Autodesk forge custom geometry

Question

I am currently facing the problem that rendering custom geometry into my forge is allocation a huge amount of memory. I am using the technique suggested on the autodesk website: https://forge.autodesk.com/en/docs/viewer/v7/developers_guide/advanced_options/custom-geometry/ . I need to render up to 300 custom geometrys into my viewer but by trying to do so the site is simply crashing and my memory jumps over 5 GB. Is there any good way to render a large amount on custom geometry into the forge and keeping the performance up to a usefull level?

Thx, JT

Answer 1

I'm afraid this is not something Forge Viewer will be able to help with. Here's why:

The viewer contains many interesting optimizations for efficient loading and rendering of a single complex model . For example, it builds a special BVH of all the geometries in a model so that they can be traversed and rendered in an efficient way. The viewer can also handle very complex models by moving their geometry data in and out of the GPU to make room for others. But again, all this assumes that there's just one (or only a few) models in the scene. If you try and add hundreds of models into the scene instead, many of these optimizations cannot be applied anymore, and in some cases they can even make things worse (imagine that the viewer suddenly has to traverse 300 BVHs instead of a single one).

So what I would recommend would be: try and avoid situations where you would have hundreds of separate models in the scene. If possible, consider "consolidating" them into a single model. For example, if the 300 models were Inventor assemblies that you need to place at specific positions, you could:

• aggregate all the assemblies using Design Automation for Inventor, and convert the result into a single Forge model, or
• create a single Forge model with all 300 geometries, and then move them around during runtime using the Viewer APIs

If none of these options work for you, you could also take a look at the new format called SVF2 ( https://forge.autodesk.com/blog/svf2-public-beta-new-optimized-viewer-format ) which significantly reduces the memory footprint.