Interview
Streaming BIM from the cloud with Unreal Engine Tridify recently launched a new BIM model streaming service that uses Unreal Engine. Greg Corke caught up with the company’s CEO, Alexander Le Bell, to find out more
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ridify is well known for its BIM-to-web service. Users upload an IFC file to the cloud and it is automatically turned into a web-optimised model that can be shared online for collaboration with teams, partners and customers. While the resulting models are lightweight, they still have to be rendered on the local device — be that a laptop, tablet or mobile phone — using the local GPU. This is fine for smaller BIM models, but, for the larger ones, users won’t always get the best experience - and, we expect, some models will simply too big. To help get around this challenge, Tridify was recently awarded an Epic MegaGrant to develop a new service that allows its models to be rendered with Unreal Engine in the cloud with the pixels
then streamed to a mobile device. All the end user needs is a URL, so the model can be viewed using a standard web browser. As all the graphics processing is now done on a powerful GPU server, the service is said to work with ‘any size of model on any device’. And, while models are currently rendered quite simply, as the system is based on Unreal Engine the world is really your oyster when it comes to visual quality. With the new service now being made available to selected customers we caught up with Tridify’s CEO, Alexander Le Bell, to find out more. Greg Corke: Will you be able to view BIM object data? Alexander Le Bell: This will be the first feature that we are going to implement because there is no use in viewing a BIM
model, if you don’t know what part of the model you are looking at. GC: Is the primary reason for the Epic Games partnership to give the ability to view larger models, and the secondary benefit is render quality? ALB: The first step is to give our customers the ability to view bigger models with any device. In the future, our aim is to provide an automated content pipeline to Twinmotion and Unreal developers. This means that you will be able to have an easy-to-use workflow where BIM data is used to filter content from large amounts of data and then use it in Twinmotion or Unreal applications. Or even import content in real-time to those software applications using Tridify APIs. By default, the render quality will also be constantly improving but the main objective is not to compete with software like Twinmotion that is geared towards high quality rendering. Our aim is to push the limit of how large and complex models can be viewed on mobile devices. GC: How will customers pay for the service? (as they will be using your GPU hardware resources?) ALB: The customer will buy a normal Tridify subscription plan that allows them to have all the current features of the Tridify service, where customers can publish to the web using the Tridify web viewer. In addition, they will now also be
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