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FreeCAD BIM update 26

by Yorik on 16.11.2024 in freecad , opensource , nativeifc

Hi all,

Small update this week to describe some more work done with FreeCAD and BIM:

Release 1.0 RC4 candidate

FreeCAD release 1.0 is almost there, we are ironing out the few remaining issues, and there is a final release candidate out for you to test! If all goes well and no further major bugs are found, the final release is scheduled to happen next week. Expect announcements everywhere

Project manager tool refactor

screenshot of FreeCAD showing the project manager screen

As part of my NativeIFC roadmap was the refactor of the BIM Project Manager tool. It now basically supports both non-IFC projects, like before, but also NativeIFC projects. In addition, you can now also use it to edit existing projects. This, however, only works with IFC projects, since for non-IFC projects, as otherwise the concept of a "project" does not really exist.

What you can now do with the project manager:

  • Setup classical (non-IFC) BIM projects, by defining site or building properties, the number of levels, etc. Once that is done, however, you cannot use the project manager to modify the different elements (site, building, levels...). You must modify these elements yourself.

  • Setup a hybrid (unlocked) IFC project. The options are the same as above, only the result will be a NativeIFC project with all the contents you defined in the manager.

  • Setup a locked NativeIFC project. Same as above, but the document starts locked

  • Edit a NativeIFC project: Either use the manager when working on a locked project, or, if this is an unlocked project, with the project selected. This is still a work in progress, though, so not every everything is already editable. Site and building data are, building outline items (rectangle, axes...) not yet.

I still see the project manager as a helper to start something structured for IFC, though, so I suppose editing it is less interesting, since once the project is started it is easy and more comfortable to edit the individual elements directly, rather than coming back to a setup screen. But future will tell us if people start using it for that purpose and if so it can be extended further.

Building structure elements now use the BuildingPart viewprovider

screenshot showing level labels

This is a simple but interesting change, building structure IFC elements such as IfcBuilding or IfcBuildingStorey now make use of the BuildingPart view provider. This is an interesting problem, because it allowed me to play with multiple inheritances (the view provider in this case inherits both from the IFC view provider and the BuildingPart view provider). The resutl is an object that has both the IFC aspect and behaviours (ex: drag-and-drop support) and the BuildingPart behaviours (ability to display a label ,etc).

This paves the way for further harmonizing of IFC and non-IFC BIM elements in FreeCAD, so both can look and behave the same.

This is part of this Pull Request which is still int he queue for post-1.0 merges.

That´s it for this edition, thank you once again to everybody who sponsors my FreeCAD BIM work on Patreon, LiberaPay or GitHub!

Cheers

Yorik

by Yorik on 16.11.2024 in freecad , opensource , nativeifc

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