The Building Coder

Exporting RVT BIM to JSON, WebGL and Forge

I am happy to say that I returned safe and sound to Switzerland from my travels for the Forge DevCon and Cloud Accelerator. Since then, I rounded off the hierarchical MEP system exporter to a JSON graph for interaction with it in the Forge viewer, worked on an update of the ADN JSON mesh exporter and helped my son Christopher getting started with C# scripting to drive audio effects for professional spatialized sound design for computer games – More TraverseAllSystems updates – CustomExporterAdnMeshJson updates – ADN JSON Exporter Alternatives to View RVT in WebGL – vA3C – The Forge Viewer – Getting started with Unity C# scripting – Opendesk at Autodesk Forge Accelerator Barcelona... Read more →

Connecting Desktop and Cloud, Room Editor Update

Last week, I listed my three Revit Technology Conference classes on connecting the desktop and the cloud, The Building Coder chatroom, and published the full detailed handout of the lab on getting started with Revit macros. This week, I published the notes from the Revit API panel Q&A. So what do we have left to talk about? Oh yes, connecting the desktop and the cloud. That is actually the most interesting of the three, and also the topic of my Autodesk University session – Connecting the desktop and the cloud – Message and Takeaway – The 2D cloud-based round-trip room editor – FireRating in the cloud – The CompHound component tracker – Dotty animated 3D assembly instructions – Conclusion... Read more →

AngelHack Athens, Sustainability and Export Precision

AngelHack Athens is in full swing, Autodesk has committed to 100% sustainability, Scott Conover explains some Revit export precision and tolerance aspects, and I am leaving on vacation next week: AngelHack Athens hackathon Autodesk commits to 100% renewable energy Revit export precision and tolerance Vacation time AngelHack Athens Hackathon We held the second I love 3D – Athens meetup yesterday with 19 interested and enthusiastic participants: I posted the full details and links to all the important View and Data... Read more →

A360 Viewer Widget and Selecting a DWG Export Setup

Today, let's look at the new A360 embeddable viewer widget and selecting a DWG export setup. A360 Embeddable Viewer Widget The Autodesk View and Data API makes easy it to interactively view and explore a 3D model in the browser without any further software whatsoever. As I just mentioned in the discussion on 50 ways to view your model, the new A360 Viewer Widget simplifies it further still, using a widget that can be embedded in web pages to view... Read more →

Cloning a Solid, AngelHack, 3D Web Fest and Dubai

The Revit 2016 offers a whole host of exciting new functionality that I am dying to try out, e.g.: Custom exporter supports 2D output Improved ReferenceIntersector linked model support DirectShape supports curves, points and references Cool new Geometry API functionality And much, much more... Too little time! At least I can mention one useful aspect of the new geometry API that came in handy for an issue that came up yesterday. I am in Dubai right now, preparing for the... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

State of the View and Data API, vA3C and Edge Ids

Today, let's take a look again at the current state of the View and Data API, vA3C and a case or two from the Revit API discussion forum: View and Data API news RvtVa3c enhancement filters parameters Defining keys or geometric references for curve vertices View and Data API News Question: I am interested in the Autodesk View and Data API that you wrote about last year. I am wondering what the current state and plans are for the Autodesk... Read more →

View and Data API Sample in Swift and Mac OS Upgrade

As you know, we have a pretty impressive number of samples demonstrating the use of the View and Data API web services. We are currently reviewing them all to ensure their documentation is reliable and consistent. I picked Adam Nagy's workflow sample written in Swift to review. That required a look at the Swift programming language itself and a system upgrade before I could start with the review itself. Before getting to that, let me also mention the upcoming 3D... Read more →

Terminating a Family Instance Placement Loop with Esc

I presented the PromptForFamilyInstancePlacement method in June 2010 when it was newly introduced in the Revit API, together with a nice little solution temporarily subscribing to the OnDocumentChanged to access the newly added elements after terminating the placement interaction. Since then, the Revit 2015 API provided some Document API additions such as the method UIDocument.PostRequestForElementTypePlacement enabling an add-in to launch and to some extents control the full standard placement interaction between user and the Revit product. To retain control over... Read more →

3D Viewing, vA3C and RevitLookup Updates

Here are some GitHub updates on the vA3C and RevitLookup projects, and 3D viewing in general: vA3C project going full steam ahead vA3C hacker R1 is up Rendering an element in 3D Small RevitLookup update vA3C Project Going Full Steam Ahead The WebGL and three.js based AEC 3D viewer project vA3C is going ahead at full steam, driven mainly by Theo Armour. vA3C is a free, open source viewer and navigator for a variety of file types. The most recent... Read more →

The Building Coder wishes you a Merry Christmas!

Christmas arrived already, and here I am, still wrapping up for the winter break. Let me share a couple of Christmas greetings from my friends and colleagues in the Autodesk Developer Network ADN and elsewhere: Kevin Vandecar Balaji Ramamoorthy Jaime Rosales Duque Claude Karfiol Aaron Lu The Building Coder wishes you a Merry Christmas! Final Words from Roland Zelles and Victor Hugo Kevin Vandecar Happy holidays to everyone! Have a great time off! I had a chance to learn something... Read more →

Back from The Conference Tour and Wrapping Up

Things have been a bit hectic the last couple of weeks, just like every December, what with Autodesk University and the DevDays Conferences. I am still cleaning up various open issues and looking forward to settling down into Christmas real soon now. Here are a couple of items to share from the last few days: AU 2014 classes online Family type preview images InfraWorks 360 REST API Moscow DevDays, Meetups and Hackathon Milano JavaScript Meetup I Love 3D More Wrapping... Read more →

Milano Meetups and My New NFC Business Card

We completed the DevDays conference and Meetup in Munich and now arrived in Milano, bella Italia. Tonight we are holding our Inaugural 3D Lovers Meetup here at Coworking LOGIN, Via Stefanardo da Vimercate 28, Milano. We only just noticed that another interesting inaugural meetup is taking place in the same location at the same time, the First MEAN Event: Break the Ice. MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express, Angular.js and Node.js, so you can see how well it fits. Main topic... Read more →

WebGL Goes Mobile and Sorted Level Retrieval

Today, let's look at a generic WebGL and a specialised Revit API issue: WebGL on all Apple platforms and sorted level retrieval. WebGL Goes Mobile Apple announced full support of WebGL for its desktop and mobile browsers, so WebGL goes truly cross platform, as pointed out by Paul Flanagan: Previous claims of cross-platform support for this HTML5 standard were largely worthless because they did not include the iPhone, iPad, or desktop Safari. That has changed, and this standard for 3D... Read more →