Bonsai new release!

E by erfizt on 21 Mar 2021 #

@Moult thanks it's work very well. :-) But, where is "Add Opening" menu? I only find Clean Wireframes, Link IFC etc

M by Moult on 21 Mar 2021 #

@erfizt openings have been moved into the "IFC Voids" panel in the object properties tab.

E by erfizt on 21 Mar 2021 #

I think I still love Blender 2.82 with my old computer and blenderbim 200912 so much :-) It's really work well for me

M by Moult on 26 Mar 2021 # +7 votes

A heads up that I have updated the roadmap: https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=BlenderBIM_Add-on_Roadmap#The_current_roadmap and changelog https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=BlenderBIM_Add-on_Changelog for those interested.

M by Moult on 4 Apr 2021 # +19 votes

BlenderBIM Add-on v0.0.210404 has been released with 100 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support the BlenderBIM Add-on: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://blenderbim.org/

This release focuses on further stabilisation and maturing of the new native authoring paradigm, to get back to building cool new features, now with a better foundation in place.

Users will notice a ton of bug fixes and UX improvements - the biggest being that authoring geometric aspects of an IFC was previously a real pain in the neck, as you had to keep track of all your changes, but now the basics are back in place and manual IFC syncing is no longer necessary. Note that authoring in general is still immature ... we're on it, I promise! Authoring pset templates and geolocation now is also much more fun. More tools can also operate in bulk, so you don't need to do things one by one.

However if you're a dev this release is pretty awesome because so many utilities have been improved with a new Blender-agnostic API, where anybody can easily automate and author IFCs with a high-level API. Even if you're not a dev, you've probably noticed preliminary, but rapidly growing support for more modules, like managing groups, structural analysis models, construction sequencing work plans, and cost schedules. Yep - the under-the-hood makes a big difference! If you're a poweruser or dev you'll also love the new automatic conversions of meshes to solids, so you get the best of both geometry paradigms and better integration with solid-based BIM apps! Oh, and of course, check out the new daily developer builds to keep up with the rabbit, uh, rapid changes!

A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry.

M by Moult on 4 Apr 2021 # +12 votes

New features:

