March 18, 2021


This week xeolabs released xeokit-sdk 1.7.1, with support for point clouds, plus additional geometry primitive types and physically-based materials for high-performance models. This release contains updates to the 3D engine, the bundled BIM viewer, the file conversion tools, and xeokit's XKT geometry file format.



Highlights

Point Cloud Visualization

This example uses xeokit-sdk to view a point cloud scan containing 2.6M points.

The point cloud scan was provided as a 70MB glTF file by BIMData, which we then converted into a 26MB XKT file using xeokit-gltf-to-xkt, for fast loading into a xeokit viewer.

<aside> ℹ️ Run this example

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/8144e820-603a-4d2a-a0c0-f343fbc1ab3e/ogefpkldgmnfkelj.png


Lines and Points in PerformanceModel

This example uses xeokit-sdk to creating point, lines and triangles primitives in the client, within xeokit's high-performance scene representation.

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e9980819-dfae-4418-b298-92a1cf8ff346/2021-03-17_10-11-12.thumb.png


Lines and Points in XKT

This example uses xeokit-xkt-utils to programmatically generate an XKT file containing an assortment of point, line and triangle primitives, which we then load into a xeokit viewer.

<aside> ℹ️ Run this example

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2956bd27-ba61-4288-a826-cab0c5e0b30e/2021-03-17_10-12-22.thumb.png


Fixed Object Alignment in Distantly-Placed Models

This release fixes a precision issue in xeokit-xkt-utils, which was causing misalignment among objects in models that are positioned far from the coordinate origin. Now windows are fitting in frames again, and we're robustly handling double-precision IFC coordinates for all cases.

<aside> ℹ️ Run this example

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c17fe295-16e4-4e67-ad19-0dd2950c9aea/Screenshot_from_2021-03-18_11-56-18.png


Physically-Based Materials in XKT

In this example, we're using xeokit-sdk to view an XKT file containing physically-based material attributes.

Each sphere has a different value for metalness vs roughness, and is rendered using the GGX BRDF, with reflection and light maps.

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/9df70e0e-81cd-4907-a4a3-94a418d24d49/pbrXKT.png


xeokit BIM Viewer 2.0

xeokit's bundled BIM viewer has been upgraded to use various packages in this release, meaning that it supports point clouds, PBR, better geometry precision, and faster rendering.

<aside> ℹ️ Run this example

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https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0b00ae75-4c4c-4c4e-8a61-dd60bcaff2ce/EQMlFoGU4AIF7XX.jpeg