Open Design Alliance is a nonprofit organization creating SDKs for engineering applications. ODA offers interoperability tools for.dwg,.dxf,.dgn, AutodeskRevit, Autodesk Navisworks, and.ifc files and a technology stack for visualization, web development, 3D PDF publishing, modeling, and more.
is a development toolkit that provides access to all data in.dwg and.dgn through an object-oriented API, allows creating and editing any type of.dwg or.dgn drawing file, and can be extended with custom.dwg objects.
Drawings SDK also provides exchange of the following file formats to and from.dwg and.dgn:
Format
Export
Import
.dgn
No
Yes
.dwf
Yes
Yes
.pdf
Yes
No
.dae
Yes
Yes
.svg
Yes
No
Raster Formats
Yes
No
.stl
Yes
No
.hsf
Yes
No
Three.js
Yes
No
is a development toolkit for building.dwg-based architectural design applications. It offers interoperability with Autodesk Architecture files.
is a development toolkit for working with Autodesk Civil 3D files. The Civil API provides read/write access to data in civil custom objects.
is a development toolkit for working with Autodesk Mechanical files.
BIM Suite
is a development toolkit for reading, writing, and creating.rvt and.rfa files.
is a development toolkit featuring 100% compatibility with the buildingSMART IFC standard. It offers a geometry building module for creating IFC geometry, which includes the ODA facet modeler and B-Rep modeler.
BimNv is a development toolkit for reading, visualizing and creating Autodesk Navisworks files.
The ODA Technology Stack incorporates three products: Visualize SDK, Web SDK, and Publish SDK.
is a graphics toolkit designed for engineering applications development.
uses Visualize SDK to embed engineering models into web pages and create web/SaaS applications.
is a development toolkit for creating 2D and 3D.pdf and.prc models. All PDFs are compatible with ISO standards and Adobe tools. Publish SDK can create PRC-based 3D PDF documents that contain full B-Rep models and can include animation, interactive views, part lists, etc.
History
The Alliance was formed in February 1998 as the OpenDWG Alliance, with its initial release of code based on the AUTODIRECT libraries written by Matt Richards of MarComp.
In 2002, the OpenDWG library was renamed to DWGdirect.
And the same year, the alliance was renamed to Open Design Alliance.
On 22 November 2006, Autodesk sued the Open Design Alliance alleging that its DWGdirect libraries infringed Autodesk's trademark for the word "Autodesk", by writing the TrustedDWG code into DWG files it created. In April 2007, the suit was dropped, with Autodesk modifying the warning message in AutoCAD 2008, and the Open Design Alliance removing support for the TrustedDWG code from its DWGdirect libraries.
In 2008, support was added for.dgn files with DGNdirect.
In April 2010, DWGdirect was renamed to Teigha for.dwg files, OpenDWG was renamed to Teigha Classic and DGNdirect was renamed to Teigha for.dgn files.
Since August 2017, Teigha contains production support for version 2018.dwg files, including architectural, civil and mechanical custom objects.
In January 2019 Drawings 2019.2 introduced extrude and revolve 3d solid modeling operations as part of the standard SDK
In January 2019 ODA announced the release of its new BimNv SDK
Membership
There are six types of ODA membership:
Educational: qualified university use only, 1 year limit
Non-commercial: any kind of internal automation for in-house use and R&D, 2 year limit
Commercial: limited commercial use, web/SaaS use not allowed
Sustaining: unlimited commercial use, web/SaaS use allowed
Founding: unlimited commercial use with full source code
Corporate: unlimited commercial use across multiple business units
There is also a free trial period.
Releases
Open Design Alliance provides three production releases each year:
May/June
August/September
December
Release notes are created for each release that contain information about product enhancements, new features and instructions for migrating from previous SDK versions. Intermediate releases are also provided each sprint.
Annual ODA Conference
Open Design Alliance holds an ODA conference every year in September. The two-day conference includes presentations from directors and developers and face-to-face meetings for non-members, members, ODA developers, and ODA executives. Anyone who is interested can register and attend the conference.
