Open Design Alliance

520 VIEWS

ODA Products and supported file formats

.dwg Toolset

Annual ODA Conference

Members of the Alliance (not exhaustive)

Corporate Members

Founding Members

Open Design Alliance

Open Design Alliance
Developer(s)	Open Design Alliance
Stable release	2019Update2.1 / February 10, 2019 (2019-02-10)
Type	Runtime library
License	Proprietary (sources available to members)
Website	opendesign.com ^[49]

Open Design Alliance is a nonprofit organization creating SDKs for engineering applications. ODA offers interoperability tools for .dwg, .dxf, .dgn, Autodesk® Revit®, Autodesk Navisworks®, and .ifc files and a technology stack for visualization, web development, 3D PDF publishing, modeling, and more.

Open Design Alliance
Developer(s)	Open Design Alliance
Stable release	2019Update2.1 / February 10, 2019 (2019-02-10)
Type	Runtime library
License	Proprietary (sources available to members)
Website	opendesign.com ^[49]

ODA Products and supported file formats

.dwg Toolset

Drawings SDK ^[50] is a development toolkit that provides access to all data in .dwg and .dgn through an object-oriented API, allows creating and editing any type of .dwg or .dgn drawing file, and can be extended with custom .dwg objects. (Old names: Teigha Drawings, Teigha for .dwg files and Teigha for .dgn files; OpenDWG and DWGdirect; DGNdirect.)

Drawings SDK also provides exchange of the following file formats to and from .dwg and .dgn:


Format	Export	Import
.dgn	No	Yes (import .dgn to .dwg only)
.dwf	Yes	Yes
.pdf	Yes	No
.dae (Collada)	Yes	Yes
.svg	Yes	No
Raster Formats	Yes	No
.stl	Yes	No
.hsf	Yes	No
Three.js	Yes	No

Architecture SDK ^[51] is a development toolkit for building .dwg-based architectural design applications. It offers interoperability with Autodesk Architecture files (old name: Teigha Architecture).
Civil SDK ^[52] is a development toolkit for working with Autodesk Civil 3D® files. The Civil API provides read/write access to data in civil custom objects (old name: Teigha Civil).
Mechanical SDK ^[53] is a development toolkit for working with Autodesk Mechanical files.

BIM Suite

BimRv SDK ^[54] is a development toolkit for reading, writing, and creating .rvt and .rfa files.
IFC SDK ^[55] is a development toolkit featuring 100% compatibility with the buildingSMART® IFC standard. It offers a geometry building module for creating IFC geometry, which includes the ODA facet modeler and B-Rep modeler.
BimNv is a development toolkit for reading, visualizing and creating Autodesk Navisworks® files.

Technology Stack

The ODA Technology Stack incorporates three products: Visualize SDK, Web SDK, and Publish SDK.

Visualize SDK ^[56] is a graphics toolkit designed for engineering applications development.
Web SDK ^[57] uses Visualize SDK to embed engineering models into web pages and create web/SaaS applications.
Publish SDK ^[58] is a development toolkit for creating 2D and 3D .pdf and .prc models. All PDFs are compatible with ISO standards and Adobe® tools. Publish SDK can create PRC-based 3D PDF documents that contain full B-Rep models and can include animation, interactive views, part lists, etc.

History

The Alliance was formed in February 1998 as the OpenDWG Alliance, with its initial release of code based on the AUTODIRECT libraries written by Matt Richards of MarComp.
In 2002, the OpenDWG library was renamed to DWGdirect.
And the same year, the alliance was renamed to Open Design Alliance.^[1]
On 22 November 2006, Autodesk sued the Open Design Alliance alleging that its DWGdirect libraries infringed Autodesk's trademark for the word "Autodesk", by writing the TrustedDWG code (including the word "AutoCAD") into DWG files it created. In April 2007, the suit was dropped, with Autodesk modifying the warning message in AutoCAD 2008 (to make it more benign), and the Open Design Alliance removing support for the TrustedDWG code from its DWGdirect libraries.
In 2008, support was added for .dgn files with DGNdirect.
In April 2010, DWGdirect was renamed to Teigha for .dwg files, OpenDWG was renamed to Teigha Classic and DGNdirect was renamed to Teigha for .dgn files.
Since August 2017 (v. 4.3.1), Teigha contains production support for version 2018 .dwg files, including architectural, civil and mechanical custom objects.
In February 2018 (v. 4.3.2), it was announced the availability of STL (stereolithography, is widely used for 3D printing and rapid prototyping) and OBJ (serves as an open exchange format for many 3D design solutions) file support.^[2]
In September 2018 Teigha brand was removed.^[3]
In October 2018 ODA started work on IFC Solution ^[4]
In January 2019 Drawings 2019.2 introduced extrude and revolve 3d solid modeling operations as part of the standard SDK ^[5]^[6]
In January 2019 ODA announced the release of its new BimNv SDK ^[7]

Membership

There are six types of ODA membership:

Educational: qualified university use only, 1 year limit
Non-commercial: any kind of internal automation for in-house use and R&D, 2 year limit
Commercial: limited commercial use (sell up to 100 copies), web/SaaS use not allowed
Sustaining: unlimited commercial use, web/SaaS use allowed
Founding: unlimited commercial use with full source code
Corporate: unlimited commercial use across multiple business units

There is also a free trial period.

Releases

Open Design Alliance provides three production releases each year:

May/June
August/September
December

Release notes are created for each release that contain information about product enhancements, new features and instructions for migrating from previous SDK versions.

Intermediate releases are also provided each sprint (month).

Annual ODA Conference

Open Design Alliance holds an ODA conference every year in September. The two-day conference includes presentations from directors and developers and face-to-face meetings for non-members, members, ODA developers, and ODA executives. Anyone who is interested can register and attend the conference.^[8]