During local <-> global coordinate conversions you can easily get and set the 3D cursor
New documentation written for IfcPatch
Meshes are auto updated in the IFC when you export, so you don't need to explicitly update mesh representations
Changing the name of a Blender object now also changes the IFC name
Aggregate creations when importing large files is now faster
Rebuild pset template authoring UI to be way less confusing and match the UX paradigm of other modules
IfcOpenShell now has preliminary support for IDS (thanks aothms!)
You can now automagically convert meshes into rectangular solid extrusions
You can now automagically convert meshes into circular profile solid extrusions
You can now automagically convert meshes into arbitrary profile solid extrusions
You can now automagically convert meshes into arbitrary profile with voids solid extrusions
BIMTester now supports both MicroMVD features or IDS for your BIM audit specifications
New module to integrate with Augin to easily upload your IFCs into an augmented reality (AR) platform!
Experimental gizmo for changing parametric extrusion depths (thanks qwiglydee!)
You can now reassign classes in bulk
Minor usability fix to denote if a pset has no properties set
Powerusers can now toggle hiding of null / empty properties
Nullness auto-toggles when editing properties. Neat. One less click! (thanks BIMVoice for the suggestion!)
We ship IfcConvert with the add-on now.
IFC drawings now store camera extents as IfcBlock. Note: still experimental.
You can now view, add, edit, and remove IFC groups.
You can assign and unassign products to IFC groups.
The "Allow non-element aggregates" workaround for ProStructures is now deprecated. It's handled automagically.
Materials will now distinguish between IfcMaterialLayerSet and IfcMaterialLayerSetUsage
Experimental support for Python 3.9 for those on custom or alpha builds of Blender 2.93 and above.
Add support for square and cubic decimetre units.
You can now add IfcMaterialLayerSetUsage to elements
You can now reorder items in a material layer, constituent, or profile set
You can now case insensitively search for psets, properties, and attribute names
Automatic daily Blender developer builds are now available on Github for those who don't want to wait for stable releases for features / fixes (thanks krande!)
You can now unlink objects and styles of elements that you've lost the original IFC of, to recover broken files
You can now bulk assign / unassign construction types
Upgrade / uninstall instructions are now provided in the add-on preferences UI to prevent users running into half upgraded issues
Adding drawings now creates the necessary groups and psets, with an experimental integration with IfcConvert. Note: highly experimental and incomplete!
Add support for nano and micro metre units. Who are these people using these units anyway? What is this, a house for ants?
Reimplement support for creating structural curve representations
You can now import structural curve members (again)
You can now author (add / edit / remove / assign / unassign) structural analysis models (thanks Jesusbill!)
You can now delete objects in bulk
Experimental operator to do efficient deep purges for devs, if stable, will result in way faster object deletions in a future release (thanks aothms!)
The IFC Debug inspector now also shows inverse references, great for debugging IFC2X3 files or style relationships for example
You can now import structural curve connections (thanks Jesusbill!)
Structural entities during import now don't spam spatial tree warnings (thanks Jesusbill!)
Object placements are now updated on export automatically in case you forgot to sync them in authoring mode
You can now import structural point connections
Structural elements are now organised in collections (thanks Jesusbill!)
ExtractElements IfcPatch recipe now retains aggregation relationships
Swept solids are now natively handled again during imports for faster rebar imports
You can now view / add / edit / remove structural boundary conditions for connections points
Improve usability to run IfcPatch recipes without typing in arguments
BCF now documents its requirements.txt file for devs (thanks TestPrab!)
You can now import and export IfcCSV with the current active IFC in memory without first writing to disk. Nice. Bulk editing!
You can now view structural member connections (thanks Jesusbill!)
New utility function for getting primitive data types of attributes for devs
Brand new ifcopenshell.api for devs. Basically, now you can easily automate any behaviour in the add-on via your own scripts. Also, you can use the entire capabilities of the add-on without even needing Blender.
Upon export, it now synchronises any objects you've deleted from your scene, so you can just do regular Blender deletes instead of pressing the "X" button
You can now select objects in the viewport from the IFC Debug Inspector via their GlobalID. (thanks ihabelaghoury!)
Ownership history tracking is now implemented in roughly half of the operations now. Getting closer towards full coverage, where we can then start tackling version control!
OCC is no longer loaded on startup, to prevent clashes with other add-ons.
You can now edit structural boundary conditions on member connections themselves. (thanks Jesusbill!)
You can now add and remove work plans for construction sequencing. (thanks bosonprojets and Jesusbill!)
You can now remove structural connection conditions (thanks Jesusbill!)
You can now add new structural connections to members
Point connections are now supported as proper entities with a placement and vertex, instead of a special empty object (thanks Jesusbill!)
A reference graph view is now auto created for convenience when creating a structural analysis model
You can now view, add, and remove cost schedules.
Geolocation utilities now supports converting either X or Y axes for checking grid north vs true north vectors
You can now get and set true north rotation independently of grid north

M by Moult on 4 Apr 2021 # +15 votes

New fixes:

Fix bug where selecting high polygon meshes for debugging fails
Fix bug where Blender offsets were not considered in local <-> global coordinate conversions
Fix bug where cursor was not placed in the right unit after a local <-> global coordinate conversion
Fix bug where undo operations might invalidate the internal ID map and break everything
Fix regression where IFC files were loaded twice during import. What a waste.
Fix bug where properties which IfcCountMeasure data types and similar were not editable
Fix bug where existing Blender offsets weren't used when importing two offset models consecutively. This helps with model federation.
Fix bug where you could add psets of the same name multiple times
Fix bug where you couldn't do import profiling on Windows. (thanks erab!)
Fix bug where sometimes cartesian point offsets wouldn't get correctly detected for poorly geolocated files.
Fix bug where nested aggregates failed to import
Fix bug where material / style UI was showing without a loaded IFC
Fix bug where assigning new constituent or profiles to a material set was broken
Fix bug where you couldn't assign a window or door type
Fix bug where loading pset templates makes it unable to install on Windows
Fix bug where you couldn't add layers to a fresh project
Fix bug on Windows where sometimes the body representation wouldn't be loaded by default
Fix bug where the iterator might not not know if a geometric set was 2D or 3D (thanks aothms!)
Fix bug where quantities couldn't be extracted in IFCCSV (thanks plaes!)
Fix fundamental bug in utilities where coordinate placements were not correctly resolved
Fix bug where nested aggregates were not nested in the scene during import
Fix bug where getting applicable psets didn't work on subsequent calls (thanks CyrilWaechter!)
Fix bug in BCF where it treated project data as mandatory instead of optional, leading to failed BCF loading
Fix bug in BIMTester where it doesn't run if you have multiple drives on Windows (thanks rbertucat!)
Fix fatal bug where languages were not bundled with the add-on so you couldn't even run BIMTester
Fix bug in IfcCSV where the delimiter was not specified correctly for non-English locales
Fix bug where you couldn't set logical properties in psets.
Fix bug where IFCXML support was seemingly not enabled. (thanks aothms!)
Fix bug where the IFC schema had a typo which made it impossible to add IfcTransformers
Fix bug where you couldn't even add IFC type instances for IFC4. Nasty.
Fix bug where assigning a spatial container didn't also update the object placement tree
Fix bug where Blender loses precision for geolocation metadata.

