OSArch Community

Welcome to the OSArch Community - Introduce yourself here.

  1. I by iosvarms on 7 Aug 2020 # +3 votes

    Hello Great Minds,

    I am Idowu (iD) and a Quantity Surveyor by training with about 15 years of practice on various private residential and public building projects in Nigeria. I love computers and developed interest in Python and R about 3 years ago. The search for a truly FOSS for a complete office workflow for the AEC took me down the path of FreeCAD and Blender. Unfortunately they are not suitable for Quantity Surveyors. In my opinion BlenderBIM should be the way to go as a one-stop-shop for OpenBIM within AEC. A great shout out to @Moult for this Add-on. He has a great mind and good spirit.

    I am glad to be here and hope to be useful in the development of OpenBIM. Thanks.

  2. M by Moult on 7 Aug 2020 #

    Welcome to the OSArch community @iosvarms ! Hopefully we can build all the necessary quantity surveying features you need!

  3. D by DADA_universe on 12 Aug 2020 #

    Welcome to the community, @iosvarms. I'm interested in knowing if you're already trying your hands at BlenderBIM and how well you seeing it fitting into your workflow for costing projects in Nigeria.

  4. D by duncan on 13 Aug 2020, edited 13 Aug 2020 #

    @iosvarms it should be possible to create a connection between an IFC file and Libreoffice Base for doing cost estimates. Feel free to start a new thread on the topic of quantity surveying where we can discuss options.

  5. I by iosvarms on 15 Aug 2020 #

    @DADA_universe Thanks. At the moment, it is difficult convincing management to explore BlenderBIM and it is not part of our workflow. Sadly, a few of my professional colleagues are not on-board with OpenBIM. But I believe a working demonstration is needed to get them interested.

  6. I by iosvarms on 15 Aug 2020 #

    @duncan I believe this should be possible. My actual intention before meeting @Moult was to parse .ifc files in Python and export to a spreadsheet for BOQ preparation. But the visualization with BlenderBIM seems more intuitive and appealing, also there is an export to csv in BlenderBIM so I dropped my intention.

    For cost estimating, you will need the following information per unit measurement or BOQ item;

    1. Unit rates for material, personnel, equipment

    2. Unit quantities for material,

    3. Unit man-hour for personnel, and

    4. Unit output-hour for equipment

    Profits, overheads and preliminaries are also required for good cost estimates

    I am not sure if these information can be gleaned from .ifc or if buildingSMART has this in IFC4, but I will try and check it out.

  7. M by Moult on 16 Aug 2020, edited 16 Aug 2020 # +1 votes

    @iosvarms IFC does indeed support BOQ data. It supports IfcCostSchedule and IfcCostItem. See diagram below.

    However, I don't know anybody who has implemented it.

    We can be the first. Go go go!

  8. B by brunopostle on 16 Aug 2020 # +11 votes

    @Moult said:

    @iosvarms IFC does indeed support BOQ data. It supports IfcCostSchedule and IfcCostItem. See diagram below.

    I thought "that's crazy, having pricing information inside a design file", but maybe this is what architects need: a big dollar value in the corner of the screen that keeps going up while they are designing, it could be animated with gold coins and a ka-ching noise ;)

  9. T by Than on 20 Aug 2020 # +7 votes

    Hello everyone!

    I'm a graduate student with MCAD's Sustainable Design program - currently residing in Portland, OR but formerly of Portland, ME. Glad to find this subject - and this project in particular - in my preliminary thesis research! I'm developing a project around anthromes, regenerative urbanism, and material culture and am making every effort to keep its development to resources that are forever FOSS. I'm enthused to have found this now because I won't really get into the thick of it for another year - which means I can hang around you lovely people and absorb everything I can while mulling around with tools. I anticipate developing algorithmic design resources through Animation Nodes / Everything Nodes that can help project workflow continuity, going from community mapping visuals right down to CNC files for productio - and hopefully not just for professionals but something suitable for students, community groups, makerspaces, etc.

    Anyway - good on you for putting this together - high time for FOSS dev in this arena!

  10. M by Moult on 20 Aug 2020 # +1 votes

    Welcome @Than ! It would be fascinating for us to help contribute to your research! Let us know is there is any way that we can!

  11. E by extremeandy on 21 Aug 2020 # +4 votes

    Hi everyone

    I'm Italian.

