Thursday, October 2, 2014

DynaWorks is here!! The Navisworks library for Dynamo

As some of you might be aware I have been working on a Dynamo library for Navisworks, if not then you'll be pleased to learn I have been working on a Dynamo library for Navisworks :)

If you want an idea what the heck it does go HERE to see it in action.

This was actually in an almost production form a couple of months ago, however until very recently you couldn't bring .dll files into Dynamo. When zero touch came out this made it possible, however you missed out on a number of documentation features, Dynamo wouldn't remember the library and so on.

So initially my bad monkeys that I had testing this stuff had to hack apart their Dynamo builds..... This is not a good idea hence why the beta was shared with a couple of people only.

However the Dynamo team started working on it from that point with a couple of others and within 2 months, they have gotten Dynamo to a version where we can share and access such programs without any hacks.

This just goes to show how well opensource can work with an active community and a funded dev team :)

Starting to Customise Dynamo.

If your doing some simple stuff, I would defiantly check out the ZeroTouch  this is a great way to work for simple stuff, however connecting to other api's like Navisworks quickly introduced issues like having all the native Navisworks objects exposed as COMobjects in Dynamo which makes for a bad user experience. So lots of wrapping is required, for those who don't know what that means is instead of dealing with an object called InwOaPathColl it looks like NavisObjectCollection in Dynamo, so much friendlier to understand:)

For those who may not be aware Dynamo is completely opensource which means you can get in there and add your own customisation's to do all sorts of things. Initially my goal was to be able to extract clashing objects, data and views and be able to sync them in Revit. This would allow me work with large Navis projects containing alot of files, and not have to have them all loaded in all the time when clearing up clashing issues.

Now many people own or have Visual Studio Professional, however I do not yet. I have managed to get by with Visual Studio Express and Sharp Develop.

After this setup I was able to clone the Dynamo repo which you can find here or you can download it. initially you just need to start the library and it should build. However I had a couple of issues working with the free version.

At this stage you can create a project and open up the Dynamo project, add yours to theirs and you can start testing in sandbox mode. If you need Revit to debug your nodes, then you will need to plug it a different way which I am not going to cover here :)

From there the only other library you need to include is ProtoInterface and possibly ProtoGeometry if you want to work with the native or Design script engine to convert your objects.
Now Dynamo will suck up all your public classes, methods and so on automatically so your best using the following items to control what shows up in Dynamo.
In Autodesk.DesignScript.Runtime the[IsVisibleInDynamoLibrary(false)] is great at hiding methods although it seems to be buggy with properties with external reference classes and [SupressImportIntoVM] which can hide classes.

One really big advantage of building a separate library is you can run it in DynamoSandbox (if you go to Program Files, Dynamo there is a .exe in there you can run which is the Dynamo Engine) mode or standalone. I have a feeling we will see alot more standalone products using Dynamo in the future not just using Revit, however you can interact with those nodes within Revit Dynamo to achieve what your after which is great.

DynaWorks 15


Due to the way the Navisworks API is setup, atm the moment multiple versions have to be referenced separately. To download head to github and download the zip here. This is due to the fact the Navisworks implementation works in sandbox box (without Revit or Navis). The Autodesk guys have the same issue with Revit, it's just they have the advantage of hiding because you can only see the commands based on the Revit version are you are in. I am sure there is a tricky way to do this but I have not as yet looked.

PS You need Navisworks Simulate or Manage in order to use this library.

Installing the Library

Once you have downloaded the relevant library from here. Once the package manager is fixed you will be able to download the library as a package but until then you need to use Github.

Once you downloaded the files as a zip or individually you need to copy paste the following files (Depending on whether you have 2015 or 2015 Navisworks) to a folder location. It doesn't matter where as long as the following files are available.
  • DynaWorks15.dll
  • DynaWorks15.xml
  • DynaWorks15_DynamoCustomization.xml
  • Interop.NavisworksAutomationAPI12.dll
  • Interop.NavisworksIntegratedAPI12.dll
Once you have those files simply load the DynaWorks.dll ONLY the rest will all load up.


Once you have this you can get packages from the package Manager or get others yourself.


With all that aside lets get into my Navis Library.

As you can see there are currently 4 main parts to the Navisworks library.

Custom:- Where I put my Custom Nodes
Clash Detection:- Run, get tests, get results, get clashing objects.
FileSettings:- Open a Navis File, append files, Save As.
Objects:- GetNodes, search/query objects, get properties, get values, get attributes
Views:- get view names, camera positions vectors and looking points.


Now I don't want to go through everything so I thought I would point out the major stuff here.

For the moment I have built a number of custom nodes that are doing alot of the hard yards for you, so download them and check them out!! This is done for 2 reasons, first because these nodes save a ton of time in setting up what can be some really basic stuff, and 2 so you can get an understanding of how I have built the system and what elements need to interact with what.


FileSettings > OpenNavisFile
This is starting point of any use of the DynaWorks, it allows the user to open a file.
It has two options, the file path and the whether the session actually opens, this is one of the coolest features in this library as you can actually get data, run clashes and query objects without having to actually open the Navisworks UI. This saves a ton of resources in access and use of the tool.
If you do want to access it just set it to true and you can still navigate, update, save and close the file if you need to.



