Inspectra BIM 0.7.0 – Release notes

Inspectra BIM 0.7.0 — alignments with chainage, cross-sections along the axis, and a faster everything

Version 0.7.0 is the biggest free-tier release since the viewer launched. It teaches Inspectra the language of linear infrastructure — axes, chainage, cross-sections — and pairs it with a round of performance work that you will feel on every heavy federated model, whether you build bridges or buildings.

Alignments become first-class

Road and rail models revolve around an axis, and Inspectra now treats it that way. IFC 4.3 files already showed their IfcAlignment centrelines as cyan lines; 0.7.0 adds the other half of real projects: vertical alignments imported from LandXML. Export the alignment from Civil 3D (or any tool that writes LandXML), open the file in Inspectra, and the horizontal geometry — lines, arcs and clothoids, evaluated properly, not approximated from chords — is combined with the vertical profile into a true 3D axis. On a 4.7 km test alignment the reconstructed length matches the declared one to the millimetre.

A file with several alignments appears in the scene tree as a small tree of its own, one checkable row per axis. XML axes render purple, IFC ones stay cyan, so you always know what you are looking at — and everything below works identically for both.

Axes are also clickable now. A click highlights the line and fills the Properties panel with its identity card: name, source, start and end chainage, length, elevation range. Esc puts it back.

Chainage on the model, not in your head

Right-click any axis in the scene tree and choose Show Chainage Labels: kilometre markers in the familiar 3+144 format appear along the line, on as many axes as you like. The spacing picks itself from the axis length, and if your office standard says otherwise, Settings → Chainage Label Spacing pins it anywhere from every 10 m to every 1000 m.

Two details make the labels livable rather than a gimmick. Zoom out and they thin themselves — instead of a wall of overlapping pills you get a sparse, readable subset that densifies as you approach. And while you orbit or pan, the labels step aside entirely and return the moment you let go, so a fully labelled 5 km alignment costs you nothing in smoothness. A floating Hide chainage labels button in the corner clears every axis at once.

Read the chainage anywhere: Measure Alignment

The Measure tab gains an Alignment tool. Click any point on an axis and Inspectra answers the two questions engineers actually ask there: what chainage is this, and what is the design elevation? The reading stays on the model as a ringed marker with a pill — Tor 1 · km 3+144.25 · H = 16.20 m — and deletes like any other measurement. The chainage comes from the axis’ own station table (start chainage included), not from a guess.

Cross-sections that follow the route

This is the feature the rest was built for. The Section tile has a new mode: From Alignment. Click an axis and a cutting plane appears perpendicular to it and perfectly vertical — a real engineering cross-section, at the exact station you picked.

The violet ball sits where the axis pierces the plane. Drag it and the section slides along the route, in both directions, re-orienting itself as the axis curves so it stays perpendicular at every station; Ctrl+scroll steps it precisely. Measuring inside the cut works exactly as it has since 0.6.0.

While we were in there, every planar section — Surface, Global, and the new alignment one — gained a floating Flip Section button, so keeping the other side of a cut no longer means rebuilding it.

Alignments embed into standalone .ins scenes like everything else: send the file, and your colleague gets the axes, the chainage and the sections with it.

Finding issues faster

The Issues search now filters by file name and by any saved Filter set, on top of text, status, tag and date. “Show me the open issues on the MEP model” is two clicks.

The performance round

Every release should give something back to people with heavy models. This one gives a lot:

• Zooming is smooth now. Orbiting and panning were fixed in earlier releases; the scroll wheel was the last motion that still stuttered. It now uses the same machinery — while you zoom, the scene temporarily sheds its decorative weight (point-cloud detail, feature edges, sub-pixel elements) and restores it the moment you stop.
• Heavy scenes degrade smarter during movement. Transparent overlays fall back to a cheaper rendering path for the duration of a drag, back faces of closed solids are skipped, and if frames still run long, the smallest on-screen elements step aside progressively. Everything returns pixel-perfect on release.
• Re-opening models is dramatically faster. A model that is already in the geometry cache no longer re-parses its IFC file at all — element properties load in the background instead, ready before you click anything. First-time loads of large models are noticeably shorter too, and the scene tree now builds without freezing the window. One heads-up: the first start after updating rebuilds the geometry cache once — that is expected.
• A precision fix for stretched scenes. A single stray element sitting kilometres outside the actual site used to make every model in the scene render with jagged, quantised edges. The scene origin now ignores such outliers, so your geometry stays crisp — and the log tells you the stray element exists, so you can clean the source model.

Inside Audit (awaiting release)

Audit — clash detection, coordination and reporting — keeps maturing while it awaits its premiere. 0.7.0 adds Clash Exceptions: reusable pairs of selections (files, attributes or saved filters) that a clash test should deliberately ignore — designed sleeve penetrations, agreed overlaps. Exceptions live in a library, attach to any test, export and import as a file to travel between machines, and every test remembers exactly which exceptions it ran with, so reruns stay honest. The clash progress window now also shows a live estimated time remaining for the current test and the whole batch, and clash results stored in a scene unlock immediately after signing in instead of waiting for a restart.

As before: the Audit tab is visible but locked. The store opens in a while; the premiere comes with version 1.0.0.

To be notified the moment it goes live, create a free account at inspectrabim.com/account and enable product updates in your dashboard.

Do pobrania

Download Inspectra BIM 0.7.0 from inspectrabim.com/download — the free viewer needs no account, and alignments, chainage and cross-sections are all part of it. Upgrading over an existing installation keeps your settings and licence; installed copies will also offer the update on their next start.