i assume the strings you used (like "ifc_assembly_element") are not really strings in your code, right? they should be actual IfcOpenShell objects.
I am not sure if you can add several objects in one go. Maybe you need to run the API command several times. But it should even so add the subsequent objects to the same IfcRelAcgregates.
@yorik said:
i assume the strings you used (like "ifc_assembly_element") are not really strings in your code, right? they should be actual IfcOpenShell objects.
I am not sure if you can add several objects in one go. Maybe you need to run the API command several times. But it should even so add the subsequent objects to the same IfcRelAcgregates.
Yes, they're not string but IFC elements, I managed to make it work but I get some strange behaviour. It only aggregates the last IFC element in the for loop and why I load it in BlenderBIM. Maybe I should make a different thread about it.
Dev new 9: https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-016-freecad-weekly9
NativeIFC: Default project structure: When you create a new project from scratch using the BIM Project tool, you will now see a dialog asking if you also wish to create a default project structure (Site, Building and Storey) under it. Note that this is not strictly mandatory by the IFC specs, you can very well have a flat file where all objects are simply related to a (mandatory) IfcProject. However, this site -> building -> storey structure is considered by many BIM applications as a standard. Your choice! ;) commit
NativeIFC: Better attributes handling: I reenabled the display of non-link attributes (those that don't link to other IFC entities) by default when importing a file, as it seems to me they cannot change the geommetry or affect other objects so they should be safe for now, but this needs to be explored further. The "Description" property contents will also now show in the "Descriptipn" column of the FreeCAD tree view. commit
NativeIFC: Support for IfcSpaces: Spaces are now handled, displayed in the tre view when importing the project structure or expanding the children of an object. You can also add objects to an IfcSpace. The shape of IfcSpaces is shown in wireframe mode in the 3D view when the shape is loaded. In coin mode, you don't see anything in the 3D view (for now... better ideas are welcome). commit
NativeIFC: Loading of orphan objects: An IFC file might contain objects that are not related to an IFC project. This is not standard, but it is still used around and might even actually be a useful thing, for example in Work-In-Progress files where it was not clear to the author what would become of a certain object. In the import dialog, there is now an option to import these "orphan" objects. They will be placed into a special group under the project object. This feature is not complete yet, because we still need to permit people to add their own objects to that group. commit - issue
NativeIFC: First steps towards geometry edition: This is probably the most exciting feature of the lot: The ability to edit IFC objects. This is still an experiment to see if this is a valid path to follow, but it's proving really interesting so far. Basically, objects gained a new "expand geometry properties" right-click menu option. When that option is clicked, a new "Geometry" property group is created, and a few properties are added to it tha allow to edit the geometry. So far, you can edit the extrusion depth and direction of extruded objects, and length and width of their profile, if that profile is a rectangle. This works really well for Arch walls and structures (rectangular beams and columns). I'll add more types on the way. There is more to iron out too, such as updating the object history. And later on, of course, we should integrate all this in an edit mode and implement tools to edit these values graphically. But I think this is a pretty interesting start. commit
FreeCAD BIM weekly update 10
weekly update 11 from https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-018-freecad-weekly11
@yorik
Looks cool! this kind of UI lends its better for displaying information of an IFC than BlenderBIM in my opinion.
Are you going to integrate IFC git in FreeCAD next? :-)
What's the drawing generation status of FreeCAD with native IFC at the moment?
Are you going to integrate IFC git in FreeCAD next? :-)
It's not in my immediate plans (also because we already have something similar in the WebTools addon), but of course keeping an eye on it ;)
What's the drawing generation status of FreeCAD with native IFC at the moment?
The current BIM workflow still works with NativeIFC models. So you can still create plans, sections, dimension and annotate and everything the normal way. Only, those things are not part of the NativeIFC model. But the plan is of course to integrate that too, and I also want to test using IfcOpenShell to generate the 2D views
Updates of this week from https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-019-freecad-weekly12
FreeCAD: release 0.21: As you might have seen in the mass media on social networks, we are preparing a new release of FreeCAD, which will be labeled 0.21. Hopefully, that's the last one before the big 1.0. We wanted this one to be 1.0 already, but it's better to do this the right way and given things the time they need than trying to stick to a predefined plan. After this 0.21 release, we will start merging toponaming code that can affect FreeCAD performance too, so it also makes sense to have a stable version now. The release date will depend on many factors, but we estimate it should be ready in about one month from now. announcement - help us!
