same manner as for the comments

5

Hi @AlexHofbeck,
Looks great, I’ve added it to our backlog!
Thanks!

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6

Is there some place that we can follow the status of this?
Is the backlog publicly viewable somewhere?

I would probably do the initial version something like this:

  • The main purpose is to help with orientation when moving around.
  • Draw one grid for the entire viewer instance (not one grid per model if viewing multiple models).
  • Also show the location of the model origin with some kind of arrows.
  • Draw the grid as a 2D plane at the height of the document origin.
  • Either make it “infinitely” wide, or make it extend past the edge of all currently shown models by X meters.
  • Make the size of each grid square something like 1x1m or 10x10m.
  • Draw the grid with a neutral gray color that is also transparent.
9

At the moment we do not have a public backlog for this feature, and gridlines are not actively in development. It has come up a few times over the years, but not at a level that has pushed it into the priority lane compared with the other Viewer and data work underway.

The use cases you outlined are clear. A single viewer-level grid, origin markers, a neutral transparent plane at document height, and a predictable square size would all be reasonable for a first version. I will fold your notes into our internal documentation so the shape of an initial implementation is already defined if demand grows.

Out of interest, which host application are you publishing from?

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11

Thanks for the reply!

Personally, I would just add this even if not so many users have explicitly expressed demand.
I think it’s one of those things that is so fundamental that a lot of users don’t even think about mentioning it.

As an example, I really like the grid used here:

Although, I’m not sure if this grid is always shown correctly at the model origin, and I’m not sure if there is any support for origin marker.
But other than that, it looks good, and seems fairly straight forward to make.

Currently, our workflow with Speckle only involves importing IFC files.