Design Automation for Revit

As of this writing (6/20/2018), Design Automation for Revit (DA4R) is in private beta. It’s not publicly available. But we receive inquiries quite frequently. So I’m putting together a list of available materials to learn about DA4R. I intend to update this page as more information become available.

To use DA4R, you will need to know both worlds: Revit addin as desktop application, and Forge and/or Web programming. If you are not familiar with both, you may start looking at them to be ready when DA4R is.

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Forge Demo Sites

Continuing with the previous post, when we talk about what Forge is and what you can do with it, the best way is to see demos. Many of samples shown in the recordings in my previous post are available for you to try out yourself.

Viewer

Autodesk Viewer
https://viewer.autodesk.com/
Free viewer site. You can give it a try with your favorite model.

What is Forge? Recordings and Tutorials

Trying to help my colleagues who are presenting about BIM 360 and Forge, I was giving a few pointers as reference. I thought the list might get handy for myself, too. So here it is a list of links to recordings about Forge in the context of AEC and BIM, together with the links to tutorial materials.

First, for those who are less technical and/or if you are interested in finding out what Forge is and what you can do with it, below show you with a plenty of demos of applications by our partners and ourselves:

• Forge for AEC in 5 min, by Jim Quanci
• BIM 360 & Business Opportunity with App Store, by Jim Quanci

If you are developer and interested in writing code, these will be a good starting point:

Troubleshooting Tips for Accessing BIM 360 Docs and Account Admin

Occasionally, we get contacted by a developer who is experiencing a difficulty making API calls to work with BIM 360 Docs and/or Account Admin. If you are having difficulty, here are a few suggestions you may want to double check:

1. When you create an app on the developer portal (http://developer.autodesk.com), make sure you select BIM 360 API for Account Admin and Document Management for Docs access. The link to the step-by-step instruction about creating an app is found here: https://developer.autodesk.com/en/docs/oauth/v2/tutorials/create-app/
2. In #1 above, if you do not see all the options for API, you may not have started the trial. Please refer to this blog post if you don’t see all the options: https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/not-all-apis-are-available-my-forge-app

Lab5 Forge API Intro – Get Properties & Search

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab4 “Forge API Web Intro JS”)

This post was prompted by an inquiry about accessing properties of Revit model using Forge API. He left a comment saying that he followed my tutorial and was able to view the uploaded model successfully. So let’s take Forge API Intro Lab4 as a starting point and build on top of it. In this post, we are going to add two functionalities that allow you to:

• Select an object and obtain its properties
• Search the model for a given string and isolate them in the viewer

Lab4 Forge API Web Intro JS

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab3 “Forge API Web Intro”)

Now that we have a model uploaded to our bucket and translated for viewing, the final piece of functionality that we want to add is an ability to view the uploaded model in a html page. To do this, Forge API provides a client side JavaScript API.

In this lab, we make a basic viewer, which is based on Basic Viewer Step-by-Step Tutorial and is slightly modified to put it in the context of our lab and make it easier to built on top of what we have built in the previous lab.

Lab3 Forge API Web Intro

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab2 “Forge API Intro”)

In the previous lab, we wrote a desktop client application that creates your own custom storage in the cloud, uploads a file to that storage, and translates it for viewing. Those core functions that we wrote to make REST calls can be easily included in your authoring tools, such as Revit and AutoCAD. Next, we write a simple ASP.NET web application. For now, we keep the basic functionality same as Lab2 (i.e., authenticate, create a bucket, upload a file, and translate). Later in the Lab4, we will add JavaScript layer to embed a viewer.

The good news is that we have written the functions to make the Forge web services REST calls in a way that we can simply reuse them. In the sample project, we put the common Forge REST calls under Forge folder. You can simply copy the folder to your web application if you have followed the labs 1 and 2.

Lab2 Forge API Intro

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Lab1 “Hello Forge World”)

In Lab1, we learned how to obtain an access token and got familiarized ourselves with the basics of REST call. Let’s move on, and create our own storage, upload a model and make it ready for viewing.

To achieve this, we use the following services:

• POST authentication/v1/authenticate (same as in the Lab 1)
• POST oss/v2/buckets
• PUT oss/v2/buckets/{bucket key}/objects/{object name}
• POST modelderivative/v2/designdata/job

where oss stands for Object Storage Service.

Lab1 Hello Forge World

(This is a continuation from the previous post: Forge API Intro Labs Overview)

In this lab, we learn the first step into the Forge world and the basic of REST API call. This is a simple Windows Forms application written in C#. The Forge services we use in this lab is POST authenticate, which is a call to obtain a two-legged authentication token required for subsequent calls.

To make REST calls, we use a library called RestSharp. We chose this as the syntax of RestSharp nicely reflects the semantics of REST call and makes it easy to read the code even if you aren’t writing in C#. Please refer to this post about how to include RestSharp library to your project.

Forge API Intro Labs Overview

In the next few posts, I’m going to write about the introduction to Forge API. This is a revised version of what I have done as “View and Data API Intro Labs” a few years back, which was unfortunately outdated now. The goal of the labs is to learn the basic of Forge API through building a simple application to view a design model in a web browser. In the back of my mind, I’m also thinking this as a preparation for Design Automation for Revit (DA4R), which is expected to come near future. For example, to use DA4R, the developer will need to use authentication API. He/she may want to take a Revit file from A360 or BIM 360 and display the result in the viewer. I hope Revit add-on developers who are new to Forge API will find these labs easy to digest.

Autodesk Forge is a collection of web services and various platform technologies that allows the third party developers to integrate with Autodesk’s cloud-based products as well as to build their own applications. They are technologies that Autodesk internally uses to build its own services as well.