BIM Workbench

[bitacovir]

In a BIM workflow, ideally, all elements should have a material (that might be something to add there too...). When an object has a material, the material defines the object color. So I would rather go that way...

Well yes. I just was thinking on contexts where users work with single material elements, such as steel structures industry or precast concrete industry. I have seen how they organize the classification of parts and assembly sequence using color patterns in their BIM designs.

[yorik]

I have seen how they organize the classification of parts and assembly sequence using color patterns in their BIM designs.

Hmm you're right, I have seen such models too...

[bernd]

in our bim models at work we use for the official ifc material property the german word "ortbeton" It means concrete on site, but in a building we have up to 10 different kind of concretes. They all have a uniqe color in the model an in the drawings, but they all are just called ortbeton (site concrete) in the ifc material property. We added another own property to distinguish, but none of the architects was ever interested in this property. They just would like to know what elements are ortbeton (site concrete). Furthermore only in our model the elements have different colors. The architect uses one color for all these concrete elements. Ahh I may should mention I'm strctural engineer and we do the concrete builfing shell, which means the form work and reinforcement drawings and models.

[yorik]

In any case it's easy to obtain in FreeCAD: Either use different materials each with a different color, or use one same material with no DiffuseColor information. That way, the ShapeColor is not overridden and one can give a different color to each element.

In any case, the Ifc Elements manager seems a good place to check that all objects have the correct material attributed, and do bulk changes.

The individual Shape color, however, has nothing to do with BIM itself I would think... And it is easy to change in the properties window for a group of selected objects (which can be obtained from the Bim elements manager too), so it seems to me that is sufficient...

[bernd]

Yeah thats the cool thing on FreeCAD compared to standard propriatary CAD, one can make and export the models the the user would like to have it and not the way the CAD software vendor would like to have it!

[joancabeza]

Hi! When I try to change the 3D view background color on the BIM Setup dialog it doesn't work. On Report view it appears this:



Running the Python command 'BIM_Setup' failed:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Users\CABE\AppData\Roaming\FreeCAD\Mod\BIM\BimSetup.py", line 152, in Activated
tdimstyle = [3,0,2][dimstyle] # TechDraw has different order than Draft

list index out of range



OS: Windows 7
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.18.14016 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: 5f63f9f23f10640b613cd894ed529eaf69a04aec
Python version: 2.7.14
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.2.0
Locale: Catalan/Spain (ca_ES)

[joancabeza]

By the way, there's a lot of good new stuff!

About building part: It can't be hide/unhide with the space bar (like groups or elements). Is there a reason?

The IFC elements manager is very useful and I've been trying the IFC property sets and it seems very promising! Is there some classification system manager in mind?

I've had some problems when I export to IFC with elements that have materials (They don`t appear), but I'll do some more tests.

I've seen that the wall properties have been relocated at the end meanwhile the base properties are at the begining. While working I found having placement and normal next to each other a good thing (but may be I just have to get used to).

I hope it helps!

[bitacovir]

About building part: It can't be hide/unhide with the space bar (like groups or elements). Is there a reason?

Yes. I can confirm this in Version: 0.18.14090 (Git)
Containers like Floor, BuildingPart, ArchBuilding can't be hidden with space bar.
In v0.17 it is working fine.

OS: Windows 10
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.18.14090 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: a7c8a4677f480f8733e700c3bd2cabc579e3e061
Python version: 2.7.14
Qt version: 4.8.7
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.2.0
Locale: English/Australia (en_AU)

[yorik]

Both issues (BIM setup screen + Visibility on/off of BuildingParts) should be solved now.

About materials in the BIM elements manager, I don't know, attach a file that shows the problem and I'll have a look.

About properties, next step wold be to automatically handle "common" properties sets such as Pset_Beam_Common that (should) be applied to all beams objects.

But I find that in most cases unnecessary, you have 200 beams in a file, if each of them has 6 "common" properties, that's 1200 lines to say nothing useful. I'd rather try to find some organic way to add just the properties we need. Not sure yet how to do that.

There are two more features that I want to add too: Quantities and Classifications. The same way that you can add "IfcRelDefineByProperties" to objects, to attach properties to it, you can add an "IfcRelDefinesByQuantities" where you can add custom measurements to an object, such as length, height, area, volume, etc... The big problem in IFC is that you can "lie", ie. say something in those quantities that doesn't reflect in the actual geometry. But that's another story.

These are useful for apps that don't use the geometry (spreadsheets, etc), so they can still know some dimensions of an object.

For classifications, we should use this: http://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/ifc/I ... cation.htm The problem, AFAICS, is that you add classification info to an IFC file, but I didn't find any way to bind these classes to objects? Even revit exports an IfcClassification, but it's just floating inside the file, and not connected to any object.

At the moment in FreeCAD you can define a class in materials. I'm thinking it could be a good idea to use materials for everything that is common to more than one object: Material itself, but also common sets of properties, and maybe classification too... Then we would also need materials to be able to inherit from another material. That way, you could for example define a general concrete to be used in the whole building, then a concrete only for columns, which derives from the general concrete, but just changes the classification, for example

[bernd]

Lots of cost planing software in switzerland start to support ifc and calculating cost with a ifc model. The surprising thing is they do use the quantitiess from ifc file to calculate the masses! I started to do some cost calculations in FreeCAD with python but used masses from my Python and FreeCAD. For test purposes I compared the volumes with the volumes in quantities and found differences in some cases. But thats another story. Just wanted to say quantities in ifc will be importend in the future at least in switzerland for sure.

Bernd