ICE Bridge Blender plugin
First of all, I would like to thank the people at the OSArch Community. You have inspired and helped me to develop a new workflow between BIM and the building energy simulation tool IDA ICE. I have now released a proof of concept in the form of a Blender plugin, ICE Bridge, that can convert any valid geometry/data into a building energy model. It can use BIM-data in the form of IFC/BlenderBIM, Speckle or just pure geometry like a closed volume for a room or a surface as a window. The plugin can be found at https://github.com/maxtillberg/ICEBridge
Right now the plugin assumes that the information is valid and there are still some major issues that I hope to solve at some point.
- I need airtight closed volumes made of planar faces to describe rooms/thermal zones. Sometimes you can find them as IFCSpaces/Speckle rooms but in many projects, they are missing and it would be extremely useful if it was possible to create these interactively. What I am thinking of is to add a room object in 3D and try to identify closed volumes by raytracing/voxels or some other method. One problem is that the zones are usually quite complex and not always as closed as needed.
- The possibility to merge closed volumes into larger volumes/rooms. The zones are defined inside of walls/floors to simulate airflow and daylight correctly and therefore there will be gaps between the volumes that needs to be filled without messing up existing volumes.
- The possibility to clean up the rooms. Quite often pillars are included as room bounding objects and messes up the geometry. It would be useful to be able to get rid of geometries like this and simplify the geometries if needed.
I guess the plugin is only useful for IDA ICE users but there might be concepts or features that might be useful for other applications. Please note that this plugin does not generate IFC or gbXML, all it does is to generate a number of scripts that can be used in IDA ICE.
If you have any ideas of feedback, please let me know.