NativeIFC: support for doors and windows: You can now create windows and doors from scratch in FreeCAD and add them to a NativeIFC project. The workflow is the same as other NativeIFC-ready objects, you create a window or a door using usual BIM or Arch tools, then you drag and drop it onto a wall. Simple as that! An opening will be generated automatically and the necessary relationships added to the IFC document. If you use other tools than Arch/BIM to model your window, make sure it has a "Subvolume" property pointing to a shape object that defines the opening volume otherwise no opening will be created in the host object. commit
NativeIFC: editing openings: When expanding individual IFC objects, windows and doors are shown embedded into their parent object (typically a wall). When expanding the children of that wall, both the opening element (which creates the "subtraction" in the wall) and the window or door that fits ito it get revealed. So we now have a possibility to edit the opening too, by moving it together with the window, or changing its extrusion parameters if it is extruded. commit
FreeCAD: Misc fixes: I also did a couple more BIM-related fixes in FreeCAD:
Update from https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-020-freecad-weekly13 :
There is a lot of information that needs to be loaded from an IFC file, that is not geometry, for example materials, types, layers, etc... that should be organised inside the IFC project, that should be visible and manageable by the user, at times, but that should also not otherwise pollute your project tree.
All this data is loaded only when you request it (when marking the appropriate checkboxes on the import dialog or by right-clicking an object in the tree) and placed into those hidden groups. You can show them by right-clicking the project and choosing "show hidden items". There is also a preference option under Edit -> Preferences -> I/O -> NativeIFC to have these groups shown by default.
There is, together with this point above, a whole lot of new functionality in NativeIFC that is, at the moment, loosely gathered under the right-click context menu of objects. This is obviously not ideal, and is highly temporary. Simply, putting these things there at the moment is easy programming-wise as all the "UI" stuff is self-contained and in one place.
Obviously, we will need to better think to the UI later on. Ideally, I'd like all these tools to simply vanish, and the needed functionality to be expanded automatically and transparently while you work. I'll start experimenting with that soon.
By right-clicking any object, you could already select "show geometry tree" and pop up a dialog window showing the geometry composition of that object. Since geometry can be constructed in a lot of different ways in IFC, this is useful info. Now, that dialog shows a side panel that allows you to select geometric components and modify some of their properties.
This is a work in progress, one step further in exploring possibly smart ways to edit IFC geometry without creating a ton of FreeCAD objects and keeping large models responsive, and might change more in the future. But it's amazing to see how revealing properties like these allows in terms of geometry editing.
And of course, once the "problem" is expressed in properties, the whole UI question next, that is, how to edit these properties graphically, gets much easier to solve. I think we are on a good path there.
Another important item on our list is now done: materials. You can now load all the materials from an IFC file at once, or right-click any object and load its materials. Materials are then stored into one of the hidden groups I described above, and linked to a "Material" property of the object. Within the BIM workbench, you can also create and manage materials the standard way, with the materials manager, and attribute those materials with the same material manager, as if it were a classic, non-NativeIFC material. Under the hood, when attributing a non-NativeIFC to a NativeIFC object, the material gets converted to NativeIFC.
So the basic system is now working, you can view, create and manipulate materials. There are more refinements needed, such as supporting material properties, and probably a better UI workflow, but I guess we need to test a bit how things work now to know better.
The current Type property is confusing. Soon we will implement types (families) support. So better change now than later. So from now on, the object type (IfcWall, IfcWindow, etc) is called class.
You can now drag an IFC element and drop it onto a building or storey, everything gets handled and reorganized smartly. It was actually already possible, but I just checked different scenarios to make sure it works
This is not fully working yet because it needs changes in FreeCAD, but you can now right-click a building structure object, like a building or storey, and make it active. When an object is active, it is highlighted in the tree, and when you create a new object it will automatically be added to it.
Right now you can already mark an object as active, and when the PR is merged, all new BIM objects will automatically be added to it.
IFC objects can have different representations. For example, a wall can have a 3D shape and a 2D shape that is used in plan view (not sed/implemented yet in FreeCAD/NativeIFC, but we'll get there). Another representation type that is very useful, is an axis representation, which is a simple line that describe the object. So far, only the walls used it, but it's also commonly used for stucrtural elements like bams and columns. Now this is also supported in FreeCAD.
