Sydney Australia open source AEC meetup!

Moult

G'day all! I'd like to explore the interest in potentially having an in-person social / show and tell meetup in Sydney, Australia. I have no idea if anybody else here is in Sydney or how keen you are in a physical meetup.

Let me know, and hopefully if there's enough interest over time it can grow to a larger meetup :)

ubiquity

Hi Dion,
I am not in Sydney (but Hobart), not likely to get to Sydney either, but I am very interested in the concepts and possibilities.
Not in AEC either but I am a retired IT trainer and member of Howrah Men's Shed, where we are currently looking at expanding and doing some concept drafting.
My Blender skills are limited and I am just now beginning to explore BlenderBIM. It seems a more suitable vehicle to explore concepts than Blender on its own (even with other Architectural add-ons).
I hope you get good local response in Sydney and perhaps meetups elsewhere around the country can begin to happen.
Cheers
Paul Reader

Flies_Eyes

I will look into what can be done to start a BBA Meetup group in Brisbane.

samromeo

Yes I would be interested, I am in the south Western Suburbs of Sydney.

Moult

@samromeo awesome! I'm in the south which sounds potentially close to where you are. Would you be interested in sharing your contact details (PM perhaps)? So far there are Edit: 7 of us including myself :) (me, samromeo, JohnM, TransportBIM, YatongNie, Brendon Reid, Nando)

samromeo

@Moult I just sent my contact information via PM

JohnM

Hi Dion and all
I'd very much like to join the Sydney event - I'm currently having a ball withy ios and Python
John

TransportBIM

Hi Dion, I'm interested.

Moult

Bumping this thread as we'll be all meeting next week! I've booked 10am Jan 17th Wednesday. Come to Level 14, ITS Tower Three, 300 Barangaroo Ave and there should be a room booked for us for the Sydney Australia open source AEC meetup. If you'd like, send me a message / email (dion@thinkmoult.com) and I'll let you know my phone number in case something goes wrong. We can start in the morning say around 10am and if people want to stay longer through lunch and beyond they can or if they want to drop off early they can as well :) We can play it by ear.

It'll be a casual combo of social, show and tell, and Q&A.

There was an email thread where everyone suggested ideas on topics they were interested in:

• IDS (ways to format output and what are current limitations) & bsDD general ideology;
• IFC schema deep dive into the structure and relationships;
• IfcOpenshell code writing tips, anything around automating validation from multiple IFC files or is IDS just as flexible
• Always keen for Blender and Blender BIM tips and tricks.
• The IDS process and technology stack
• Headless checking/dashboarding
• BlenderBIM capabilities, in general
• ifcOpenShell, geo-referencing, ifc model viewing…

If you haven't RSVPed please get in touch if coming and even better, bring something fun to showcase! Any FOSS is on-topic: Speckle, QGIS, CloudCompare, IFCJS, Godot...

Flies_Eyes

How long has the venue been booked?

Moult

From 10am to 12.30pm, assuming we'd all be hungry by then. Ideally if it works out, we can organise another meetup, perhaps with a bit more structure as well :)

Massimo

This is a very nice type of event, i really like it!
@Moult Could this type of event be replicated in others cities/countries?

knotsruen

e.g. London please :)

theoryshaw

Here's our event in Wisconsin...

Moult

Hahahaha! Go for it! Reach out, find some local AEC firms and see if any of them do any FOSS stuff and start one up!

Moult

Hey all! We had a great meetup yesterday with 8 people joining :) It was such a wild meetup the curtains broke halfway through and the automated blinds decided to shield the world from our meeting. Thank you all so much for coming! Things we covered:

• Combo introduction session / group therapy about the problems of proprietary software. Most of us come from a position of receiving BIM models and processing / reviewing them for downstream tasks. Most have had over 30 years of experience in the industry. There was a heavy focus on Blender / Python. We were interested in doing more knowledge sharing, but also working on or sharing a practical project together.
• A detailed discussion about geometry. We talked about the different ways of defining geometry explicitly (easy to process, larger to store, similar to a raster) and implicitly (harder to process, simpler to store, similar to a vector). We talked about the pros and cons of meshes and solids.
• I showed a portion of the Native IFC demo I recently gave at bS UK+I - it provided a highly condensed summary of the various current capabilities of BBIM/IOS.
• I demoed how to use code to parse the geometry in an IFC model and how to insert new Qtos with calculated qto data using the ifcopenshell shape module.

There was a lot we didn't get to do. We never got around to actually demoing working with IDS, IfcCSV reporting, and dashboarding, so there is a lot of content to cover for the next session which we've decided would be in 1 month and go from 9am to 1pm (so a 4 hour session instead of a 2.5 hour session like yesterday).

I'll be sending around a group email privately (so we don't get everybody's email public here) for the next session. If you're in Sydney, use free software, contribute to free software, or want to get started, please let me know and join the next one! Send me an email at dion@thinkmoult.com.

