xeokit v1.1 Release Notes
This xeokit SDK v1.1 release includes: a bundled BIM viewer, HTML tree view and context menu widgets, ambient shadows, improved camera interaction, metadata support for 3DXML models, plus many fixes and tweaks requested by users.
Special thanks to our sponsors:
and to our contributors:
xeokit V1.1 includes xeokit-bim-viewer, which is an open source 2D/3D BIM viewer built on xeokit, that runs in the browser and loads models from your file system.
This viewer is developed with funding from Digital building Industries AG and OpenProject GmbH.
The viewer is integrated within OpenProject BIM 10.4, and can also be used as a stand-alone JavaScript application. In combination with open source CLI model conversion tools, it represents a low-cost, high-performance way to get your IFC models on the Web, that allows you the freedom to convert and host your models on your own server or GitHub repository.
xeokit V1.1 adds a TreeViewPlugin, which is an HTML tree view component that can navigate the objects in huge models. TreeViewPlugin has various hierarchy modes, scales up to large numbers of objects, and fully customizable using CSS.
This plugin was developed with funding from Digital building Industries AG and OpenProject GmbH.
xeokit V1.1 adds a ContextMenu component that provides a customizable HTML context menu.
This component was developed with funding from Digital building Industries AG and OpenProject.
xeokit V1.1 adds Scalable Ambient Obscurance (SAO), which approximates Ambient Occlusion in realtime. It darkens creases, cavities and surfaces that are close to each other, which tend to be occluded from ambient light and appear darker.
SAO was developed with funding from D-Studio.
The animated GIF above shows the effect as we repeatedly enable and disable SAO. When SAO is enabled, we can see darkening in regions such as the corners, and the crevices between stairs. This increases the amount of detail we can see when ambient light is high, or when objects have uniform colors across their surfaces. Run the example to experiment with the various SAO configurations.
xeokit's implementation of SAO is based on the paper Scalable Ambient Obscurance.
The CameraControl component is completely rewritten in xeokit V1.1. CameraControl controls the Camera with keyboard, mouse and touch input, and fires events when we hover, click or tap objects.
The new CameraControl provides better interactivity when dollying, orbiting and panning.
The XML3DLoaderPlugin can now automatically generate metadata from each SolidWorks 3DXML model it loads.
We can use that metadata with TreeViewPlugin to generate a tree view for navigating the objects within the model.
xeokit V1.1 includes a new version of its .XKT geometry format (V3), which fixes an accuracy issue with IFC
models positioned far from the World-space origin.
The xeokit-gltf-to-xkt CLI conversion tool and XKTLoaderPlugin have both been updated with this fix.
Also, the Creating Files for Offline BIM tutorial has been updated with more tips for preventing precision loss when converting your IFC models for use with xeokit.
The BIMServerLoaderPlugin now loads models from BIMServer 1.5.2, thanks to Nissim Pradhan](https://github.com/nissimpradhan), who is using xeokit within his research at Fraunhofer Italia.