we have developed a designed automation tool using Forge and VB.net to automate several tasks in the manufacturing/oil and gas industry, that makes the designing of pressure vessels take about a fourth of the time and steps required than without our tool. This is to say that we are familiar with the Forge and Inventor interfaces, but require your assistance in determining where to begin with for creating Digital Twins in the AEC industry and capitalize the platform for Asset Management.
I understand that Forge web service uses APIs such as - Data management, BIM 360, Model derivative and viewer, etc. We are looking to start with a sample project to get started in this direction.
Please refer to this getting started tutorial. And this sample (GitHub)
Related
I cannot find any resource similar to the Model Derivative API that has a list of supported file translations.
can the autocad Design Automation API take in .dxf, pdfs, etc., or is there a list somewhere?
Design Automation for AutoCAD can process DWG,DXF,DWT and DWS, unlike Model Derivative which has translation capabilities, Design Automation is a service to run automated jobs.
At the moment, importing PDF in Design Automation for AutoCAD is not possible.
Per my meeting with Denis Grigor, I was informed that the the Design Automation API has the same capabilities as Model Derivative API to extract metadata from an uploaded AutoCAD file. Model Derivative has a fixed-job pricing structure which is more cost-effective for large files, since it's charged per job, whereas Design Automation is charged per processing hour.
My client will only be extracting data from smaller files, so it doesn't make sense to use Model Derivative API if Design Automation can do the same.
I don't know where to start however. Which specific APIs do I need to use if I want to upload an autocad file such as .dxf or .dwg and retrieve geometric results using Design Automation API?
Whether you are setting up a Design Automation pipeline for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, or any other "engine", the process is pretty much the same
develop and debug a plugin/script (in your case an AutoCAD plug-in) locally
upload the plugin/script to Design Automation service as an app bundle
create a Design Automation activity - a reusable template for tasks you will want to execute later, specifying the engine, app bundle, inputs, outputs, etc.
create a Design Automation work item, executing a task based on an activity with specific inputs/outputs (usually just URLs where input files can be downloaded from and output files uploaded to)
Here's a blog post with a simple example using Design Automation for Inventor - it takes an Inventor plugin that generates custom screenshots, and turns it into a Design Automation activity that is later executed with different input Inventor models: https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/simple-introduction-design-automation-inventor.
The same process is also explained in this tutorial: https://learnforge.autodesk.io/#/tutorials/modifymodels.
I have found a plug-in to manually export schedules (rebar, production bom, material lists) from Revit models. However, our company is looking to automate this and take out the human required element of exporting these schedules.
I have not, so far, found a way in the Forge API (Revit Design Automation API) to access these schedules like a can with a custom plug in.
Is this support coming or is there a place to vote on this capability?
Thanks,
Chris
The Forge Design Automation API for Revit enables you to run the same .NET Revit API code as the Revit.exe executable on the Windows desktop. Therefore, you can probably convert the existing desktop add-in to run within the Forge environment. There is no missing capability, not additional support needed, and no need to vote for anything. The Building Coder has explored and documented how to migrate and convert existing desktop Revit API add-in code to run in the Forge design automation environment in the topic group on DA4R – Design Automation for Revit.
Anybody recommend any backends or frameworks for Forge?
I'm seeing resources for Nodejs, PHP, .Net Core and others which are for the backend.
Are any of these any more convenient or dependable with Forge than the others?
I also know Python and thought Django would be another option but I don't see too many resources on the Python side of things.
Any perspectives on the tools (pro or con) would be great.
The more I understand the kinds of tech stacks, user projects and ways people use Forge to expand on BIM 360 and other APIs the more it can help me and the community get familiar with the service.
This relies completely on the excisting stack used by your company. Forge is a collection of API's accessible via endpoints.
Any library just abstracts the calls away in a accesible way. I've had moderate succes with the dotnet core Forge package, it works very well but you are giving away some strict typing.
If you dont wanna be bound by abstractions made by other people, create your own ! This will ultimately lead to the most lightweight solution since you are only creating what you need.
Cheers
I have background in Inventor/Revit API development only, and need to learn enough JS to be able to work comfortably with the Forge APIs. I'll be booking myself into a JS training course to learn general skills, but what topics/modules must I definitely cover to have a solid foundation for Forge API development. I'll be working with BOM data, viewers and possibly web configurators.
Many thanks for your help.
We're a .Net shop that recently implemented the Forge Viewer for a client with Inventor Files. We built our service on top of Azure Functions and utilized as much .Net C# code as possible, as it is where we have the most experience and comfortability. The provided .Net SDK is very helpful: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Autodesk.Forge/.
The only API that you can't do entirely in .Net is the Viewer API. However, to get started I was able to use boilerplate code from the provided examples and get the models loading. From there I had our web developers get involved to handle the more extensive javascript programming for me.
Feel free to bounce any questions you may have off of me. We've just finished going down this road and it is very rewarding, but somewhat challenging at times for us .Net developers.
You need the JavaScript, as you already know. Take some time to improve security and OAuth authentication workflow. This sample includes most of it.
In most cases, you'll need a hybrid desktop app that can connect to the cloud, the image below (from the blog post) shows a generic approach for the architecture using Autodesk Forge (or any other cloud APIs).