IfcOpenShell.org 0.3.0 rc1 released!

With pleasure the first release candidate of IfcOpenShell.org 0.3.0 has been released. If no new major show-stoppers are encountered this release will become the official 0.3.0 version after a period of testing. The focus for this release has been to improve the stability of IfcOpenShell and improve the handling of IFC files coming from a wide variety of sources.

IfcOpenShell has become much more stable

• A lot of reasons for IfcOpenShell to crash on certain IFC files have been addressed, for example when encountering invalid enumaration values or when unit of measure information cannot be found

IfcOpenShell now understands a lot more entities

• Support for IfcMappedItems and IfcCartesianTransformationOperator3D(nonUniform) has been brought up to par
• Support for IfcOpeningElements of IfcBuildingElementParts which are decompositions of IfcElements
• Support for IFC files coming from AutoCAD Architecture has been improved by supporting IfcShapeRepresentations linked to IfcProducts via an IfcProductRepresentation instead of an IfcProductDefinitionShape

Some additional features in IfcOpenShell

• The Blender addon has recieved much attention and is now able to convert the hierarchical structure of IFC files into parenting relations in Blender
• Support for normal smoothing of curved surfaces in IfcObj
• Parsing and geometry extraction has sped up tremendously in some cases

Very exciting news is the work that has been done on a plug-in for the open source BIMserver.org to provide them an open source IFC geometry engine, it may take some time for this to be readily available, but the first results are promissing.

Note that this is first release for which Linux and Mac OSX builds are supplied. This is all rather new for us, we are still mapping on what platforms they actually do work, so if you encounter any problems with them (or just want to say they do work) please mail to support@ifcopenshell.org, drop by at our forums or let us know in the comments.

The release can be downloaded from the http://ifcopenshell.org website:

• The IFC importer for Blender: http://ifcopenshell.org/ifcblender.html
• The IFC importer for Autodesk 3ds Max: http://ifcopenshell.org/ifcmax.html
• The stand-alone IFC to Wavefront .OBJ converter: http://ifcopenshell.org/ifcobj.html
• The plug-in for BIMserver.org: http://ifcopenshell.org/bimserver.html

Enjoy! And remember that IfcOpenShell still needs your help!