BIM is the abbreviation of Building Information Modeling — the process of creating and controlling the digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of buildings. This method assumes gathering and processing all technological, architectural, economic and other kinds of information about a building with all its dependencies on other objects and processes. Within this concept, a building and all other objects that have relationships to it are treated as a single model.

BIM data are stored in .rvt/.rfa files:

• .rfa — a file that contains information about external/loadable families. Such families can be imported into a .rvt file and provide the ability to create family instances using family information.
• .rvt — a file that contains the Model. The Model includes:
  • Family instances — instances of families imported from a .rfa file.
  • System families that are defined by the format and are not created by external/loadable families (walls, roofs, floors, etc.).
  • Elements groups.
  • Other BimRv elements.

For additional information about the file format please see the Basic File Format section.

ODA supplies BimRv SDK as a cross-platform standalone solution that implements working with .rvt and .rfa files through the object-oriented API.

A .rvt/.rfa file represents a physical model for storing information about BIM objects; this format defines the way how to store BIM objects on a data storage devices according to the used file system.

A structured representation of a .rvt/.rfa file content that takes into account relations between objects, is a BimRv database. It implements the logical model of a BIM project data.

BimRv public API assumes there is a difference between elements and objects. Elements are database-resident entities that can be stored in a BimRv database and have unique identifiers to differ one element from another.

Objects are not directly stored in a BimRv database therefore they do not have identifiers. In other words, any element is an object, but any object is not mandatory an element.

BimRv SDK contains the following functionality:

• Read data from .rvt and .rfa files to get access to:
  • Walls, roofs, floors, family instances (doors, windows, columns, etc.) and other elements.
  • Geometry elements (curves, free forms, B-Rep elements), view-specific elements, text elements.
  • Parametric relationships information that describes how the elements are organized into an entire model.
  • Materials and fill patterns, which are used within views and rendering.

  BimRv SDK supports:

  • Reading .rfa/.rvt files of version 2011 and higher.
  • Conversion to the latest version for the 2015 file version and higher.

• Write data:
  • Save data in .rvt/.rfa files of the latest version only. For the version 2015 and higher BimRv SDK provides the re-save functionality. Re-save operation means the possibility to change any existing data and then save the changes back to the .rvt/.rfa file in the latest supported format.
  • An opportunity to save only additions and changes made to a model that makes the saving process faster and more efficient while working with large files.
• Create BimRv elements:
  • Different views, levels.
  • Curve elements (line, arc, ellipse, etc).
  • Form elements (extrusion, revolution, sweep, blend).
  • Basic walls.
  • Non-hosted family instances.
  • Custom geometry (DirectShape, DirectShapeType, FreeFormElem).
• Visualization of BimRv data:
  • Visualization of all elements, which have geometry (the geometry is stored in GElement).
  • Annotation elements (nodes, grids, texts, etc.) Such elements do not have geometry and graphic representation is created "on the fly".
  • Sections (section generation "on the fly" and filling gaps with materials).
  • Visual Styles (6 visual styles, which use different material settings for the visualization, are available).
• Interaction with other popular data formats:

  Format	Export	Import
  .dae (Collada)	✔	✔
  .ifc	✔	✖
  JSON	✔	✖
  Raster Image	✔	✖
  .svg	✔	✖

  BimRv SDK supports conversion for version 2015 and higher.

  See the Interaction with Other Formats section for additional information.

To get information about BimRv SDK modules, see the How to Determine Which Libraries to Use topic.

See Also:

Supported Platforms

Get Started with ODA BimRv SDK