The Building Coder

Live Revit Element Rendering in Remote WebGL Viewer

Today, I'll implement live real-time export of 3D geometry from a Revit add-in to a web-hosted WebGL viewer. This is an enhancement to the initial version exporting 3D element geometry to a WebGL viewer, which just generated data that I copied and pasted to hard-code it into the NodeWebGL viewer as a proof of concept. Meanwhile, I enhanced the WebGL viewer in various ways to prepare it for this real-time live connection, mainly by adding a REST API and support... Read more →

Add-in Migration to Revit 2016 and Updated Wizards

I updated my Visual Studio Revit C# and VB add-in wizards for Revit 2016. Before presenting them, a quick important note on how to approach resolving issues that you may encounter migrating your existing add-ins: Please read What's New in the Revit 2016 API! Revit add-in wizards for Revit 2016 Revit add-in wizard customisation Revit add-in wizard usage Download and installation Please Read What's New in the Revit 2016 API! Every major Revit API release so far enhanced the existing... Read more →

What's New in the Revit 2016 API

Here is the online version of the 'What's New' section of the Revit 2016 API help file. The information provided here is extracted from the document 'Revit Platform API Changes and Additions.docx' provided with the Revit SDK. As said, is also included in the 'What's New' section in the Revit API help file RevitAPI.chm. This is very important information, even for later reference. The explanation of the changes and enhancements are well worth referring to later on as well, to... Read more →

Revit 2016 API News and DevDays Online Recording

Revit 2016 has been released! Let's dive straight in to the new Revit API functionality, plus a note on table of contents for video recordings: Revit 2016 API news – DevDays Online slide deck, recording, notes and sample code Video recording table of contents RevitLookup for Revit 2016 Revit 2016 API News – DevDays Online Slide Deck, Recording, Notes and Sample Code Here is the Revit 2016 DevDays Online recording material, based on the presentations shown at the confidential Autodesk... Read more →

Gross and Net Wall Area Calculation Enhancement

We make further enhancements to the on-going project to determine gross and net areas and volumes, obviously a fundamental issue to BIM. And I have more news to share as well: Playing with my WebGL viewer WebGL Developers meetup in NYC April 21 AEC Hackathon in Dallas May 1-3 Angelhack in Dubai May 7-9 Angelhack in Athens June 5-7 Wall area calculation handling multiple openings in multiple walls in multiple rooms Playing with my WebGL Viewer My last post was... Read more →

Exporting 3D Element Geometry to a WebGL Viewer

Yesterday, I discussed how to get started with WebGL and demonstrated a simple 3D viewer making use of the Tiny WebGL helper Library TWGL. Today, I present the TwglExport Revit add-in to select an individual element and populate the viewer with that. To drive the WebGL viewer, we just need a bunch of vertex locations, normal vectors in each vertex, and face definitions hooking them up with each other. TwglExport achieves exactly that though the following steps: Retrieve the pre-selected... Read more →

Curved Wall Elevation Profile and Creator Class Update

Alexander Ignatovich, Александр Игнатович, of Investicionnaya Venchurnaya Companiya, took another and deeper look at The Building Coder sample external command CmdWallProfile that I originally implemented in 2008 to retrieve the wall elevation profile and my colleague Katsuaki Takamizawa modified to use the ExporterIFCUtils.SortCurveLoops method to sort the outer and inner loops a few months ago. Alexander already made a number of other important contributions to The Building Coder in the past: Exporting Image and Setting a Default 3D View Orientation... Read more →

Sending a Room Boundary to an SVG Node Web Server

Yesterday, I implemented and published a simple Node.js web server to display an SVG polygon. In that post, you can define the polygon path manually in a text box and invoke the web server by clicking a button. Obviously, the same system can be driven automatically. Let's look at a way to extract the boundary polygon or a Revit room element, convert that to SVG, and invoke the web server to display it. Here is the room element in Revit,... Read more →

Duplicate Add-In GUID and Driving Revit from Outside

Lots of stuff going on; I have a hard time keeping up. Due to popular request, I updated the RvtVa3c readme. I am continuing to answer issues on the Revit API discussion forum as well as ADN cases. I am struggling to find time for The 3D Web Coder... One ADN case that I answered fits in very nicely with a forum suggestion provided by Arnošt Löbel. Here are my topics for now: Duplicate add-in GUID Driving Revit from outside... Read more →

Back from Easter Holidays and Various Revit API Issues

I hope you had a wonderful time over Easter. I returned from my team meeting and subsequent brief holiday in the snow and am confronted with a long list of unanswered Revit API discussion forum issues. I answered a dozen and present a summary of a few of the most interesting ones: Determining the distance between floor and bottom of a beam Consecutive ordering of TopographySurface boundary points Extracting unique building element geometry vertices Retrieving all visible elements Before I... Read more →

Revit API Trends and Team Meeting in Bretagne

Here is an illuminating explanation by Arnošt Löbel and Martin Schmid on some Revit API development trends that have already been underway for a couple of releases. Before I get to them, a quick report from our ADN team meeting: ADN European Team Meeting in Bretagne As you may have noticed from Adam Nagy's tweets in the past few days, I am at a team meeting with my European ADN colleagues: We are convening in Brittany, home of our manager... Read more →

List All Import Instances

Have you ever wondered whether you have any duplicate imported CAD instances in your model? My colleague Nikolay Shulga from the Revit development team implemented a nice little end user utility to answer this question. By the way, Nikolay and I go back a long time, way back in the beginning of the IAI and IFC project, decades ago, in previous lives... In Nikolay's own words: A while ago I wrote a prototype app to list ImportInstance objects in a... Read more →