A significant amount of people think about Blender as a 3D modeler and platform to render realistic images to visualize your designs. It can help a lot in this regard, but that is only part of the role it can assume in architecture. With the help of Add-pons like BlenderBIM, you can expand Blender and include authoring and document BIM data. That opens a world of possibilities for Blender to have a full open-source workflow.
When using the BlenderBIM Add-on, you can create IFC files in compliance with ISO standards. A new version released recently has about 50 new features and fixes!
Opening Design Aalseth Residence team – CC BY-SA 4.0
Here is a list of the new features and bug fixes from version v0.0.201207:
- Add support for IFC2X3 material data imports
- Vendor workaround for “treat styled item as material” now deprecated, as new material and style system is much better
- Add support for importing IFC material description and category attributes
- Native element roundtripping now supports layer assignments
- Native representation roundtripping now auto-fixes representations that aren’t using contexts properly
- Improved packaging and refactoring for BIMTester makes it easier for other devs, including FreeCAD integration
- Native geometry roundtripping now decouples surface styles
- Native geometry roundtripping now lets you change styles independently from geometry
- New experimental utility to upgrade IFC2X3 to IFC4 and downgrade IFC4 to IFC2X3 automatically
- Native geometry roundtripping now works across different IFC versions, so you can roundtrip and change the schema at the same time
- Exporting classifications to different IFC schemas (including graceful downgrading) is now supported
- Support graceful downgrading of material definitions from IFC4 to IFC2X3
- Support built-in vendor workaround for importing invalid IFC properties coming from ArchiCAD
- Roundtripping geometry now works for geometry, which has one too many relationships between geometry and styles
- Handle and gracefully accept invalid IfcGrid elements coming from Revit. Sigh.
- New experimental support for Non-IFC, Blender object clash detection
- IfcOpeningElements now only show as wireframes by default for convenience
- Roundtripping now enables openings by default, which works much better with the latest Blender boolean modifier
- The object property sets panel now also shows inherited psets from the construction type
- Improved UI for psets and qtos with collapsible panels and improved readability
- New UI that shows inherited materials from the construction type if available
- Add support for exporting material sets for construction types
- All representation contexts are now round-tripped in native roundtrip mode, not just the body context.
- New powerful and intuitive smart clash grouping feature
- The Optimise IFC patch recipe is now packaged with the BlenderBIM Add-on
- The ExtractElements IFC patch recipe is now packaged with the BlenderBIM Add-on, letting you extract a subset of elements from a larger IFC file
- Dumb grids are now auto placed in an IfcSite if it can detect one
- Drawings now have classes for material layer set names
- Improved usage descriptions for IFCCSV to help new users
- You can now smart tag material attributes in drawings
- New utility function to check is_a() in the schema without needing a file first
- Auto-add the currently loaded IFC when creating a drawing for the first time
- You can now apply drawing styles to elements with material set usages
- New vendor workaround for exporting to the DESITE BIM application
- The Migrate IFC patch recipe is now packaged with the BlenderBIM Add-on, letting you upgrade or downgrade IFC versions
- IFCs with invalid attributes are now gracefully exported with warnings when exporting to a schema which doesn’t allow it to let the user fix it easily
- You can now bake parametric geometry into meshes
And the bug fixes:
- Fix bug where no color is set if only a styled item has a style, but the material has no representation
- Fix default category to none, not load-bearing, in case we import IFC2X3 where this property doesn’t exist
- Fix bug where the material wouldn’t get assigned for multiple mapped representations
- Fix warnings in copy attribute to the selection tool
- Fix import bug where some IfcOpeningElements aren’t placed in the correct openings collection
- Fix regression where the section cutting plane doesn’t work unless you’ve selected an object
- Fix bug where a drawing can’t be created with a file that uses material set usages
- Fix issue where invalidly declared representation contexts from other vendors can confuse drawing creation
- Fix bug where sometimes the IFC class and product dropdowns get out of sync
- Fix import bug where duplicate material names with accents fail to import
- Fix bug where some aggregates can cause drawing generation to fail
- Fixed example script in the IfcOpenShell Qt GUI viewer
- Fix bug where spatial elements didn’t get styles exported correctly
