a Drawing Manager and CSS Editor for BonsaiBim
Hello,
ViewBox is a Drawing Manager and CSS Editor for BonsaiBim.
https://github.com/sl-x75/ViewBox
I decided to create this program with the thought that it could help new users, at least at first. It is in no way comparable to or a replacement for a tool like Inkscape. From the user's perspective, the application is very simple with a Drawing Manager, a Viewer, and a CSS Editor. Internally, the code is probably unnecessary complex but work.
An early thought regarding the implementation was the recomposition of structural elements (IfcWall, IfcSlab, IfcColumn etc)
as well as on Annotation-Sets for dimensions and symbols. This would have offered a better user experience, but because my knowledge was very limited and because saving became much more complicated, I did not insist. As a result, now you edit each shape detected by the Picker separately.
One of the most important decisions was to use pure CSS styling, which is very convenient for instant updates and saving. To achieve this, I had to remove all styling from patterns.svg and symbols.svg. For markers.svg, this is not necessary. As a consequence, specifically structured default.css, symbols.svg, and patterns.svg files must be used.
To ensure the application works correctly, a couple of things are needed:
1. A minor improvement to the Bonsai code to ensure unique IDs on sheets (a request has been submitted to the repository).
2. The use of specifically structured asset files: patterns.svg and symbols.svg and default.css . The sections in the CSS file are important for the saving.
For the EPset_Status, three pre-existing rules are in the CSS that you have to adjust the styling for manually at the moment. To make them appear, you also need to apply a pattern to an element to write it into the AST. The EPSet and PSet detection deserve something dedicated.
Inserting shadows would be a good feature because they give depth, but so far, I have not found a way to implement it. I also think it would be quite easy (though I have not tried it) to integrate the entire web-ifc-viewer UI functionality.
Of course, you can do all of this without the app, and I also believe that the place for this functionality is within Blender itself. A more detailed guide on how it works is in the repository.
I have only tried the AppImage and Deb builds on Linux and the Dmg build on Mac. For the license, I just followed Bonsai's. As for the icon and name, they can be changed at any time. I just used "ViewBox" as the name because it was simple and used everywhere. This program is not essential, but I hope it will be useful.
During the development I had different ideas like combine 3d viewer because of the web-ifc and by searching the web I have discover this: https://threepipe.org/package/plugin-svg-renderer.html
Could this help for better Drawing generation ?
Many years ago, in the very early stages of Bonsai (BlenderBim), I stumbled upon the first video by Dion Moult, and to be honest, the idea of making an architectural design tool within Blender—without even taking the IFC part into account—seemed impossible to me. I was wrong. This is a very good work.
Many congratulations to everyone.
Comments
A word of caution to everyone!
I'm just being the paranoid IT guy here, but be very careful. It's a significant piece of work, and will access some hairy facilities, i.e. a .deb package which effectively has admin access at installation, and can do anything it damn well pleases.
This has been posted by someone with no history in this forum (joined today) and very little history on GitHub (joined in June-ish, created this project, and raised a feature request against Bonsai - nothing else.)
Unless you are patient enough and competent enough to review the code base you really shouldn't be rushing to install this.