Extracting areas in m2 from IfcBuildingElementProxy

hachara

Hello guys, a complete beginner in ifcopenshell. I am trying to extract the areas and coordinated of 11 IfcBuildingElementProxy elements in my IFC, using python and ifcopenshell and possibly create a database for these building elements.
Can anyone point me in the right direction. Thank you

Moult

There's two approaches to this. 1) fetching precalcualted quantities, or 2) calculating it yourself.

If your model already contains quantity data, you can fetch its properties (or quantities) and one line of code is all it takes. See here for an example https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifcopenshell-python/code_examples.html#get-the-properties-of-a-wall-type or here https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/autoapi/ifcopenshell/util/element/index.html?highlight=get_pset#ifcopenshell.util.element.get_psets

If you want to calculate it yourself, you first need to extract the geometry, see https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifcopenshell-python/geometry_processing.html

Once you've extracted the geometry, you can fetch various statistics about the geometry using the util.shape module: https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/autoapi/ifcopenshell/util/shape/index.html so get_footprint_area is probably what you're after.