A house model converted into Unity, with the BIM data still available. (Image courtesy of Tridify.)
At the end of last year, game engine Unity and BIM conversion company Tridify announced that they’d be partnering to create conversion software that would allow users to bring BIM files into Unity without losing any of their data. Tridify Convert is a project five years in the making, a long time in the fast-paced world of software.
But exactly how does Convert work, and what was the process behind getting the software to market?
What It Does
The most significant feature of Tridify Convert is that the software makes it possible to bring BIM and CAD models into Unity’s game engine without losing the associated BIM data. The BIM information is carried over in the form of an Industry Foundation Class (IFC) file export connected to the model, which gets automatically turned into a COLLADA file upon upload into Unity.
“Our technology separates product data and geometry data, but the link between them still exists,” said Juha Alanen, executive vice president of Sales at Tridify. “Our cloud service creates a minimal representation of the 3D model from IFC geometry, so it is already optimized and ready to use in game engines. Once the user gets the converted data into Unity, the product data is attached back to 3D objects. With this technology, users can only show relevant and optimized data/geometry in their applications.”
Convert also includes a toolset…