Presenting Blender as a new IFC authoring tool

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Update time!

  • Importing IFCs now have improved mesh reuse and optimisations on shape creation leading to much faster imports! Also some bugfixes thanks to @Hans_Lammerts
  • New interface to assign documents to IFC objects
  • New interface to assign classification systems (Uniclass / Omniclass) to IFC objects
  • IFC importing now also imports object attributes
  • Bugfix in BIMTester to run and re-run multiple test suites
  • IFC COBie packaged with minor bugfixes
  • Experimental gbXML export now supports creating openings, as well as some bugfixes
  • New IFC Diff tool (basically git diff for IFC files) - this allows you to take two different IFC files and it will compare them and tell you what changed. It will tell you if geometry has changed, or
    attributes, and also the previous value of the attribute and the new value of the attribute. It writes it out to a json file which can be visualised with BlenderBIM so you can overlay changed models.
  • New experimental sectioning tool to create construction documentation. You can cut sections direct from IFC files and create view hatching / line weight stylesheets with CSS which can be mass applied across objects. Objects are smart vectors, so unlike other documentation tools, 2D documentation have SVG classes applied so each object knows the IFC GlobalId, material, and IFC class.
  • New interface to create, edit, and save IFC aggregates
  • Import now supports curves, so you can import survey point geometry that might come from 12D, for example.
  • Export now supports Blender curve objects, not just mesh objects, so you can do profile extrusions along vector curves and export them
  • A whole bunch of geometry processing fixes in the underlying IfcOpenShell library by @aothms (which are quite technical but it looks like a great job! :slight_smile: )

I am very happy to announce that we are now using Blender for very basic construction documentation on real projects! It is still highly experimental and has no interface for the public to use yet, but it’s a start!

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