WARNING: Do not put this node inside a Custom Node, first it will always close the session for some reason after it runs if the node is in a custom node, this is a known issue. Second if you run multiple custom nodes or other options with it embedded it tries to open the file each time, encounters file locks etc......


Accessing Navisworks Objects (Also known as Nodes)

NOTE: Nodes are every single selectable object in a Navisworks Selection tree. Each has it's own attributes and properties, but Navisworks treats each one as a Node Instance with parents or children.

These are different from Nodes in Dynamo, I know it's annoying but to keep ease of use of API, communication with developers and so on, I am not creating new acronyms. 

There are currently a number of ways to use Dynamo to access Navisworks Nodes

First you can run a clash detection, filter through the clashes and return the objects you want. There is a fair bit happening in Clash detection so I suggest you look at the published nodes and also the examples on GitHub.

Second in Objects>NavisNodes>GetFilesInProject this will give you the starting point of the node files in each loaded nwc. You can then use the GetNodeChildren to cycle through the lists.

Last you can use any existing selection sets in Objects>NavisSelection and get a list of selectionsets manipulate and create what you need then use the GetNodesFromSelectionSets.

ClassNames vs ClassUserNames

There are two options here, both are equally valuable, one allows you to select objects by the Navisworks objectname, the second allows you to select objects by the string name data from Revit or other external package.
To know which name you need to select expand the little data readout, the first name of any node is the ClassName and the second is the UserClassName. The same thing goes for attributes.



Accessing Navisworks Attributes

From the nodes you can access the attributes, these are the various Tabs, that you see in the Properties panel. You can return attributes from nodes by using the Objects>NavisAttributes>GetNavisAttributesFromNodesList. This will return all the available attributes for those particular nodes in a list.

Accessing Navisworks Properties

The way the NavisCOMAPI library works when we want properties we have to setup a few things.
There are under Object>NavisPropertyList, the first returns a list of the available properties from the attribute.
These get the Attribute by ClassName or ClassUserName, then you need to identify the property and it will return all values as strings. I may work on numbers and other data in future, but this makes it easy for now.

Navisworks GetData

Second in objects there is GetData and NavisObjects and each has a Get Value. The option in GetData is for getting the properties and values of ANY Navis object so tests, results, the works. The other option is for getting the data from Navisworks property tabs, properties and values.

The query objects add alot of value in finding out what things are and what are in elements so feel free to use that!!

This is a great tool for querying or filtering objects by various attributes and so on!!!
It should work on every type of object in Navisworks.

Do not use this to get Property values, a special methods has to be done hence the once I have above, using this will cause it to crash or crazy behavior.

Navisworks ClashDetection

I am not going to detail all the requirements of the Clash Detection tool, just the setup.
First you need to have setup some clash tests, you can use Dynamo to Run tests and cleanup resolved issues if you want, otherwise you can simple extract the clash data.

To do this get an OpenNavisFile and connect it to ClashDetection>Create>GetClashDetection then under ClashDetection>Actions> you can get the clash tests, then the clash results by each clash or by group.

You can get various data from these XYZ points, views, properties/comments however, if you want to select the objects you must use the GetClashNodes available from the same area. Once you have the nodes you can perform other operations.

NOTE: Here is some great news, if not all your team has Navisworks Manage, they can still open the file and extract all data and clash data with Simulate!!! That way only the team members with manage need it to setup the clashes and so on. Users can access the NWF project to retrieve all the data from Simulate.

You can also run new clash tests, resolve clashing issues and so forth from Simulate!

Hopefully this stays open but who knows!!!

Navisworks Views

Lastly we can get View Data to do this we need to access the Views>GetSavedViews from the list.
You can then cycle through get comments, data camera positions etc...

In future if people want we can look at creating Navisworks views from with Revit, and updating the Navisworks file itself. for now I needed data and clash extraction.

Note: I have created a default and metres conversion. Please note this will only work if the conversion is set to feet, which so far in 2015 I can't seem to change the underlying API units. The reason for the conversion is the dynamo 3D view creation nodes are also in metres and this should save a ton of time.

Getting Started

 Examples on the github repo you can find a number of definitions to get your started, these are commented to show you what the nodes are doing and should work with DynaWorks14 and 15.

If you need both versions of Navisworks then becareful on how you manage them!!!

Examples

The following are some examples of using DynaWorks to do the following.
  • RevitClashesElementUpdate - Updates Revit elements comments to say whether something clashes from Navisworks
  • RevitClashFamilies - Places Family Instances as Clash Points
  • CreateSuitableRevitView - Creates a suitable Revit View of the family.

Final Notes

This has been a big but fun project for me in my spare time, I know there will be bugs, problems and possible feature requests all that information should be put on the GitHub repo here.

Also this is a personal project, so your gonna have to put in the effort to learn it outside of my examples, and this blog.

Also I am not support so I can't guarantee how many issues, queries or problems I will be available fix!