Two new IfcOpenShell releases

It has been a long wait since the previous official IfcOpenShell release. But now, two releases are presented at once, to make up for testing the patience of the community to this extent. On the one hand the new 0.4 release candidate improves on the stability of the 0.4 branch. The 0.5 preview release features more bleeding-edge work. Both releases have been updated for changes in upstream projects and include builds for the new blender 2.73 and 3ds Max 2015 and are built using Open Cascade 6.7.1 (OCE 0.16).

Both releases can be downloaded from the ifcopenshell.org website. As always, it includes IfcBlender, IfcMax and IfcConvert. The 0.5 release now introduces ifcopenshell-python, a Python module for parsing and writing IFC files and creating BReps and explicit triangulated geometry from the implicit IFC geometry. The BIMserver plug-in has been provided with updated executables for its geometry interpretation.

The 0.4 release

An excerpt of the improvements is provided below:

• More faithful use of precision information in IFC
• Fixes and improvements for IfcLShapeProfileDef, IfcCShapeProfileDef, IfcRectangleHollowProfileDef, IfcCartesianTransformOperator3D, IfcSpecularExponent, IfcFacetedBrep, IfcPolyline, IfcPolyLoop
• Prevent errors in triangulations due to zero-length normals
• Fixes for parsing files with comments
• Write unique IDs in Collada files
• Speed up output of Wavefront OBJ files
• Less unnecessary nurbs conversion in the STEP and IGES output
• Check the validity of solids and fillets
• Make parsing and serialization locale-independent

The 0.5 preview release

Simultaneously, a large amount of improvements and new features have been added to the 0.5 branch, which we do not want to withhold from the community. Hence, a preview of the 0.5 branch is released for adventurous users. Most notably, it contains all the improvements to geometry handling as outlined in this post and a brand new Python interface and coupling with pythonOCC. The Python interface has been built in collaboration with the FreeCAD team and its users, which are about to release a new version that includes a very promising full blown IFC importer and exporter. For programmers a new API is introduced that supersedes the IfcGeomObjects API. A new output format is added to IfcConvert which provides textual output from the IFC file that describes the header, decomposition structure and property values in XML format.

Introducing IfcOpenShell Academy

With the introduction of the Python interface to IfcOpenShell and the integration with pythonOCC, IfcOpenShell becomes even more suitable as a platform for academia, research and rapid development. With Python+IfcOpenShell+pythonOCC+Qt a complete framework is presented to interactively and visually present, analyse and construct IFC data. IfcOpenShell Academy provides an overview of quick recipes or building blocks to accomplish common tasks related to IFC. If you wish to contribute a recipe to the cookbook contact thomas@ifcopenshell.org.

Enjoy! And remember that IfcOpenShell still needs your help!

IfcOpenShell 0.4.0 rc1 released!

It has been a while, but today the immediate availability of the first release candidate for the IfcOpenShell 0.4 release is announced! On this blog some of the new features of this release will be highlighted in detail. For example on file format conversion. Please report all issues found (by leaving a comment, starting a thread on the forums, a message on IRC, e-mail or a letter, you know where to find us)!

Changes since 0.3:

• Introduction of IfcConvert 
  • A new utility that writes STEP, Collada, IGES and Wavefront OBJ files
• Support for IfcSurfaceStyles when importing geometry
  • Surface styles govern the colours applied to elements in IFC viewers
• More robust support for clipped representations
• Blender IFC importer updated for 2.69
• 3ds Max IFC importer updated for 3ds Max 2014
• Improved performance and stability

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 geometry conversion utility: http://ifcopenshell.org/ifcconvert.html
• The plug-in for BIMserver.org: http://ifcopenshell.org/bimserver.html

Enjoy! And remember that IfcOpenShell still needs your help!

IfcOpenShell.org 0.3.0 rc3 released!

With pleasure the third 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.

Since the previous release candidate several issues have been addressed

• The clipping of building elements behaves much better now, especially if a polygonal boundary of the clipping volume coincides with faces of the first operand solid.
• Bugs have been fixed in the processing of mapped representations, trimmed curves and connected faces sets.
• IfcBlender has been updated for compatibility with Blender 2.62. Furthermore, hidden elements in the 3d View are now hidden in the Render as well.
• IfcOpenShell now warns if entities with the same GlobalId or id are encountered.
• A major performance issue has been addressed by only sewing faces of IfcConnectedFaceSets when they are needed for Boolean operations.
• We now have automated visual test cases!

Very interesting for us to witness has been the development of the IFC importer for FreeCAD that uses IfcOpenShell as a fall-back for their customly developed importer. Because both FreeCAD and IfcOpenShell are based on Open Cascade the level of integration between FreeCAD and IfcOpenShell could be much deeper than it is currently the case with the importers for 3ds Max and Blender!

Furthermore we would like to congratulate the talented BIMserver team with their upcoming 1.1 release. It is a pleasure working with you to provide an open source IFC geometry engine for the BIMserver. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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!