Using Autodesk Forge to Automate Model Simplification for BIM Coordination

One of the challenges in 3D factory equipment layouts is the high Level of Detail (LOD) of vendor-supplied equipment models used in factory layouts and 3D model coordination, resulting in large file sizes degrading the performance of the federated model. Reducing the LOD to a manageable size takes up to 70 hours of manual editing for each project. Goodyear manages 30-40 projects each year. To solve this problem, Goodyear worked with Autodesk to develop and deploy an Autodesk Forge application to automate the process of lightweighting vendor models to be used within the layout of equipment in a 3D environment. Through automation, we’ve achieved a 97% reduction in the time it takes to prepare the equipment models. The automation has achieved an up to 74% file-size reduction with both a high and low LOD representation. In this session, we’ll describe this project from inception to deployment, cover the challenges we overcame, and demonstrate the application and the efficiency we’ve achieved.