EleFront - Next Release

Plugins Elefront
1

Hi all,
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be releasing a Beta for the next version of EleFront in the coming weeks. It’s been a couple of years now since a major release, but we’ve significantly rebuilt portions of the codebase in order to make the code more flexible and extensible for the future, and we’ve also added a bunch of new capabilities that we’re very excited to share with you all (some highlights include improvements to blocks and features for working with large files).

We’ll provide more details about all the changes and added capabilities at release, but we wanted to give advance notice about a few important things, for those that use EleFront.

  • The next release will only be compatible with Rhino 7 and later.

Rhino 7 introduced a bunch of new exciting features such as Hops, Rhino.Compute, GrasshopperPlayer, expanded TextFields, Rhino.Inside and others. In order to enable and take advantage of these features, we needed to commit to the latest version.

  • We will provide a Legacy Release of the current version.

This will address a small number of known bugs, but the legacy version of EleFront will see little to no maintenance moving forward (basically only if there is a severe bug uncovered).

  • To upgrade existing definitions to the new version, you will have to replace the old components with the new ones

Obviously we wish the transition were easier, but many of the components will have different configurations (in terms of inputs/outputs) from the current version, and the underlying code is significantly different. Hopefully the improvements to the next version are worth the headache of conversion.

  • You will also be able to have them installed side-by-side

This would allow you to continue using your old scripts and gradually transition to the new version, if you prefer. This is another reason for the Legacy Release, which will have names that are distinct to let you know which version is which. We’ll provide some instructions for this when the Beta is released.

  • Almost all scripting functions have been re-structured.

If you use the EleFront library for scripting, this may affect you. We’re deliberately restructuring the code to make it simpler and easier to use EleFront in a coding context, and we intend to release an API guide at some point after the full release.

  • The first release will be a Beta, with a full release to follow.

This is to solicit feedback from the community and uncover any bugs, missing functionality, or use-cases we hadn’t considered.

We’re very excited about what this major overhaul will make possible, and hope that you will find value in it as well. More information coming soon!

Edit: If you would like to receive a one-time email to let you know when the Beta is released, please drop us your email here:

2

Thank you @krahimzadeh, this is exciting news.

3

Im Having trouble with the current elefront? its not showing up in my panels has anyone else had this issue?

4

Hi Felicia, can you provide a little more context?

is this in regard to the Rhino attributes elefront panel or the grasshopper plugin?

Rhino 7?

Is this the first time installing Elefront? (Plugin unblocked)

on a windows version i’m assuming?

Thanks

5

yes this is my first time installing it and it is in Rhino 7, I drag and dropped the plugin file into a grasshopper and it shows in the folder but it doesn’t show in the grasshopper panel

6

all .gha files need to be unblocked (right click on the file) and placed in Grasshopper: File>Special Folders> Components Folder

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7

Great News!!!
I’m trying to program a BOM generator, I think is going to be very useful.

8

Wonderful news!

Should we just watch the forum? Or can we sign up for an email alert when it’s released?

Thanks,

Dan

9

Great idea!

We’re working on a newsletter type system for letting people know about updates / resources, etc. but it’s not up and running yet. In the mean time, if you would like an email about the Beta release, please drop us your email (I’ve edited the first post to include the link).

10

I’m interested in the Beta release but I’m not allowed to access the Google form.

11

Ah yes. I just changed the settings, let me know if it still doesn’t work.

12

Chiming in…The new version of eleFront, like previous versions, has been built through direct project applications that we build for ourselves. In this case, we have been stress testing some new ideas on some pretty large and gnarly real world applications and are looking forward to sharing with everyone this new version. As Keyan mentioned, we are seeking to leverage some of the great new features in Rhino 7 to help make really, really big models, better outputs, and collaboration better and easier.

Some recent work that went into making this new version, including full fabrication modeling of 10s of millions of unique parts for these projects:

13

Thanks Evan, I’ve been using EleFront for many years and my latest big project was this labyrinth here:

Labyrinth @boulderhallebasel - Gallery - McNeel Forum

14

cool project!

15

Wil be working also with RhinoMAC?

16

Our intention is that it will be supported on MacOS, but the initial focus is for R7 on Windows.

17

Hi @elevelle @krahimzadeh
Is it for plugin updates
AutoGraph
Will it be updated? For Rhino 7 and above?

18

Right now there aren’t any immediate plans to update Autograph. Would be great to understand how you are using Autograph.

19

We’re waiting patiently!

Any idea of a release date on the horizon?

Can’t wait to give this a go!

Dan

20

We are aiming to release a working version of the beta in the next 2 weeks. It may not have 100% of the functionality, but the major pieces will be there for everyone to start testing (and probably finding bugs we haven’t found yet…)