Blender Bim - Standalone add on

Avinash

I'm just wondering if it is possible to use blender bim add on outside of the blender application ecosystem. For example, i can just create a python script (.py), and by using the bpy package, i can create a 3D scene by running the python script outside of the blender and without even installing blender application in my local system right?

Similarly is it possible to import and use the blender bim add on as well with bpy and create a IFC output file just by using scripts without any GUI or blender ecosystem ???

Gorgious

I think you can use bpy as a standalone package but you'll hit limitations depending on what you're trying to do, as a lot of operations and rendering features are intricately tied to UI elements and signals. (eg. openGL, operator context, etc.).

There is really IMO no point in using Blender BIM outside of the Blender ecosystem, since the BlenderBIM addon is itself based upon the software agnostic ifcopenshell engine. So you should be using ifcopenshell directly instead.

Avinash

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Avinash

@Gorgious said:
I think you can use bpy as a standalone package but you'll hit limitations depending on what you're trying to do, as a lot of operations and rendering features are intricately tied to UI elements and signals. (eg. openGL, operator context, etc.).

There is really IMO no point in using Blender BIM outside of the Blender ecosystem, since the BlenderBIM addon is itself based upon the software agnostic ifcopenshell engine. So you should be using ifcopenshell directly instead.

Yeah i have been using bpy as a standalone package to create 3d scenes entirely by scripting , using the coordinates for each and every objects in the scene, without using any GUI ecosystem. I could create scene hierarchy, apply colors ,textures from images, etc....

I am just wondering if there's any way to create an IFC file just by using scripts without any gui since i already have the coordinates for every elements that should be present in the BIM file.

Moult

That's pretty cool, I always wondered what the bpy capabilities were outside Blender.

As @Gorgious mentioned, you can just use IfcOpenShell. The BlenderBIM Add-on is just a GUI to IfcOpenShell. For example, all the spreadsheet features are just a UI to IfcCSV, the quantity take-off is a UI to Ifc5D, the clash detection is a UI to IfcClash, etc.

See https://ifcopenshell.org/ - and in particular the Python docs, API reference, and code examples.

• https://docs.ifcopenshell.org/ifcopenshell-python/code_examples.html
• https://docs.ifcopenshell.org/autoapi/ifcopenshell/api/index.html

You can also look inside the BBIM code to see how it does things.

Avinash

@Moult said:
That's pretty cool, I always wondered what the bpy capabilities were outside Blender.

As @Gorgious mentioned, you can just use IfcOpenShell. The BlenderBIM Add-on is just a GUI to IfcOpenShell. For example, all the spreadsheet features are just a UI to IfcCSV, the quantity take-off is a UI to Ifc5D, the clash detection is a UI to IfcClash, etc.

See https://ifcopenshell.org/ - and in particular the Python docs, API reference, and code examples.

• https://docs.ifcopenshell.org/ifcopenshell-python/code_examples.html
• https://docs.ifcopenshell.org/autoapi/ifcopenshell/api/index.html

You can also look inside the BBIM code to see how it does things.

thanks!!