Now Available: Cesium Design Tiler and Add-In for Autodesk Revit
We are pleased to announce the release of the Cesium Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In. This release provides new tools to improve workflows and provide new capabilities that place architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) content in a 3D geospatial context.
The Cesium Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In are now available.
These tools transform IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets.
The Design Tiler and Revit Add-In provide easier, more efficient workflows for sharing your design data via the web or other visualization platforms like Unreal Engine, Unity, and NVIDIA Omniverse. By incorporating Cesium and 3D Tiles, you are now able to quickly and easily share your data, making it more accessible while also creating more performant applications.
The new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In improve workflows and capabilities that place AECO content in a 3D geospatial context.
3D Tiles is an open standard for streaming massive, heterogeneous, 3D geospatial data, such as global terrain, entire 3D City models, and high resolution reality data captured from drones, LiDAR scanners, and mobile devices.
3D Tiles optimizes the streaming of complex design and geospatial data providing high performance visualization.
3D Tiles are efficient for global data sets like Cesium World Terrain and Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles, as well as complex CAD/BIM data with hundreds of thousands of individual features and millions of individual triangles. By leveraging 3D Tiles, your complex design models can now be streamed efficiently to any number of 3D viewers that show your site within its geospatial context. For example, when streaming design data as 3D Tiles with Cesium for Unreal, there are 80-90% fewer draw calls and a 50% faster framerate compared to using untiled static meshes.
The Design Tiler, accessible through Cesium ion’s user interface or via API, adds the ability to quickly and easily convert from IFC to 3D Tiles. IFC is an open standard developed by buildingSMART International that is widely adopted across AECO and BIM.
The Design Tiler ingests IFC data including entities, metadata, and the underlying parent and child relationships inherent in the IFC data structures. The initial release of the Design Tiler supports most IFC Geometry Types, Entity metadata and embedded geospatial information. We have been working with large federated IFC models containing over 100 individual building models, over 4 million individual objects and in excess of 800 million mesh triangles, all being performantly streamed via 3D Tiles.
IFC Data model converted to 3D Tiles, manually positioned in Boston, MA, and combined with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Source - BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International, accessible via Github.
With this new tiling capability, you can easily drag and drop your IFC data into your Cesium ion account. The resulting data will be converted to 3D Tiles making it accessible as an asset for streaming into CesiumJS, our runtime integrations with Unreal, Unity, or NVIDIA Omniverse, or any other system that supports 3D Tiles v1.1. If your IFC data contains embedded coordinate reference system information, Cesium will use this information to place the 3D Tiles in the correct location on the globe. If this information is not available, you can use the Cesium ion 3D Tiles Location Editor to quickly and easily set its position, rotation, and scale on the globe.
Through our AECO Tech Preview Program, Trendspek was given early access to the Design Tiler. Trendspek provides a suite of tools that empower owners, engineers, and contractors to manage infrastructure across the entire asset lifecycle using CesiumJS. Josh Sinclair, Head of Product at Trendspek, said, “The LoD generation is far superior to any BIM conversion tool we have used in the past. The output looks great.” With the Design Tiler, the Trendspek team was able to incorporate BIM data to communicate proposed remedial works packages to their users.
Trendspek has been able to quickly incorporate BIM as 3D Tiles alongside a reality capture model in their inspection application which uses CesiumJS.
With support for IFC, 3D Tiles can now be generated from a wide range of AECO verticals, including architecture, structural engineering, and MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) designs. With IFC data as 3D Tiles, there is greater performance, increased interoperability, and less manual effort to optimize this rich content for viewing and distribution.
Complementing the release of the Design Tiler, the Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In is now available. This Add-In provides a simple process to upload your current 3D View directly to Cesium ion as 3D Tiles. The Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In connects directly to your existing Cesium ion account and leverages the Design Tiler to generate 3D Tiles. This Add-In is available free and open source under the Apache 2.0 License.
The Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In connects directly to your existing Cesium ion account and leverages the Design Tiler to generate 3D Tiles.
The conversion process is configurable, allowing you to export visible geometry and textures along with all element parameters as metadata to 3D Tiles. The Revit Add-in allows AECO teams to send performant, interactive digital twins to partners over the web or into native runtime engines like Unreal Engine, Unity, or NVIDIA Omniverse via Cesium ion. The conversion and upload to Cesium ion is done transparently, letting architects and other AECO professionals focus on their designs and workflows.
View your Revit models anywhere in the world with accurate geospatial context.
The open source Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In continues our commitment to openness and interoperability. Download the Add-In directly from the Autodesk App Store, the Cesium downloads page, or the GitHub repo.
The addition of the Design Tiler and Revit Add-In provides a new set of tools for improving workflows that increase the accessibility and interoperability of your design data via open standards. These tools allow you to make your data available quickly and easily by leveraging open standards, combining it with global geospatial content and streaming into an accurate 3D view.
Get started by creating a Cesium ion account and uploading your IFC data or download the Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In to unlock the potential of your design data as 3D Tiles.
Looking for inspiration? Check out our AECO CesiumJS examples on the Cesium Sandcastle or our updated Cesium for Unreal Samples starter project.
If you have any suggestions or need support, please reach out on the Cesium Community Forum. We can’t wait to see what you create with these tools!