I reworked a couple of less polished parts of the NativeIFC code, and now each and every action that touches the IFC document (excepting creating new IFC representations, which still use the Arch IFC export code), use the IfcOpenShell API. Besides the increased stability and reliance on IfcOpenShell, it also has the side effect that we always know when the internal IFC file has changed. So we now have a much more reliable way to know that, and we can think of automatic operations such as writing the changes on the fly, or later on plugging to other management systems like Git.
A few screencapture of latest features :D
@yorik would consider to use the IFC Representation dialog box table on the right to edit the properties?
@yorik would consider to use the IFC Representation dialog box table on the right to edit the properties?
Yes, you can already, but I'm not sure how good a workflow that is. Certainly we can do something better. Consider this preliminary, until we find something better ;)
@yorik said:
@yorik would consider to use the IFC Representation dialog box table on the right to edit the properties?
Yes, you can already, but I'm not sure how good a workflow that is. Certainly we can do something better. Consider this preliminary, until we find something better ;)
Hmmm, I tested with IFC Schependomlaan.if, seems e.g. I can change the ELEVATION attribute from +1000 to +1500
But changing the CompositionType is not working...
Indeed not everything works just yet... Normally all numerical values should work already, plus pure text like name, description, ...
@yorik and/or @bitacovir Wondering if name of this thread should add Native-IFC
e.g. - " [FreeCAD BIM + Native-IFC] development news by Yorik " ? :D
And combining thread - " [FreeCAD] Soon also with Native IFC support? like BlenderBIM " ?
Not sure we can change the title anymore... Also this thread comes from well before NativeIFC.
Maybe time to start a fresh new thread? :)
Indeed, it seems there is limitation in time to edit a post :) Probably bitacovir can't revise the topic now.
New update from https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-021-freecad-weekly14
The NativeIFC add-on now has support for groups. This works basically the same way as in the rest of FreeCAD: You can add groups inside your IFC project, and add objects to these groups. To add a group, right-click any IFC object in the tree, and choose "Create group". To add an object to a group, just drag and drop it into it.
There is one catch, though: Groups work the same way as other FreeCAD groups: They behave like other FreeCAD objects. You can add groups inside other objects or structures, but if you add an object to a group, that object cannot be part of another group or structure. This kinds of forces a strict "tree-like" structure.
In IFC, however, groups are a much looser structure. You still keep a strict structure using building containers like storeys or buildings, but any object can be attached to any group, and groups don't need to live inside a structure.
We could do it that way too, but then our IFC groups would not look like FreeCAD groups anymore, they would become a separate, loose structure on the side and not interfere with the building structure.
I like the former one, because I've got used to work that way in FreeCAD and use groups a lot to organize things, for example inside a storey. But I understand this is not the way most people use groups within IFC. So this is a point that still needs some debate I think.
What's your opinion? Do you use IFC groups? How? I'd be interested to know.
Property sets attached to materials are now properly handled by the NativeIFC module.
I seem to have gone (maybe too?) fast and stacked a lot of things in ifc_tools module. This has been working fine up to now, but I begin to meet some bottlenecks. Mainly, the overall complexity begins to pose different problems:
The overall performance is becoming hard to control. It is hard to see where the slowdowns and bottlenecks are.
Each new feature supported by the NativeIFC brings a new layer of complexity, that must be applied on several parts of the code, which is slowly getting out of control. We need a better plan to handle these complexity increases.
There is more and more "stuff" outside the IFC project structure itself: materials, layers, groups... And there will be much more in the future. We need to think of a better system to properly and beautifully handle these.
So I've started working on a big code refactor, separating code into easier-to-handle structures, and also designing a better structure to accommodate future expansion. Right now there is not much to see yet, the main piece committed is the separation of all shape-generation code into a separate ifc_generator module. So the situation is mow much clearer: FreeCAD objects use this module whenever they need their shape to be calculated or updated, and that's it, nowhere else in the NativeIFC module is a shape recalculation initiated. So when measuring file load performance that's now the only place to look at.
I've also added a quick-and-dirty performance test that gives the performance data at the end of the README. I'll try to maintain these performance numbers updated and more under control form now on.