    I'm director of a technical IT consulting company.

    I'm a researcher who studies the application of the BIM methodology in order to guarantee the results of the built in the use and management phase.

    I believe that we need to take a step forward and leave the importance that is given to data, in order to create the culture necessary to deliver information.

    I have been following for some time the excellent work of Dion through the BIMvoice videos.

    I hope I can make my contribution to the community.

    Regards

    andrea

  12. D by duncan on 21 Aug 2020 #

    hi @extremeandy , welcome. I'd love to talk more about OpenBIM and libre software in the FM phase! Maybe you could start a fresh discussion in the forum with something specific. At the moment I'm looking into making MVDs for a basic handover for public sector housing projects here in Denmark - but let's keep that in it's own thread. Some of it is here: https://community.osarch.org/discussion/comment/2115

    I guess you've seen these: https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=AEC_Free_Software_directory#Facility_Management ? Maybe you could share your thought on them if you've used them.

  13. M by Moult on 22 Aug 2020 # +1 votes

    Welcome @extremeandy ! Clean data is extremely important in the FM phase. It would be excellent for us to help contribute to your work and work together to improve it for the entire industry!

  14. A by avnd on 31 Aug 2020 # +3 votes

    Hello everyone,

    I'm an architect from Paris, France. I'm working with a fellow architect and we are interested in developing alternative tools for the architectural practice. We just discovered BlenderBIM, which is full of promises! For now we're working with Rhino, and we were starting to look into VisualARQ. We'd love to switch to full opensource with Blender!

    Don't know if we can be of any help, we have some skills in web programming, and Ruby, we're quite new at Python :)

    Sadly we won't be available for the next monthly meeting, but we'll be happy to join on October!

    We're really happy to discover such a community!

  15. T by thejikz on 31 Aug 2020 # +1 votes

    Hey-

    I have just found this community, I have been a Blender Hobby user for 10+ years- and now run and operate blenderNPR.org

    In my professional life- I am a heavy Autodesk user, mainly Revit. I have used AutoCAD -Fabrication CadMEP for years however. I write C# for addons for Revit when needed, and am well versed in the Revit API. I am also a Journeyman Sheet Metal Worker at Local 66 with SMWIA (https://smart-union.org/). I started my career installing mechanical systems. I currently model Plumbing systems in Revit for field fabrication, and am utilizing spools and Trimble to achieve field installation.

    I am very interested in being a subject matter expert or help in some capacity as it pertains to fabrication level modelling and design utilizing BlenderBIM when it is prudent to do so.

    Cheers, good to meet you all!

    Lee P

  16. M by Moult on 31 Aug 2020 #

    @avnd welcome to the OSArch community! If you are well versed in web programming, perhaps you can help @Jesusbill with his online structural IFC viewer? Alternatively, @aothms is working on IFC-Pipeline, an IFC web viewer, that with some basic frontend knowledge could quite quickly turn it into a very attractive system. You are also free to help develop and/or maintain the OSArch.org website, forum, or wiki, or the BlenderBIM.org website - at the moment I am the only guy doing it and it would be good for other web guys to work with it too :)

    @thejikz Welcome! It sounds like you have exactly the skills to help work on the MEP side of the BlenderBIM Add-on. Is this something that interests you? Please play around and let us know what's broken and (even better) if you can help to fix it :)

  17. S by svmv on 3 Sep 2020 #

    Hello Everyone,

    My name is Victor, learning python, and blender. If there is anything i can help with more then happy too. Great community, gives me hope on a brighter future! :)

  18. M by Moult on 3 Sep 2020 #

    Welcome to the OSArch community @svmv! We hope you'll help us change the industry! It's very early days, but we're all working on it!

  19. D by dimitrie on 8 Sep 2020 # +8 votes

    Hi there! It's a bit of an oversight on our end not being joining this community sooner - we've had quite the open source journey so far at Speckle!

    Long story short, our mission is to provide an open source data platform for AEC - that's a big challenge! Speckle is opinionated in what it does, and how it does it - object based, immutable, composable object model(s) instead of "complete" object models, etc. Some of these assumptions have been sliced and diced in a PhD thesis, and I try to keep the research vibe alive in our project (I started Speckle within a H2020 Marie Curie grant) at the same time as delivering a semi-polished OSS product. Quite difficult sometimes :)

    Regardless, Speckle's been OSS from the get-go, and that's how it's going to stay. We're always up to meet new people - contributors or users, and are engaging a lot with our community - mostly on our forum. There's been quite some chatter re our upcoming 2.0 iteration - feel free to join!

