FreeCAD BIM weekly update 11

Hi all!

Here is the eleventh weekly update (a couple of days late, sorry!) showing what I am doing this week with BIM and NativeIFC in FreeCAD. As we are approaching a new FreeCAD release, I began to work on fixing more general FreeCAD issues. But we still have some new NativeIFC stuff too!

  • NativeIFC: Show geometry tree: Importer IFC objects now have a new "Show geometry tree" context menu option. This option pops up a dialog window that shows the geometry decomposition of that object. This has no direct utility when you are modelling, but can be very useful for debugging, and also to learn the internals of how IFC objects are constructed. You can also of course use this from Python. commit

screenshot of FreeCAD showing a geometry tree dialog

  • NativeIFC: Expose IFC property sets: You can now right-click any IFC object, and choose the new "Expand IFC property sets" option. Alternatively, you can also mark the "load property sets" option on the import dialog. When choosing that option, property sets attached to an IFC object appear in the properties panel of the object. At the moment, you can change the value of a property, which will correctly change the IFC file. However, the owner history of that object is not changed, I'm not sure it needs to, and you still cannot add new properties or new property sets. I'm not too sure how to handle this yet, as we might want to allow adding or even bulk-adding default psets like Pset_WallCommon automatically. I guess we'll go step by step and first allow to add new properties commit

screenshot of FreeCAD showing imported Psets

That's it for this week I guess! As always, thanks to everybody who sponsors me on Patreon, LiberaPay or GitHub!