IFC: Road / Rails / Alignments - Beginners Start point
Hi all,
I’ll be supporting a Colleague in writing her Master Thesis and it talks about programmatically adding railway elements along the alignment. This is kind of a common task in Most proprietary design software. Nevertheless this information is rarely correctly exported into IFC. Could somebody point me out where can I read about the relationship between geometry and instances in IFC? How do I read/create an IFC-Alignment element?
It would also be helpful to know if someone has a workflow for creating an alignment (based on Horizontal and vertical lines and curves) in Blender or FreeCAD to place objects along it.
I would be very grateful if someone could put aside a little bit of time and talk with me for around 30min and point me in the right way to start eating the big Pie of unstructured documentation.
I have good experience Programming, working with alignments, BIM, and modelling. So I’m not afraid to get technical.
Comments
@magicalcloud_75 Maybe he can help?
I find this video by @dimitar (and others about the same subject on the channel) are really helpful in realizing such tasks. Separating XY direction and Z direction with separate curves is smart. Not directly related to ifc, though.
@camontellano you'd want to read about the additions to IFC that are part of version 4.3. I understand that's where they've done a lot with horizontal infrastructure and alignment. This might be a staring point and then onto the bS forum https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ifc-schema-specifications/ifc-release-notes/
I don't have answers fot 'the correct way to bring IFC methology into rail' My pratices is to use BricsCAD BIM to get geometry decent over to DWG. DWG because this is de standard for civil designs anyway.
Hi,
Thank you all for your great support here. I went through (many of) your suggestions and really helped me sort some things out.
@Gorgius, your suggestion with the Video of @dimitar was awesome. It put me right on track to be willing to learn more on Blender and using it as a modelling tool. This together with the Tutorials of @makertales (Learn Blender 2.9+ Through Precision Modeling), @blenderguru (Blender 3.0 Beginner Donut Tutorial) and many others provided a great framework that I'll be digging up in the next months.
I'm looking now on Tips and hints to following points:
1. In order to use blender to create road and rail geometries I'm missing the ability to control curves more accurately. I need to have control about how the curves join to each other and be sure they keep their properties (tangency, radius) when modified. I also need to be able to handle special curves like clothoids.
2. Being to "join" an horizontal curve and a vertical to a parametric 3D object would be a huge plus, because I could then array objects directly to the 3D Curve.
Maybe using Sverchok? I know that there is also work being done with primitives in Blender, if you have any ideas where i can find more information this topic, it's very welcomed.!
The Geometry Sketcher plugin might help you.
You might know this already, but there's also this.