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UX (User Experience)

User experience concerns not only dialogs and menus, but also the application's performance. Major changes and improvements have been made that will be especially good for the user experience.

In this context, we will highlight four main points:

  1. Point clouds
  2. Grouping in model list
  3. IFC filtering
  4. Performance

1. Point Clouds Have Their Own Object Type

As part of general improvement of user experience, the Point cloud/Triangular mesh object is now split into two separate objects.

Important change

The split involves changes in many places in the program.

Properties Dialog for Application Layers: Metadata/Presentation/Label/Filter

We now have two objects versus one common object previously in the dialogs. A similar change as in the Presentation tab shown above will also be found in the Metadata, Label and Filter tabs.

Horizontal List Field

We now have two tabs in the horizontal list field, one for Triangular mesh and one for Point clouds.

The Convert to point cloud button has been removed from the triangular mesh properties dialog.

The option is now found in the horizontal list field for triangular mesh: Tools - Convert to point cloud.

Point clouds have also gotten their own properties dialog.

Paste Objects

The Paste objects dialog has now received new fields for Triangular mesh and Point clouds.

2. Grouping in List for Application Layers and Models

The functionality is now the same in the list for application layers and models. We can create groups and move models/groups with drag and drop.

Note that improvements have been made to existing functionality in the application layer list. We can have multiple levels in both application layer and model lists. It is also possible to create empty groups, which can be useful in project templates, among other things.

Example - Model list:

Create Model

We now have a common dialog for creating models as for application layers.

3. IFC Filtering Integrated in the Program

New IFC list view directly in Terrain. It is no longer necessary to use DDScad viewer for this.

Ability to group by name or type, and filtering on free text.

The filtering is only dynamic in the list. We must, for example, select Show only filtered from the context menu when we want to show the result in 2D or 3D presentation.

4. Separate Display Files for SFI Commands

When you have many models in the project, the performance in drawing to screen will increase with the number of models. By using caching of generated geometry, we will now be able to refresh the screen faster. If we now make changes to an SFI command, only this one needs to be regenerated and not all the others.

Example

Some quick tests on a large cloud project from a customer (> 20 GB in Gemini Connected) show great effect with separate display files for the road body and 2D mass types.

Several simple operations took a long time (1-2 min), for example refreshing drawing and switching between 2D/3D/Cross section.

Rebuilding to separate display files gave a result of 2-3 seconds in the same drawing.