technotecture

PART - A visual Kit of Parts Editor and 3D engine

PART editor running on Mac OS XPART editor running on Mac OS X

Kit of Parts are a paradigm used in various domains like Architecture, Software Engineering and the like. PART is a cross platform authoring environment to create Kit of Parts and simulate various aspects.

technotecture labs developed this software as subcontractor for Plugin Creations LLC. The customer Kajima Corp. Japan ran a research project regarding robotic construction. This software is a prototype for a 3D engine to simulate robotics aided construction. The core software designed revolves around the X3D format and extends it to suit the needs for construction, building managment and robot guidance.

Features

  • Native Crossplatform through wxWidgets
    • Mac OS X - Carbon (main application target)
    • Windows - Win32 API
    • Linux - GTK2
  • fully X3D compatible
  • VRML 2.0 import/export
  • Multi Viewer, OpenGL accelerated
  • Simple Editor

Development

The core is a X3D parser and scenegraph. Adjacent to that a simple GUI allows the user to manipulate the scenegraph. Plugins are used to convert 3rd party 3D database files into X3D. The main converter plugin is a VRML2 to X3D transformer, capable of converting large datasets fast. It is written in C++ to gain the most speed.

Screenshots

Here some screenshots demonstrating the capabilities of PART with some mock-up scenes.