CAD, BIM & 3D

This is part 7 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss alternative approaches to the FBX import from the first two articles. This is not a coding post, but a reflection, with some hints to implementation. There are many roads which lead to Rome… And depending on your use case, it may lead via different passages. Investigating our options to load models from CAD/BIM There are a few more 3D Formats which can be recognised by Unity, such as Wavefront OBJ or 3D Studio for MS DOS (*.3ds). A more modern format that is supported is Collada (*.dae). Depending on your CAD or BIM software, this may be a direct way to get your geometry there. The biggest “gotcha” we get here is that these models often don’t include any form of object-identification (as in: having a unique and predictable name). We relied in the previous blog-posts on the fact that the exported geometry still contained a hint in its name to the original object, which was the who...