S by stephen_l on 4 Apr 2021 # +1 votes

Add support for nano and micro metre units. Who are these people using these units anyway? What is this, a house for ants?

Layer thickness for things like metals or paintings i guess.

C by c4rlosdias on 4 Apr 2021 #

Yes!!!!!

C by c4rlosdias on 4 Apr 2021 #

is Shift+E no longer needed?

M by Moult on 4 Apr 2021 # +1 votes

@c4rlosdias For moving objects, or editing meshes, or deleting objects, I believe you no longer require Shift-E. It should sync whenever you press export. It hasn't been battle-tested though.

If you change collections, you will still need to either update the spatial container via Shift-E or via the Object Properties.

E by erfizt on 6 Apr 2021 # +1 votes

Wow, that's amazing update

P by pstrokap on 15 Apr 2021 #

I'm having an issue with IFC Property Set Templates. I think it did work before but after I updated the addon I keep getting an error message and have no idea what is going on.

D by duncan on 15 Apr 2021 #

@pstrokap have you manually deleted the old add-in from the blender folder? I know there have been upgrade problem that get solved by doing that.

P by pstrokap on 16 Apr 2021 #

@duncan Yes, also tried a new Blender install but still the same message

M by Moult on 17 Apr 2021 #

@pstrokap my apologies, I have fixed it: https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/commit/3e1eb9648fc20c0fef21977ac09d74ffab054955

P by pstrokap on 17 Apr 2021 #

@Moult That’s fantastic, thanks Dion. Now I have something to do this weekend...

S by slaw on 27 May 2021 #

Hi, I'm having an another issue with IFC during export.

M by Moult on 28 May 2021 #

Hi @slaw, which version? It looks like you have no IFC file.

S by slaw on 29 May 2021 #

Hello Dion.

Blender 2.92.

Your BlenderBIM I tried builds 210404 and 210517 for Windows.

What do You mean "no IFC file" ?

M by Moult on 30 May 2021 # +1 votes

@slaw my guess is you are simply using a Blender file and pressing export. This is not quite right - you need to have an active IFC project before you can export. Either import from an existing IFC dataset, or create a new one in the scene properties panel. Only then will you be able to export. IFC is not the same as other formats where you can start from a blank file and it'll export. Instead, you need to have an active IFC dataset in your scene properties.

To help future users from seeing this meaningless error message, I've added this commit: https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/commit/c041dd13ad7dfd993935e26d630abd57b915f3f9

S by slaw on 31 May 2021 #

Hello Dion. I tried to move a bit of the 3D terrain map from Google maps.

Apparently, these are not IFC elements, because trying to export them further to an IFC file, I get the error as above.

THX a lot for help.

M by Moult on 31 May 2021 #

@slaw that's right - only IFC elements can be exported to IFC. You can create a new IFC project, then convert your map into an IFC element.

A by Ace on 2 Jun 2021 #

@slaw said:

Hello Dion. I tried to move a bit of the 3D terrain map from Google maps.

Apparently, these are not IFC elements, because trying to export them further to an IFC file, I get the error as above.

THX a lot for help.

I tried this this morning as well,

since it's just a big mesh of shiz and there is no IfcTopology class I categorized it as an IfcElement and as "IfcCivilElement", it came into SketchUp ok but I haven't loaded it into a real BIM program

I'm still earning about the IFC classifications and not sure if it would work as an IfcSpatialElement better and categorized as IfcSite

S by stephen_l on 2 Jun 2021 # +1 votes

Maybe IfcGeographicElement with TERRAIN as predefined type.