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VIM for Developers

VIM offers a suite of tools and libraries that empower software developers to implement custom 3D visualizations, workflows, tools, and automations based on their BIM models.

Get started quickly

The fastest way to get up and running is our public VIM Hackathon GitHub repository, which provides ready-to-run examples and sample VIM files to help you start building with VIM right away.

VIM Open-Source Libraries​

VIM provides the following free open-source libraries:

  • VIM Web — The VIM Web viewer runs in your web browser. It loads and visualizes VIM files from a URL (URLs can be self-hosted). This viewer is fully customizable and comes with built-in camera controls, isolation, object coloring, a sectioning tool, a measure tool, and widgets for navigating the element hierarchy and for inspecting BIM element properties.

  • VIM File Format — The VIM file format is maintained in a free and open-source GitHub repository. This repository contains technical documentation about the VIM file format as well as libraries to read and write VIM files.

VIM Flex Scripted Plugins​

VIM Flex Pro can be extended with scripted plugins, allowing you to customize the application interface and build your own views and workflows directly on top of your BIM data.

  • VIM Flex Plugins — Plugins are AngelScript-based scripts that extend VIM Flex with custom views and workflows. Through the scripting API they can run SQL queries against your BIM data, modify the 3D scene, subscribe to application events, and render custom widgets. VIM Flex ships with a fully-featured sample plugin to get you started.

Licensed VIM SDK and Command Line Tools​

VIM additionally provides a collection of licensed libraries and command line applications. These are all unlocked using an offline license key.

  • VIM SDK — The VIM SDK enables you to implement your own Revit add-in which invokes the underlying VIM exporter to convert your Revit projects into VIM files. It also provides access to libraries for diffing and running clash detections with VIM files.

  • VIM Tool CLI — The VIM Tool is a command line application that enables you to automate a number of tasks involving VIM files, including:

    • Transferring VIM file information into a SQL Server database.
    • Comparing (or diffing) two VIM files and storing the difference in an SQL Server
      database.
    • Merging a collection of VIM files into a single VIM file for custom federation purposes.
    • Deduplicating similar meshes in a VIM file.

  • VIM IFC Converter CLI — The VIM IFC Converter is a command line application that enables you to automate the conversion of IFC files into VIM files.