LEDAS Cloud Platform is our own product that we developed to help companies to get their 3D modeling solutions to the production stage more quickly. The architecture of LCP is based on the deep expertise our team attained from developing cloud solutions. The server-side model representation, client-side UI, and business logic are implemented specifically for this new application.
Customer applications are not restricted to any specific discipline; they can be used for 3D medical software, as well as for BIM, CAD and other areas.
Since 2014, LEDAS has been involved in several BIM/AEC projects aimed at visualizing and creating 3D BIM (building information modeling) models directly in Web browsers. One of the projects required that we develop a set of fully-functional BIM authoring tools with collaboration capabilities.
With the model located on back-end servers, it can be distributed among servers as sub-models with specified access rights for each user role. The client code running in the browser provides the UI (user interface), with direct communication with dedicated back-end servers. This approach locates all time-consuming operations, such as checking BIM models for collisions, on the server side to utilize its superior computing power.
In some of our projects, we at LEDAS have been working with big sets of 3D data that need to be visualized and navigated through with a Web browser. Models of electric power plants, bridges, and large buildings can contain thousands and even millions of elements.
Millions of elements translates into even more millions of polygons. These numbers exceed the capabilities of even the latest Web browsers. To deal with them, we implemented a number of new LOD (levels of detail) techniques and heuristics. A LOD system uses several levels of representation of each object, from coarse (faster) to detailed (slower). This allows users to see both the big picture (with coarse LOD) and detailed structures of particular elements (with detailed LOD) at reasonable FPS (frames per second) rates.
Typical LOD optimization tactics include simplified representations of objects; sorting and visualizing objects on the basis of size; taking camera position into account; and instancing of otherwise identical elements.
We deployed additional techniques so that our LOD routines are properly integrated and well tuned:
For better efficiency, our team developed dedicated protocols of client-server communication on the basis of WebSocket. As a result, our optimization techniques make working with huge data sets in Web browsers almost as smooth as on the desktop.
Contact us to implement the LOD techniques in your web solution!
A long-term development project with AWV Informatik lead the LEDAS team to developing a front-end to the ClassCAD cloud software, their flagship product. Tessellation of 3D geometry, 2D sketching, and client-server geometric constraint solving was accomplished with our LGS software – these are just a few of the tasks our developers worked on.