January 31, 2015 │Scott Overman │http://bimserver.org/
It’s my pleasure to announce that BIMserver, in addition to all its managerial and model checking features, is extending the opportunity to you to further visualize your data models with charts.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a complex endeavor. In a technology-rich environment, there is the opportunity to further complicate the process by demanding the data in many different forms. This opportunity hopefully provides specific value to the process as a whole. Today, it is reasonable to expect the ability to display, toggle, and explore such models in detail without ever assembling anything physical. Seeing the model in this detail is both visually appealing and provides practical benefits.
Enter BIMserver’s new charting module.
Charts provide counter-points to the in-depth detail of three-dimensional representations.
This is important because it empowers the process to communicate answers to intriguing questions. What is the model made up of? Why are these pieces related? How do the pieces stack up against each other? All of this is delivered in a way that simultaneously avoids sending the whole model while retaining its overall shape.
The charting module packages programming for charts of 16 different types. Provisional demonstration plugins released as part of this module expose a small portion of these new features. These plugins focus on organizing and laying out the tree structure of a standard IFC project:
The charts are delivered as a web-technology known as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). This means that these deliverables can be extended to be interactive or animated with existing tools that edit SVG files.
