Creating text tags inside viewer

[paireks]

Hey Viktor,

I'm passing to you the request from Yoann Obry who came up with this idea. Idea is to display a text with values of chosen property inside the viewer. Such feature should greately improve readability of data inside complex models, as you won't have to click at every element to get some specific info, but you could see it for multiple elements at once. Yoann shared these images:

This is how it is right now, we could have a radio button to pick the properties we want to see inside model:

This is how it could be displayed in viewer once the radiobutton would be pressed (this example was created using this: https://github.com/paireks/dotbimpy#customize):

Not sure how big challange it would be to implement it. Also obtaining the text location could be interesting, as e.g. finding some sort of a center of a mass for a mesh might be a challange itself, or it might look weird for some meshes, e.g. if one mesh is constructed with two separate meshes with gap in between. But maybe I'm overthinking it, would love to hear your opinion on that.

I found these two examples that maybe would be helpful to implement it:
https://stemkoski.github.io/Three.js/Labeled-Geometry.html
https://stemkoski.github.io/Three.js/Sprite-Text-Labels.html

Best regards ;)
Wojciech

[paireks]

Regarding location of text: maybe center of bounding box would be easy to obtain and good enough for most of the cases.

[kovacsv]

I like the idea, but the complexity here is that there is no common property set. So for example if you check the "Guid" property, the model should be scanned if any of the meshes has a property with the name "Guid".

From the UX perspective it's misleading that you select from the list of mesh properties, but it will effect the visualization of the entire model.

So I think it's need more investigation on how to achieve this goal.

[os4bim]

Hello,

Thanks for your discussion. I just want to add that as far as I know there is no IFC viewer who have this ability. If one day we can have this it will be a step forward in the reading of the metadata from the 3D BIM models.

Kind regards,
Yoann

[paireks]

Maybe this would do better work from the UX perspective:

But generally when I'm thinking about some edge cases (overlapping elements, meshes with gaps, tiny elements next to each other) I see that it can be misleading in many cases, so I'd say making it clear for the user that this tag goes to this element could be more challenging.

[paireks]

For an example this is how it looks like when middle of the bounding box is taken for text tag

[os4bim]

This is very useful to make some parameter checking. In this sample you can hide the walls to better see the elements inside.
For example you need to order the windows and you want to check if the schedule is conform. You can display the width and the height of the windows in the 3D viewer to validate them.