Opendesign vs Forge for RFA file generation

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Please help me to  understand the difference between  opendesign vs Forge , from the RFA file generation automation and any other key cons of moving towards opendesign (https://www.opendesign.com/)

Regards,

Navan.

[mikako_harada · Accepted solution]

Hi Navan, 

I never used Teigha products.  But looking at their page, they seem to be providing reverse engineered file format. (I haven't looked at everything, but at least for Revit).   As a support personal, my initial reaction is that it makes me nervous about possible file stability issues.  

Anyway, let me try to comment based on the fact from what I know of, which is Forge.  Forge is not just about authoring tools.  It's not about desktop, either.  It's about opening up Autodesk's cloud technologies to the 3rd parties to foster echo-systems at large. It's Autodesk's vision and still evolving.  At the time of this writing, there is no tool that allows you to author Revit file with Forge. There is Design Automation API for dwg or AutoCAD files. But not for Revit. We are working on doing the similar for Revit.  Once we have that, we'll be able to produce Revit file without Revit. We are not in a stage that we can tell exactly when it would be, however.  If your interests is specifically for revit and rfa, it will be more suited for the Revit roadmap discussion. 

As a side note, I would be interested in the use case of automating rfa files. For example, maker of windows, doors, or equipment used for MEP designs are something I could imagine as one of scenarios.

This might be a bit off the tangent since I do not know the context, another way of looking at the use of Forge is that using Model Derivative and Viewer, where you can translate a certain format to another, and put together on viewer as aggregated model (such as we do with Glue, and Navisworks), we may be able to approach the problem differently.

I hope this helps.