While we constantly challenge ourselves to think about new features and ways to extend BIMSens relevance, this week release is from you, for you. Packed with user requests for improvements and tweaks that makes your workflow simpler to setup, faster to run, and easier to share.
Reframe Inside a Space
Our friends in Ukraine were looking for a way to navigate a model from room to room and suggested a new type of data trigger automatically positioning the viewpoint inside the room. This is now possible, allowing us to review room finishes, clashes or defect by jumping straigt into the linked space. Just turn on the “Reframe Inside” mode.
We used this occasion to improve the interface to change reframe mode, a simple right click on the Reframing button allows you to toggle the mode you want.
Unlimited ID Match Length
Our friends in Ireland were dealing with very large models and constantly running into the ID match limitation in number of 3D objects that can be selected to filter the grid. Yes, many of you have run into this and reached out for classic work arounds before (integer Ids, single condition match etc.). We finally had a fresh look at the issue, and while you’ll still be limited when using AND-conjunctions, there is now no limit to the size of single-condition and OR-conjunctions ID Matches. Other than your patience, with very large models. We’ve also made the messages for overflow a bit more explanatory in that direction.
Copy-Paste Attributes Mappings
The features we recently added to the “model to database” transfer, such as alternative attribute mapping and dynamic or conditional management of missing attributes, were very well received by the community. It’s comforting to see that we addressed a common struggle. Some of you pushed it much further than we would have ever thought, using hundreds of mappings for a single data transfer. That highlighted a few shortfalls, including the time it takes to configure a new transfer by browsing through so many attributes one by one, as well as some performance issues checking for all the conditional routing when the transfer runs. We introduced copy-pasting of attributes mapping configuration (from excel) directly into the grid to help with the first issue, and redesigned the whole transfer code to get to a nearly 10x speed improvement on the second issue. Hope you like it
New Data Source
Our friends over in the UK continue their deployment of BIMSens to every data source they can put their hands on, and recently asked for an OData connector. We now added the connector in Beta mode, read-only at the moment, looking forward to your feedback on how to extend it, new configuration options, wizard, making it read-write etc. Your call!
This is a good occasion to mention that we extend the connector based purely on user requests, so if you have a which list of data source you’d like to connect to, just send us the API doc. Our API is totally open, and you can also ask for our C# demo project to create your own sources.
BIMWatcher bigger and better
Our neighbours in Australia have been pushing the envelope with the BIMWatcher publishing ability. We’ve made some speed improvement to the publishing, allowed for normals inclusion which generate slightly bigger models but much better-looking curves, and there is a great deal of enhancements in the pipeline for the web viewer that our firends at BIMWatcher are preparing to release, both 3D viewer and data interface alike.
We’ve sprinkled a few other improvements here and there: command line, colour filter options, ID match etc. Developing all those user features was a great deal of fun and quite fulfilling knowing there immediate use, so keep the requests coming.