Groups, Layers & Building Story

[duncan.lithgow]

I'm trying to work out what way of using Groups, Layers & Building Stories makes sense both for FreeCAD and a good IFC/BIM workflow

I'm from the Revit world, so excuse me for using some of that terminology

I am used to visualising my objects by their category (wall/door/slab) and this makes managing their graphics easy as all doors are in the door category. So I started creating layers in the way I'm used to using categories. But since I need objects to belong to a Building Story I get the problem of no longer being able to collect all objects of a certain category in the same layer.

I'd love some help and insight in understanding this and finding a good workflow.

[sww1235]

First off, what is your freecad version? The 0.19 development versions have many more BIM/arch features than the 0.18 version and are very stable.

the building part object is used to represent most items in freecad arch workflow, including storeys, sites and buildings.

I will let someone more experienced in Revit answer the categories question

[duncan.lithgow]

Hi, I try to always run the latest development version, is there a way to get auto notifications when a new packaged version is available?

I don't need a Revit-looking organization, that's just what I'm familiar with. I just need a better way of organizing things so I can see if they're on the correct Building Story and also control their graphics for a whole category of objects at once.

[sww1235]

In regards to the development version, that would be the master branch on https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD. There are windows, mac and linux appimages packaged under the 0.19pre tag at https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases. The assets under the 0.19pre tag are actually more updated than the git commit associated with the tag.

In regards to organization, some info on the new app:link changes can be found at Yorik's blog https://yorik.uncreated.net/blog/2020-009-freecad-june, which wil lmake working with windows and doors much easier.

I tend to structure my buildings with a heirarchy as follows. Project -> Site -> Building -> Storey (building part). Materials and objects like windows get put outside that heirarchy under the project tree.

Just to give you some ideas.

Maybe yorik will chime in here, since he has a lot more experience

[duncan.lithgow]

Thanks sw1235. So how do you associate a window with a building story if it's outside that structure?

[yorik]

The best answer would actually be: "Use what you find best". You could do your whole building structure with groups. Or use only buildingParts, or a mix of both (my fav choice). The choice is yours and you'll get a totally valid BIM model in all cases.

Revit has a lot of mechanisms that force the user in a certain workflow (ex. all objects must belong to a floor). We try to do the contrary with FreeCAD. It makes no sense, for example, to place an elevator system into a specific floor. Sometimes there is not even the concept of "floor" in a model.

If you want to keep working like in Revit, you can just use Building Parts (set their IFC type to "Building Storey") and add your objects there. I myself usually do this: I use groups, but whenever I specifically want BuildingParts (ie. I want to export them as Building Storeys, or I want to be able to move them and automatically move their contents together, or I want them to be clonable or referencable), then I use BuildingParts