search

opensourceBIM / BIMsurfer

The latest version of the BIM Surfer WebGL viewer for IFC
MIT License
382 stars 132 forks source link

Any documentation to build and run bim surfer or viewer as a web project #60

Open SomeCoolApps opened 5 years ago

SomeCoolApps commented 5 years ago

Hi,

I want to be able to run the bim viewer or surfer as a standalone application inside a web server. can someone please guide me here. I want to understand how the project can be built and what artifacts/dependencies it requires to run in a webserver.

Thanks

Moult commented 4 years ago

+1 to this. Is this possible? Or does it require a BIMServer instance?

rubendel commented 4 years ago

It requires no dependencies to "run in a webserver". It's all static content, so any webserver will do. Also there is no need to build it, since most browsers are happy to accept ES6 these days. You can also transpile to other ES versions if that's your thing.

Moult commented 4 years ago

I interpreted the question as how to get it to run bimsurfer to load a regular IFC file without needing a bimserver instance - that way it is "standalone". Is it possible?

rubendel commented 4 years ago

Ah I understand. No that's most definitely not possible. You see, parsing an IFC file would in theory be possible (you'd be running into memory issues pretty soon though, since most desktop/laptops are not equipped with the kind of memory a server usually has). More importantly, the process of generating triangles (required for visualization) requires very complex libraries that to my knowledge are not available for JavaScript. For this process, BIMserver uses IfcOpenShell, which in turn uses OpenCascade for the heavy lifting, hope that makes sense.

Moult commented 4 years ago

Oh, I didn't mean directly from IFC - for example in BIMSurfer v2 it can take a glTF and XML produced by IfcConvert. Can this BIMsurfer do the same?

rubendel commented 4 years ago

Ah oke, no that's not implemented. There are many browser based viewers that can load glTF, I don't really see why you would use BIMsurfer for that.

Moult commented 4 years ago

I think because in BIMsurfer v2 although the glTF serves the geometry, it is paired with an XML that represents the IFC metadata - BIMSurfer v2 seemingly can link the two together. As far as I am aware, the other browser based viewers that load glTF just load glTF and don't have nice IFC metadata integration features.

Any plans for supporting something similar in the future? It would be quite nice, as running BIMServer may not be for everyone.

rubendel commented 4 years ago

There are no plans to support this (but he it's open source ;)). BIMsurfer V3 is basically only a 3D viewer, no BIM data is shown, even though it's loaded from a BIMserver.