In the CAD community, the Open Design Alliance (ODA) is semi-famous for its industry battles with CAD giant, US-based Autodesk. The vast industry consortium is powered by quite literally every single competitor to Autodesk in the world. For well over a decade, the ODA has pulled its vast resources together to software reverse engineer Autodesk’s proprietary CAD format—DWG—the native format for the ubiquitous AutoCAD.
Revit Data For Everyone
This week the ODA has publicly released a software development kit (SDK) to the general public that enables software developers, both large and small, the ability to work with native Autodesk Revit file types. We first wrote about this looming development back in September (see, Architosh, “ODA Accelerates BIM Interoperability With Native Revit File Support,” 13 Sep 2016).
The ODA’s new tools are known as Teigha BIM and are “a set of development tools that enable cross-platform, multi-device software development that allows new software packages to be able to read and write .rfa and .rvt file formats (aka Revit files).” Though previously limited in their availability to certain key members of the ODA, they are now available to everyone.
01 – Tiegha BIM is the ODA’s latest SDK (software development kit) available to all ODA members at various membership status.
“We are very pleased to offer Teigha BIM licensing to the general public,” commented Neil Peterson, ODA President. “Through the end of last year, Teigha BIM was only available to our top-tier subscribers. But import and visualization are now ready for production use—so it’s the right time to offer this technology to a wider audience.”
Feedback Very Strong
Sergey Vishnevetsky, Development Director at ODA, said, “Feedback from early adopters has been quite positive. A number of our customers are already shipping importers and visualization solutions based on Teigha BIM.”
“Our focus this year has shifted to parametric entity creation,” continued Vishnevetsky, “a feature that is in high demand from users looking to streamline their automation processes. We expect rapid progress in this area in 2017, and interested parties can register on the Open Design website to receive real-time progress updates.”
To learn more about Teigha BIM and the ODA in general, visit here.