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Areas - Calculated v Projected
Hello,
Have been testing the updates on and off over the last few months, great progress!
When I export an .IFC to a viewer I am getting correct calculated areas of all faces of an element, this is fine when there is zero thickness and would give a correct area for a specific surface finish. Issue comes when thickness/depth. are also specified as the total area of the object is calculated. Is there a way to capture just a single face area (projected)?
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@ChubbyQuark which viewer are you using? Blender or FreeCAD?
I'm using trimble connect and autodesk viewer for testing the .IFC export. Seems some viewers can interrogate projected v total area, so it may be a case of defining which attribute to use. Thought there may be a way to define before exporting the .IFC from Blender?
@ChubbyQuark at a guess, you are modeling in Blender, and then exporting an IFC, then viewing it in Trimble Connect / Autodesk Viewer? If so, if you don't insert quantity take off values, those viewers will likely try to autodetect areas. Because you are creating meshes, they most likely try to detect areas by counting all faces.
Relying on autodetected areas is not the correct approach. The correct approach is to specify the quantities during authoring, and not rely on guesswork from viewing apps. If you add some Qto properties, you will find some buttons where the BlenderBIM Add-on will guess quantities for you - this can help detect things like projected areas.
Ok, thanks, I'll have another look later. I did note one. Ifc viewer had the option to display face area or total area of a mesh but it would be better to calculate these at source, as you suggest.