There’s great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge’s Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta.
Here’s an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon:
This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors in their building by picking the location in the Forge viewer (technically there’s a raycast performed along the viewing direction against the current scene, and the 3D location of the closest intersection is where the sensor gets placed).
Right now we have to maintain a list of “positioned sensors”, which exists outside of the Revit model.
Using the Design Automation API for Revit, it’s our hope that we can modify the building’s source RVT file to include our special sensor family at the correct location in the model (with the right metadata connecting it with the sensor readings in our database). There’s a little more to it, of course, especially as we currently use the NWC export – rather than the RVT file directly – which gives us room information to enable the by-floor and by-room navigation features. But hopefully that’s a step we can either now remove or also automate using the Design Automation API.
If you have plans or thoughts on how you’d like to use the Design Automation API for Revit, feel free to share them via this post, Twitter or LinkedIn. Please also be sure to send any feedback you have on issues and future directions for the API during the Beta phase: this is always highly valued by the engineering teams.
