Hello everyone! Long time Sketchup user, first time forum user.
Does anyone know if there is a way to overlay real-time data queries in a model? For example, I would like to draw up a model of a data center and use a viewer to do a “virtual walkthrough.” That part is simple enough, but I would like to overlay real-time data queries. For example, if you were walking through the data center you could hoover over a server in a rack and a box would pop up and display real-time asset information and vital signs for the server. I have the APIs to hook into on the data end, I just need the component that would link it to the CAD model. Does anything like that exist? Hopefully what I’m saying makes sense.
Develop (or let develop) a ruby extension that communicates with your api and is able to detect which component is being hovered (or selected) and then visualize that data in SketchUp. This is a question that is quite common and custom tools that do such things have been developed, by me, or other SketchUp extension developers.
OR, and because it is such a common question that always requires some custom development, use a tool I quite recently made and that will allow you to do just that (linking data from datasources with 3D models) and does not involve any programming. I am not sure if you know Microsoft Power BI, but it is a powerful tool that will allow you to fetch data from various datasources (webservices, but also common excel files, json, csv, xml, sql databases) and craft interactive dashboards to visualize that data. Really wonderful how easy it is to get the data in there and use it. But, out of the box, it doesn’t come with a functionality to show 3D models in the dashboards. And that is the part I solved with 3DBI (for sketchup). This combination of tools should allow you to link any kind of data, with any kind of 3D models.
This is EXTREMELY helpful. I live in PowerBI most days, so I will start to explore that route. Thank you so much for your time and help on this. I’m very impressed.