Comments on: Open Design Alliance Releases new IFC Software Development Kit (SDK)

By: stefkeb

stefkeb — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 08:08:00 +0000

The advantage of having an open standard: everybody can implement support for it in their software tools. The disadvantage? Everybody does it in a particular way… E.g. Right now, we have IFCs coming from ARCHICAD or Revit which both use the same EDM toolkit but with widely different IFCs. Compare that with the IFCs generated by Vectorworks, Allplan, Tekla, Bentley etc… Even when they all are IFC2x3 certified and the first IFC4 certifications are around the corner or have been released (in the case of Vectorworks).

As every system is mapping the IFC schema to an internal (closed) format you still get very different outcomes.

Solibri is using their own libraries (I think) and they look differently at IFC as Tekla BIMsight, Navisworks, SimpleBIM, BIMvision, FZK Viewer.
There are the toolkits such as IfcOpenShell, IfcPlusPlus, GeometryGym, IfcEngine, XBIM, BIMserver.org …
There are multiple other platforms, including the CDEs and online IFC viewers, which often parse the IFC using one of these toolkits and turn the IFC into a geometry model and some kind of list or tree of properties.

At the same time, buildingSMART has announced that they will also release some kind of reference implementation, but in the past shared examples using IfcEngine and GeometryGym libraries.

ODA has a good reputation for their DWG libraries and are a capable player, but it is very early to think that all of a sudden software vendors will adopt their libraries.

And even then, I don’t see how e.g. Revit and ARCHICAD would have “better” IFC support comparing to the current toolkit they are using right now.

To me it is yet another IFC toolkit, with its own merits and probably idiosyncrasies…

By: stefkeb

stefkeb — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 04:08:00 +0000

As every system is mapping the IFC schema to an internal (closed) format you still get very different outcomes.

At the same time, buildingSMART has announced that they will also release some kind of reference implementation, but in the past shared examples using IfcEngine and GeometryGym libraries.

ODA has a good reputation for their DWG libraries and are a capable player, but it is very early to think that all of a sudden software vendors will adopt their libraries.

And even then, I don’t see how e.g. Revit and ARCHICAD would have “better” IFC support comparing to the current toolkit they are using right now.

To me it is yet another IFC toolkit, with its own merits and probably idiosyncrasies…