Navisworks Support and HOOPS

There has been a substantial demand for Navisworks support within the HOOPS Platform. Several companies, including a large electronics manufacturing company, are currently sponsoring the Navisworks project. This particular company is interested in this feature because they are developing a plant design and management solution.

Why is Navisworks support in such high demand? Multiple factors play into this but most significantly, the growth of the BIM (Building Information Modelling) and AEC (Architectural, Engineering, and Construction) markets. In 2021, global BIM revenues were estimated to be between six and seven billion USD. A conservative estimate of BIM growth is 10% year over year for the next ten years. Many governments worldwide are also now mandating BIM compliance, and there’s been a push to move from 2D to 3D. Across the world, there have been small companies popping up to serve specific geographic regions within the BIM space due to these developments.

Support for Navisworks has been a consistent request from partners In the BIM space working on collaborative applications. Often, these projects will be composed of multiple building disciplines (steel structure, concrete construction, exterior, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and other domains), each with data created within different software packages. This data needs to be combined during the numerous design reviews where shared issues are discovered, documented, and later resolved when the people working on the project go back and work in their original design software. Navisworks plays a vital role in bringing data together from different sources. The ability to collaborate across multiple areas is crucial in today’s construction workflows.

Our partners are particularly interested in the NWD format. This format is lightweight and needs no external reference. An NWD can be used to create a snapshot of a design review. By looking at the file, you can see the context of the last design review, which is very helpful in collaboration within the BIM space. The NWD file contains metadata, including all unique IDs inside the file. Autodesk has a free viewer for NWD files called Navisworks Freedom, but it’s not adequate for our partners who want the ability to read NWD in the applications that they’re developing.

Tech Soft 3D focuses on providing quality reading and viewing of Navisworks data. Our partners will be able to programmatically access the model tree structure, metadata, tessellation, color transparency, and saved Navisworks views. Animation is not supported.

Beta support was included in the HOOPS Platform 2022 Service Pack 1 release. Navisworks will be officially supported in Service Pack 2, planned for August 2022. Navisworks readers will be available on Windows and Linux operating systems. We are eager for developers to use the Navisworks readers and provide feedback. If you are not currently a partner, you can download HOOPS Exchange as part of the HOOPS Native Platform at techsoft3d.com and join the discussion in our forum.