BIM Workbench

[yorik]

The beam mode is now fixed in master as of git commit 60fae525b

[yorik]

The weird UI separation in the BIM workbench I did a few months ago didn't seem to raise much enthusiasm and indeed I think it was more confusing than anything else... So now I switched back to something more classical with 3 main areas:
- 2D drafting
- 3D modeling
- Modification

I think this is actually way better...

Screenshot from 2019-05-15 21-31-53.png (209.18 KiB) Viewed 3551 times

Also, you'll notice several new tools there: Structure has been split between Column, beam and slab, and Window between door and window.
This is still the same tool, only it starts in a different mode and with different presets. Same as the move and copy tools.

In Arch, everything still stays the way it was.

It's funny, because even being myself a power-user, I like having a different button for beam and column. It's one click less, after all...

There were some underlying changes needed for this in Arch too, so you need a bleeding edge of FreeCAD for these new tools to work in BIM. Otherwise, they will all do the same thing...

[yorik]

Also: the BIM workbench is now fully translatable. The file is on crowdin!

[bitacovir]

Structure has been split between Column, beam and slab, and Window between door and window.

http://www.nooooooooooooooo.com/



Just kidding... Let's see how it works.

[yorik]

Power users like you won't need the BIM WB anyway

But it's not really a change in your workflow. The column tool starts exactly like the generic Structure tool. The beam tool is the same tool but already starts in beam mode, and the slab tool simply lets you pick an existing 2D object and extrudes it by 20cm (I'll add a control later to choose a different thickness)

But have a try, I wouldn't have believed it myself but I kind of like it actually...

[Wilson]

I really like that now you have doors and windows as separated objects, as well as columns, slabs and beams. In some other BIM softwares, you do have that, but sometimes you can't make a quantity schedule that contains these different objects together, which means that you would have, for instance, a quantity schedule for doors and another for windows. That doesn't make much sense in my opinion, because in the real world the company that produces your doors and windows is many times the same, so you want all this info together in a quantity sheet but separated in your BIM model. It's all about flexibility and FreeCAD has a lot of that. That being said, if you can have these objects as separate ones, like you have now, but with the possibility to have them together, for instance, in a quantity schedule (or material take-off, I don't know the exact term in English) I believe it will be a major plus.

[yorik]

Note that only the tool buttons that appears in the FreeCAD interface have been separated. They still produce a same object for both windows and doors. However, they are easily distinguished (their IfcType property is either Door or Window), so it's easy to separate them anywhere it's needed, or to consider them the same.

[Wilson]

Note that only the tool buttons that appears in the FreeCAD interface have been separated. They still produce a same object for both windows and doors. However, they are easily distinguished (their IfcType property is either Door or Window), so it's easy to separate them anywhere it's needed, or to consider them the same.

Precisily, they are the same object but you can separate or not, as you need, as well has having different IfcType to distinguish doors and windows, for instance. Personally, I believe this flexibility is great.

[Patrick Jörg]

Hey everybody
What about a BIMobject Plugin for FreeCAD?
I just got developeraccess to theyr network. However I didn't yet find out how it works because I'm not very good at network stuff.
But It should be possible if they are allowing it. My account is for my work, where I will try to do the same, however I don't see, why they shouldn't allow to do the same for FreeCAD.
Would be awesome to have those libraries available here right?

Or is there any technical or licencing issue that makes such a thing a bad idea?
I know there are probably tons of other platforms, there might be better ones, and of course this would go to the plugins, since not everybody wants that.
Let me know what you think about it.

[yorik]

What about a BIMobject Plugin for FreeCAD?

Be realized
Install the BIM workbench and have a look at the Library tool

However:

- You can only search objects, you still need to download them manually. the tool could be extended to do more, though, like display the results and even allow download from inside FreeCAD, it's pretty simple HTML parsing, but this is usually very fragile (if they change anything to their HTML output our tool might stop working) so that also means a lot of maintenance. I'm not yet convinced this is totally worth it, given the other point below:
- IFC models found on BimObjects are usually of poor quality, usually triangulated versions of revit or archicad models. That's my own experience though, if you have a different one I'd be interested to know

If you have access to their API, though, (if there is such API), things can be different, as usually APIs don't change as often as the HTML output (the whole idea of an API is not to change often). But one has to look very well as the legal details of what they allow to do with that API.