IFC conversion

[Hugo]

IFC conversion.

 

An engineer I work with became very enthusiastic about FORMZ (downloaded last week trial) to work with. BUT.... he got questions from building contractors and government to deliver IFC information. The same in my business.

Now he doubt to buy the FMZ software. That's a pity.

 

[jonmoore]

IFC conversion.

 

An engineer I work with became very enthusiastic about FORMZ (downloaded last week trial) to work with. BUT.... he got questions from building contractors and government to deliver IFC information. The same in my business.

Now he doubt to buy the FMZ software. That's a pity.

 

I agree that there needs to be some kind of handling for IFC data in FormZ but i think this needs to be broken down into the two core aspects of IFC.

 

- BIM data

- Geometric data

 

The geometric aspect is easily handled as there's a great open source initiative I highlighted once before called IFCOpenShell and this has been used to create geometric converters for both 3ds Max and Blender (I've successfully used it on many occasions now).

 

http://ifcopenshell.org/index.html

 

I'm hoping the AutoDesSys develop a plugin themselves using this freely available SDK at some point in the future.

 

As for the BIM data, I think both Vectorworks and Sketchup are leading the way here by allowing their users to include IFC BIM datasets with their models without attempting to compete with the specialist BIM tools such as Revit, Bentley and Archicad. This seems a very sensible approach. It stops BIM workflows from impacting the freeform nature of modeling within Sketchup/Vectorworks but allows the BIM data to carry over via IFC.

 

Yet again I think it's vital that AutoDesSys address this in a future update. Especially considering such are large part of the FormZ user base work in Architectural fields.