Bonsai BIM App/Plugging store?
Are there any plans to setup some sort of App/Plugging framework that would allow Bonsai to be extended/customized very much like other AEC software?
I see two use cases at least:
- something similar to "recipes" of ifcpatch. There are many scripts spread in the forum that could benefit the community if hosted as "addon" recipes
- addon over the bonsai addon. Allowing to extend UI and functionality with some clear API in order to avoid instability by running an independent addon in parallel to the running Bonsai addon
Thanks!
Comments
The blender store doesn't allow add-on add-ons, for now anyway. Potentially these could be hosted in a separate repository (like the nightly Bonsai snapshots), but if they are fully packaged blender add-ons, they are probably good enough to bundle with Bonsai in the first place.
@brunopostle thanks for the info! Is there some API for an independent blender adddon to talk to the Bonsai addon? Otherwise I can imagine there would be many cases in which they would collide and result in instability.
Cheers,
@falken10vdl there isn't really an API, any add-on can
import bonsaiand start using bonsai and IfcOpenShell functionality. With the new blender extension system all dependencies are bundled as python wheels, so in principle if two add-ons require the same dependency then only one version gets loaded.The Homemaker add-on only works if bonsai is installed, but it otherwise is a 'normal' blender extension (and it isn't on the blender store).
@brunopostle . Perfect, thanks for the hint. I see that is a very good example of an independent addon in cooperation with bonsai. I am going to study how homemaker is doing it.
Thanks!
@falken10vdl Homemaker is structured as a normal python module that depends on IfcOpenShell, ie. you can run all this code outside of blender. Then the
__init__.pyfile contains all the blender/bonsai related stuff.I notice that it is using an older deprecated API for accessing the IFC model, the current recommended way to do this is: