Hello I’m a newbie with IFC and I’m working on implementing lighting geometry to blender bim as a research project.
My problem is I can’t find anything on implementation of IfcLightSource or have not found any examples of it. I desparetly need help. Is there any BIM software that supports lighting geometry? Any kind of direction would be a big help.
Thank you in advance
G’day @yorgunkirmizi ! I’d love to help you with your research project! Implementing lights has been on the todo list for a while but I never got around to it!
The lights are dependent on the rendering engine. Lights will need to be translated in different ways for Cycles / Eevee, versus other engines. An ambient light refers to the world settings, directional would be a sun lamp, positional is a point light, and goniometric needs to be first translated into IES data, which can then be set via the node tree.
As a later step, I would love to then integrate IFC into Radiance in a more streamlined manner, which is where the real value of these lights come in. Right now, IFC has extremely poor support for CG / ArchViz requirements - which I really hope they will improve, so the actual usecases where elements like these are useful are more around light simulation.
It seems relatively straightforward - what is your timeline for implementation like? Would you need help with anything? Would you prefer to pair program or code alone? Let me know!
Hello Mr. Moult, I’m so happy that you’ve replied this topic! I’ve been working on this research for about 7 months now and first I’ve focused on scripting with Python and also working with IES lights. I am not really good at with coding either I’m learning as I go but I’m quite passionate to do further enchancements.
First I tried my hand with a small add-on on blender to add IES lights easier for the user. That took some basic python knowledge but now I came to the IFC implementation part I’m quite stuck. I’ve been taking your code of BlenderBIM as an example so far but it is quite complicated for me to understand.
If it is possible I would really appriciate a private meeting with you or maybe I could email you my research and what I have done so far and what I’m planning/trying to do.
Have a good day
Ilkin
Hey there! Sure thing! The code for geometric representations is perhaps the trickiest bit, as representations in IFC are also quite complex! My contact details are dion@thinkmoult.com and I’m online on the OSArch.org live chat. You can also feel free to post about your research on community.osarch.org - you may come across other academics and subject matter experts there who have already engaged with the BlenderBIM Add-on and IfcOpenShell who can help answer questions or collaborate 
Happy to also organise a voice call, screenshare, or joint programming session. Contact me through any of those channels, and let’s get started!