Hi everyone,
We’ve completed the next update to the eleFront v5 beta. I believe that many of the reported bugs have been resolved , and we’ve also added a bunch of new features. I am hopeful that this version is rather stable (famous last words), and will be the last beta version before a full release. While you should still be careful before putting this into production, we would be grateful for any testing and feedback.
You can find Version 5.0.5 as a pre-release in the Package Manager, for both R7 and the R8 WIP.
There are some major new features, and some that are still missing, which I will outline below.
New Features
- Pass-Through Components
As GH1 in the Rhino 8 WIP is now implementing many similar features to eleFront, we wanted to bring the design of the components a little bit closer to the way the native components will work, so we have implemented Pass Through components for Attributes, and for Layers.
As described, in the post I’ve linked above, you can use this to either create, modify, or deconstruct attributes, simply by choosing which parameters you have as inputs and outputs. If you want to condense the component into the most compact version, you can collapse the component through the context menu.
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Per-Object Attributes
As you may be able to tell from the screenshot, you can now set things like Linetype, Material, Colour, on a per-object basis. -
Material Assignment
You may also notice that there is a Material input, which is a much-requested feature, and one that I would especially appreciate to hear feedback. We are really only implementing the assignment of materials based on the name of the material - not dealing with the Materials directly. The Bake Settings component also includes now an option for how to handle deal with Materials that have the same name:
- Upgrader Prototype
You will notice that the Define Attributes, Deconstruct Attributes, and Modify Attributes components will be marked Obsolete. I’ve included a prototype Upgrader that should allow you to automatically upgrade these components to the new, Pass-Through version.
To access this, go to Solution > Upgrade Components, and follow the prompts. For the full release, we hope to implement this for upgrading (almost) all components from eleFront v4 as well, including the Data Description components for both eleFront v4 and AutoGraph. This will solve the nuisance some users have experienced where their scripts contain components from both eleFront and AutoGraph, which makes sharing scripts more annoying.
Fixed Bugs:
This is re-enabled, but not optimized, so use carefully.
And a bunch of others!
*Features not yet implemented
- Baking with groups
- Exporting to formats other than Rhino
- Auto-populating of Value lists for User Values on the relevant components
- More comprehensive auto-upgrader
NB: If you were previously using the Bake to File
component, it will fail to deserialize in this new version. That is, it will turn red, and the inputs and outputs will be missing. This is due to some additional features that were added. This is generally bad practice, so I apologize, but that’s why we called it a Beta! You can simply replace the component with a fresh one and it should be smooth sailing.