The next session will cover:

• IDS, what it is, what it can do, what open source tools are available to create, check, and validate models with IDS
• Extracting tabular data from BIM models with free software such as IfcCSV and Pandas
• A demo of how Lendlease does dashboarding with free software

Other random ideas for future sessions:

• Introduction to Speckle, and a deep dive into the Speckle data model
• How can we use free software like CloudCompare, Meshlab, and Hugin for collecting, managing, and displaying point cloud scans and 360 photos
• A deep dive into colours and materials in IFC and free software options for 3D rendering
• A tutorial on OpenCASCADE, how does OpenCASCADE represent geometry, how to create and modify geometry with it and Python
• A show and tell from from Laing O'Rourke about one case study of using free software on a project

Here is some of the documentation we looked at during the session:

• https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifcopenshell-python/geometry_processing.html#geometry-iterator
• https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifcopenshell/geometry_settings.html#disable-opening-subtractions (gross vs net)
• https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/autoapi/ifcopenshell/util/shape/index.html?highlight=get_volume#ifcopenshell.util.shape.get_volume
• https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/autoapi/ifcopenshell/api/pset/add_qto/index.html adding a qto
• https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/autoapi/ifcopenshell/api/pset/edit_qto/index.html editing a qto

Sample code we wrote for quantification: https://pastebin.com/GA3U76Lh

Sample code of a more comprehensive (but not optimised, it doesn't use the iterator) quantity check: https://gist.github.com/Moult/d25e4fe1c295d5fdafe1c3b2f1adeab1

Sample QTO IDS: https://gist.github.com/Moult/6d0450d2308abd80fe538a37899d0e56

JohnM

Tks Dion - great to meet everyone face to face, excellent start, looking forward to the next meeting, will start on your examples...

TransportBIM

Thank-you Dion. It was well worth the trip to Sydney. Looking forward to the next one.

breid

Thanks Dion! Looking forward to the next event. Feb 14, 9-1pm works for me

Moult

Hey all! Sorry for the delay. Busy week :) We had another successful meetup with 11 people joining this time around. We discussed:

• What is IDS? The documentation is here: https://github.com/buildingSMART/IDS/blob/master/Documentation/README.md
• How you can use IfcTester to generate your own .ids files: https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/tree/v0.7.0/src/ifctester
• Sample code which generates an IDS (see attached .txt file Python code to this post)
• An incomplete IFC viewer here: https://blenderbim.org/ifctester/ - anybody interested in helping finish building it?
• IfcOpenShell contains a filtering query language which is similar to the use of facets in IDS. Documentation here: https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifcopenshell-python/selector_syntax.html#filtering-elements
• You can use IfcCSV to create tabular exports in CSV, ODS, XLSX, and Dataframe: https://blenderbim.org/docs-python/ifccsv.html - it can be done graphically or via code. Sample code is in documentation (may need updating, anybody keen on testing it and fixing docs if necessary?)
• We briefly mentioned the Voxelisation Toolkit: https://github.com/opensourceBIM/voxelization_toolkit - anybody keen on helping build a Blender interface for this?
• We talked about the Google Summer of Code. If anybody is interested (or knows a student who might be interested) example projects that Google will pay a stipend for and we will mentor are here: https://github.com/opencax/GSoC/issues?q=is:issue+is:open+label:"Project:+IfcOpenShell"
• We talked a lot about how to use Names and Descriptions appropriately. Attached to this post is a Revit-centric guide to getting this right: Revit-types.ods
• We discussed how we should revive the effort at https://wiki.osarch.org/ to write guides on how this data should be done. The old attempt (called MicroMVDs prior to the invent of IDS) is here https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=MicroMVDs_for_exchange_requirements - Shaun and Brendon agreed to start tackling this.
• We looked at the Lendlease digital engineering dashboard and showed how IfcTester and IfcCSV powers a lot of what is shown.
• We discussed how to customise your own test reports. Here is the reporter code which reports to various formats, such as ODS: https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/blob/v0.7.0/src/ifctester/ifctester/reporter.py#L313-L424 - Shaun was interested in building his own condensed report format.

We've decided the next session would be in 1.5 months and go from 9am to 1pm.

I'll be sending around a group email privately (so we don't get everybody's email public here) for the next session. If you're in Sydney, use free software, contribute to free software, or want to get started, please let me know and join the next one! Send me an email at dion@thinkmoult.com.

JohnM

Hi all - some links to IDS developments
1. coBuilder IDS...

2. Solibri IDS

3. Artur Tomczak IDS website
IDS Editor (artomczak.pythonanywhere.com)
4. Another IDS tool : jiQsaVV https://jiqsavv.com/

TransportBIM

@Moult, thanks again for another great session, looking forward to the next one. I'm happy to help out on dot point 6.

YatongN

Thanks for sharing, Dion! I tested IfcCSV sample code, works well. The only thing is need to have "odfpy" installed to activate the ods export.