    Anyway, happy to have found osarch - I'll go lurk and poke around!

    PS: Repo links for the brave!

  20. M by Moult on 8 Sep 2020, edited 8 Sep 2020 #

    Welcome @dimitrie ! I've heard many good things about Speckle - it's on the Wiki directory, and I tried it briefly a long time ago. I need to revisit it with the new alpha! Has the Blender client been updated? I do not see a tutorial for it on the "get started" page. If there can be tighter integration with Blender and FreeCAD that would allow it be a very powerful tool in full-stack FOSS. I also wonder if there is a way to integrate with the BlenderBIM Add-on - such as consistent mappings between IFC data, BCF data, SVG drawings, and the Speckle data drops.

  21. D by dimitrie on 8 Sep 2020 # +2 votes

    Hey @Moult! The new alpha is, at the moment, purely code, so not much there to test yet. But finally had time to abstract away a few things to move things more towards having "VCS"-like behaviour.

    The Blender addon is the baby of Tom Svillans, a community contributor (and friend). Sadly for us he's busy with other day jobs, so am unsure as to the full status of the plugin, or the upgrade timeline. Last I checked, it seemed rather solid and was seeing some use! I do know Tom made this video as an intro: https://vimeo.com/398214562 (and, wait up, there are some instructions on the repo).

    Re FreeCAD and BlenderBIM we're totally game, but none on our team have any experience with developing for either, let alone voice coherent opinions on possible integrations :( The IFC topic is much wider, but we're defs keen to support it - most likely as a Speckle Kit - in the future. For now we're focusing on quite "pragmatic" interop in our schema development.

  22. J by James_UK_BIM_Manager on 16 Sep 2020, edited 16 Sep 2020 # +9 votes

    Greetings OSArch Community! So glad to be here! ???

    I am a BIM Manager for a UK based AJ100 Architectural practice, who were one of the original named signatories of the open www.letters-to-autodesk.com

    (any disgruntled Autodesk customers please check it out if you’re not aware of it)

    I propose to highlight this community to the wider group of signatories if that is acceptable? I would imagine that there may probably already be some overlap in terms of members?

    As architects we are massive advocates of openBIM, so are really excited, interested and keen to get involved where we can to add value!

    Cheers everyone

    James

  23. M by Moult on 17 Sep 2020 #

    Welcome @James_UK_BIM_Manager ! Please feel free to highlight this community to the wider group of signatories. I certainly understand the sentiment behind the open letters, and I think that is part of what motivates us all to solve the problem by providing a suite of free and open source software that the entire industry can benefit from. I have a sinking feeling that letters to Autodesk get redirected to the public relations / damage control department, not the product department. Just imagine what could happen if a fraction of AEC licensing costs to proprietary software was diverted to sponsoring FOSS AEC development ...

    It's still very early days, and we are a small group of motivated individuals, but we have a wiki, a community forums, and have got many tools built already from model authoring, documentation tools, auditing, clash detection, diff, BCF, IFC, COBie, project management, web viewers, etc and through users testing and providing feedback we are slowly bringing them together into a force to be reckoned with.

  24. B by bitacovir on 17 Sep 2020 # +1 votes

    @James_UK_BIM_Manager said:

    Greetings OSArch Community! So glad to be here! ???

    Welcome. Please have a look on our Open Source software directory and I recommend especial attention on FreeCAD and BlenderBIM addon.

  25. A by agonzalezesteve on 25 Sep 2020, edited 25 Sep 2020 # +10 votes

    Hello everyone, I'm Adrià from Barcelona.

    I am a user of EnergyPlus and Radiance and I develop plugins in SketchUp based on the API of OpenStudio in order to improve our modelling process of energy simulations and daylight analysis for green building certifications (LEED, BREEAM, WELL, VERDE, DGNB...) and energy performance certificates in Spain.

    Due to the future of OpenStudio outside SketchUp I decided to try open source alternatives like Blender or FreeCAD and I want to learn how to extract information from IFC in order to use it in OpenStudio.

    I'm glad to join this community and I hope I can contribute soon.

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