Presenting Blender as a new IFC authoring tool

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@gester, you queries:

  1. It is technically possible. I have known people to do it, and I myself have run it on Android on my phone (yes, even rendering in real-time). However, practically Blender is a fully fledged authoring program for industry-grade workflows - for the purposes of authoring, a touchscreen input will allow you to navigate, but you will have a poor authoring experience. A better approach would be to have a dedicated viewing software for the IFC file on your mobile device, tailored towards a specific task. This goes for any authoring tool, not just Blender.
  2. BlenderBIM is an addon to Blender that allows IFC reading and writing into Blender, as well as the necessary UI to assign, audit, and manipulate BIM data within the 3D interface. It is also part of IfcOpenShell, which contains a growing suite of tools to read and write IFCs, do MVD checking, IFC QA, visualisation, COBie, IFC/SVG/OBJ/DAE/etc file conversion, 3DS Max, and more - all of which are free and open-source software. Archipack is separate to BlenderBIM, and revolves around “domain-specific modeling”, essentially parametrically generating geometry that is frequently used in the architectural domain. BlenderBIM and Archipack can be used together, or each standalone - they complement each other: BlenderBIM focusing on OpenBIM data, and Archipack focusing on geometry. At the moment, integration is loose. We will likely integrate further.
  3. At the moment, there is an experimental script that does section cuts, there are also 3D dimensioning and labeling tools, and IfcOpenShell also has some experimental SVG conversions. None are yet up to the task of construction documentation, (i.e. with annotations, dimensions, symbols, schedules, and sheets) though this is on the to-do list. It is extremely important to solve this, as currently we are again faced with proprietary software should we want to do 2D documentation.

@ReD_CoDE - There is no “correct form” for this - it is purely a convention - data for predefined types and tags are stored elsewhere, and only the IfcClass and Name is shown in the outliner tree for brevity. I will perhaps add a configuration to reorganise the tree in different ways later. That is a good idea.

Stephen, who develops Archipack, is a capable developer and it would be a good idea to collaborate.

As mentioned above, Blender itself technically can run on mobile (it’s a cool party trick!), but feels limited on a touchscreen and a slower processor. However, @ReD_CoDE you are absolutely correct that there are other technologies to view models already available. For example, I have got IFC models into the free and open-source Godot game engine (as an alternative to Unity) which can be run on any platform, including mobile, and put into an executable to distribute to clients. It is also trivial to get the IFC model onto the web, which I have also done with some optimisation and conversion using Blender. This also works with WebVR. This is all speaking from first-hand experience delivering these outputs.