Let’s start with a tiny bit of history lesson
Does any of you know the beginning of the World Wide Web? How it came about?
So, back in the 1980’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland) where many scientists were working on their research. They all had their own computers and own applications to help them, which is OK, but when it came to sharing the results they gathered, they ran into a problem. They faced the issue of data being locked up in different systems. Sir Tim said… (next slide)
How people could got access to data depended on: the computer the data was on and what application they were using. So he introduced a protocol to make communication possible between computers, a client and a server, through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – the system that drives the internet, that thing we now could not live without.
In the design world it would look like this
Design sharing went through a couple of steps…
In the past you needed the specific design software even just to have a look at the modelor you could export the file to a more generic format and lose some of the information, sometimes all the meta data inside the model
Then file specific viewers were introduced, DWG Viewer, Inventor Viewer, etc (with ADR/Autodesk Design Review you could view in a browser but needed to install an ActiveX component, and only worked in IE) – but then you still needed to install something on your computerAs design is going more and more agile, where you have to be in direct contact with your customers, the end users of your product, enabling them to view the models early on and make comments and suggestions that will influence the final product, these previous solutions start to fail.
Now with Forge you can get geometric and meta data out of any file and access it from any browser on any device
(show the viewer with all the data being accessible, hierarchy, properties, etc)
As you’ve seen with the Viewer, design is not just geometry but lots of other information as well.
Design also defines the materials you choose, the hierarchy between the components, the manufacturing option of each part, the surface finish to use on the faces, the parameters driving the model, and so on.
You might also need to access some of this data programmatically from an application or a service, to integrate all the various components of your design process, without a viewer popping up along the way.
And that’s what the Model Derivative API can help you with.
All the information you’ve seen in the viewer’s property and hierarchy windows were provided by this service.
What was again all the info that the viewer pulled from this service?
The hierarchy of the model, all the geometric and meta data of the model. And it can also translate the model into various export formats: STL, STEP, IGES, OBJ, etc
(point out that more are coming)
In case you are familiar with IFTTT, Zapier or similar solutions which allow you to connect multiple services together to form a complete workflow – well our services can be used like that. They are like lego pieces from which you can choose the ones you need and build something cool from them.
There are 50+ formats supported for viewing and data extraction, and many of them are also available for export.
OBJ export is possible even at component level so you can pick and choose the components to export, while STEP, IGES and STL can only be done for the whole file – and currently not available for many design file formats.