Just to be clear on open source Dynamo BIM

Hi all.

I write with a quick question about this open source software:

http://dynamobim.org/
(source is on github)

Apparently it is tailored for Revit and Vasari but they are working towords making it more open to other programs (read blogpost about release 0.7).

Do anybody know if this theoretically would be able to integrate with Blender since it is open source?
Or would it need a more powerful geometry engine…?
I ask because it is backed by Autodesk and I have experienced that all Adesk products only work with their own tools.

Best regards

The project is Apache2.0 license, so we can use their code.

But this looks to be MS-Windows Only (C#, Visual Studio), there is always Mono, but even in that case it probably requires porting effort and wouldn’t be a library you could drop into Blender.

So any integration would likely be separate applications communicating, rather then directly integrating libraries.
Its possible to integrate Mono into Blender using their C bindings, then we could run C# code, so… in principle code could be integrated, but this is a really big project.

Also not clear if its completely open-source, they have a lot of binary DLL’s committed into GitHub, though I’m not familiar with how C# projects typically operate.

see: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/tree/master/extern, although IronPython for eg, only has DLL’s and is definitely OpenSource. so its all a bit fuzzy where libraries come from, committing compiled code to source control is generally bad practice - and not allowed in Blender’s repo.


Not sure you mean by geometry engine? seems like it has its own libraries to do geometry, but I didnt look too deeply into it.

As i know, an addon is being developed called “sverchok”, which is doing exactly the same thing.

“Sverchok - is a parametric tool for an architect, designer, lets you program objects geometry without knowing programming languages”

http://nikitron.cc.ua/sverchok_en.html

Indeed, looks cool but I have no idea what it adds beyond Sverchok?

I see.
I have been working a bit with it and it is pretty cool, but a bit early in development.
There are some annoying bugs and it is a bit hard to see exactly where it is going in the development.

The documentation is nonexisting which makes it hard to pick up anything other than other example tutorials.

Even though it is a nodebased bim tool which in itself is quite cool. BIM approach is more or less the industry standard now and it can feel a little limited compared to a free modelling app like blender. On the other hand the limited options of the BIM approach means it lends itself very well to extend it with nodes.

I see sverchok is much better for blender. A seperate BIM approach in blender would be great but much work and not practical through Dynamo as it is only the node library on top of Revit.