The forthcoming 0.21 release of FreeCAD is coming, we are coming to the end of what we call the "feature freeze" time, where we all concentrate on bug fixing. Most of the work is done, and outside a few leftovers we're close to ready for the release. Another important aspect we've been looking into is to better streamline and document the process of building the "official" release packages for the different platforms (Windows, MacOS and Linux).
Currently, weekly builds are all handled using the conda platform. Release builds too, for MacOS and Linux. Conda is a really interesting open-source, cross-platform system that gathers the capabilities of a build system and a package manager.
On Windows, though, the FreeCAD executable must be packaged into an installer, so there is an extra step, which is currently done manually, outside the conda platform.
We're trying to better document all this process, so others can help working on these packages, and also make the official FreeCAD installer packages more seamlessly installable.
Another issue we have is that main commercial platforms, basically Windows and MacOS, are increasingly trying to restrict the ability for users to install applications not coming from their own stores. More than often, users are nagged by "warning! You are trying to install an unsafe application!" dialogs when trying to install FreeCAD.
While we're also trying to bring FreeCAD on these stores, it is a pretty complex process which takes big amounts of time and money. So while we're still not there we are also trying to make the current FreeCAD packages a bit more recognized as safe by these platforms, by having them digitally signed. This is another complex problem that also takes a lot of research, as these platforms put a lot of conditions.
Is all this really bettering the security of these platforms? I have my doubts there, it seems much more like a commercial move to force application developers to use the stores, which generates big revenues (they take about 30% of the developer earnings, without having to do much). Anyway, we're decided to try to get FreeCAD there, as long as it does not harm the open and free nature of FreeCAD and does not cost us a fortune.
@paullee said:
Indeed, it seems there is limitation in time to edit a post :) Probably bitacovir can't revise the topic now.
The main topic is about Yorik's work on FreeCAD. You don't need to be so specific in the title.
Here is this week's update. No significant BIM/IFC contents because of the 0.21 release of FreeCAD, so I'll just post the link: https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-023-freecad-news-15
Can you make one 2D BIM workbenck to work like ARES Commander all to bim function
BIM Drawings Automation In https://www.graebert.com/cad-software/ares-commander/new-features/ for freecad 1.0 just to Generate floor plans from ifc and 2D fields export to pdf, annotate , draw 2d lines and text , highlight ifc element in some color etc.
@isain said:
Can you make one 2D BIM workbenck to work like ARES Commander all to bim function
BIM Drawings Automation In https://www.graebert.com/cad-software/ares-commander/new-features/ for freecad 1.0 just to Generate floor plans from ifc and 2D fields export to pdf, annotate , draw 2d lines and text , highlight ifc element in some color etc.
These are the current BIM FreeCAD goals for 1.0
(maybe a lot of work for one person)
BIM Goals for FreeCAD 1.0
I would like very much the 1.0 release of FreeCAD to be a killer release in the BIM area too. So I have this very (or not so much) ambitious goals in my mind:
- Unification of Arch, BIM and NativeIFC: If we want FreeCAD to be recognized as a mainstream BIM platform, BIM tools should be right there, simply, easily, included, no additional download required
- Solving of the IFC/non IFC dilemma: Users should be able to use the BIM tools without caring about IFC (for example in other workbenches). But if you work with IFC, everything should work seamlessly, the fact that you are in an IFC environment should be somehow, implicit.
- Refactor of the window tool: No comments on that one, I think everybody will agree..
- Moving the IFC export code to IfcOpenShell: This will give IfcOpenShell users much more power to create IFC contents from FreeCAD, which can only benefit the whole open BIM ecosystem.
IIRC ares commander is an autocad clone. FreeCAD is mostly focused on 3D. there are apps much more stitable for that, like librecad or qcad. That said, it is already totally possible to draft full 2D drawings with FreeCAD.
There is a video in Bim drawnings automation you can see what is an idea. Second ACad or Librecad workflow is general not so suitable for floor-plans I what thinking more like ARchicad so in this first goal add also basic 2d workbench but for arch not general (Unification of Arch, BIM and NativeIFC and 2d modul draw, annotate, paper selection(layouts ))
https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2023-024-hard-time
Sending major good vibes to you. Stay strong, @yorik .
I hope everything is going to be alright to your loved family member soon, good vibes to you and all your family members, @yorik. Tudo de bom para voces e muita saude!
Login or Register to reply.