Custom Visual for Power BI to visualize 3D models and connect them to your data. It uses the library three.js and its fantastic 3DM loader to visualize 3D models in power BI. It currently only supports Rhino3d models, but the visual can be easily expanded to support other file formats.
This custom visual was developed by Diego Apellániz.
Thanks to McNeel for the wonderful 3DM loader for three.js.
Thanks to Tizian Alkewitz for the intensive beta testing.
- Download last release of this repository.
- Download and install Power BI Desktop.
- Open Power BI, create a new file and go to Files -> Import -> Power BI Visual from File and select 3DVisor.pbiviz from the downloaded files.
- Create a 3D Visor in Power BI by select the imported visual from the visualizations panel on the right side. It won't display anything though until we connect it to our data and upload the 3D model.
- Prepare a Excel table with the following format. One column must contain the GUIDs of the objects of your 3D model you want to import in Power BI. Additional columns may include different categories for the GUIDs and different values. It's important that all cells of the table are filed:
If you are using Rhino3D as the source of your 3D model, you can easily use Grasshopper to create your Excel table:
- Upload Excel table to Power BI
- Connect GUIDs with the 3D Visor. The input form to introduce the URL of your 3D model should appear now in the 3D Visor.
- Post-process your 3D modell. Delete the elements you don't want to import in Power BI and you didn't include in the GUIDs column of your table. In case you're using a Rhino model, it's strongly recommended to convert all geometry elements to meshes, since other geometry types may not be implemented in the 3DM loader yet.
- Get your 3D model online. Only 3D models uploaded to a https domain with CORS enabled can be imported in Power BI. In case you don't have access to such a domain, you can use one of the following resources:
Make your 3D model locally accessible through yor Localhost IP adress. In the downloaded files from the last release, you will find a Python script to make files accessible through a localhost IP adress. In order to use it, we need to create an SSL certificate first.
- Install OpenSSL.
- Create an SSL certificate file. We need it to create an https server on Localhost as shown in this video. In the corresponding steps, you can use the provided config.txt file and copy the command line in the file command.txt from the downloaded folder. On 4:16 stop the video. You should instead look on to how to load your generated certificate localhost.crt into Google Chrome or another browser. Finally open the provided certfile.pem file from the downloaded folde with the text editor. Replace the contents of the KEY and CERTIFICATE with the content of the previously generated localhost.key and localhost.crt.
- Install Python in your computer.
- Open the Windows Command Promt as an administrator, type cd PATH where PATH is the route to the folder of the downloaded python script and tpye pip install -r requirements.txt.
- Now you can finally run the python script ActivateLocalHost.py by doing double click into it. You should get the url of the https server runing in your localhost. Something like
https://localhost:49379. - Enter this url in Google Chrome. You shouldn't receive any warning if the SSL certificate and the file certfile.pem were created properly. Now you should see in the browser all files located in the same folder as the python script. You can also copy here the 3D model you want to import. You can then refresh the browser and copy the link to the file of the 3d model which you will then enter in Power BI!
We can also use a link to a file stored in OneDrive. SharePoint and OneDrive for business unfortunately don't work here.
- Get the shared link to the file in OneDrive.
- Run the program EncodeOneDriveURL.exe from the downloaded files and enter the shared link from OneDrive. You will get a resulting url that is the direct link to the file and that you can use in Power BI!
Just connect your imported data to the 3D visor. If just the GUIDS are provided, the 3D model will be displayed in gray. If a category is also provided, the different groups wil be displayed according to the color pallette of Power BI. If also data for the Colors parameter is provided, the model objects will be displayed using a color gradient that interpolates the added values of each group. Finally, if Color dara is provided with no grouping, the color gradient will consider the value of each independent model object with no grouping.
