3 ms·
Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software, but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and expensive, a k
by tannhaeuser 6y ago
Admittedly, I don't know very much about the requirements for CAD software, but I will say given building CAD software is extremely laborious and expensive, a key step is settling on a standard format for data exchange. When and during the time Google owned SketchUp, they made Collada/.dae export part of the community product, and eg Blender has really great support for Collada import (worked out of the box for a non-trivial project of mine - thx Blender and SketchUp/Google!). Of course, meanwhile SketchUp has been discontinued as a free desktop product (being offered only as online hobby software for 3D printing models, like Tinkercad, instead), and Autodesk has introduced FBX as oh-so-much better alternative. I'm just saying that if you want competition and innovation, as a customer you must demand open standards and use workflows based on open file formats to get anywhere.
- rjsw 6y agoThere is a standard format for data exchange [1], what became BIM didn't have to be different to it but at least they kept the geometry definitions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10303
- fsloth 6y agoThere are many standards. Unfortunately the most used ones are called DXF (Autocad file) and RVT (Revit file). There is an open standard called IFC that has a foothold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Foundation_Classes Unfortunately, it's still second place in most cases.
- rjsw 6y agoThe exchange file formats for IFC use the same syntax as those for STEP. The models could have been the same too but the people behind IFC wanted to do their own thing.
- fsloth 6y agoThe exchange format is irrelevant, it's the schema that matters, though. IFC does have XML serialization as well.