OpenBIM & Rhino

Why didn't I know about this http://grasshopperdocs.com/addons/geomgym-ifc.html ?

"OpenBIM addon for Rhino and Grasshopper enabling IFC (Industry Foundation Class) model to be generated and exchanged to ArchiCAD, Revit, Bently, Tekla and any other BIM software with IFC capability. https://technical.geometrygym.com/getting-started/installation"

It's not Free Software, but bringing more openbim to proprietary software is part of what we're about there.

@geometrygym I've added that here: https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Free_software_extensions_to_proprietary_software#Proprietary_software_and_OpenBIM - feel free to pad out the text a bit or make a page pointing to some more documentation

Tagged:
MoultbitacovirpaulleeCGRkaiaurelienzh

Comments

  • Before Rhino Inside Revit, Geometry Gym was probably the best solution out of a half dozen to bring in geometry from Rhino into Revit, used in all the big offices with serious Rhino workflows. From a presentation in our office, Jon mentioned that early on in his experiments, IFC could be used for the exchange process, instead of inventing a new format. I am sure that as a result, the IFC format has improved over time.

  • I see that Rhino.Inside for Revit is licensed MIT - so that's nice.
    https://github.com/mcneel/rhino.inside-revit/blob/1.x/LICENSE
    I still have a dream to see Blender.Inside as a Sketchup like conceptual environment for Revit ... but I don't think it aligns with Tons visions for Blender.

  • Just wanted to emphasise @dimitar 's point about just how trail-blazing @geometrygym 's efforts have been in supporting interoperability. For many concepts in the schema, I have found myself looking at @geometrygym 's implementation to better understand it in practice.

    kaiaurelienzh
  • @duncan said:
    I still have a dream to see Blender.Inside as a Sketchup like conceptual environment for Revit ... but I don't think it aligns with Tons visions for Blender.

    I've actually used in a similar capacity, in a hacky way. I had to do a massing based on sun diagrams for a project in London once. The sun shading diagrams tend to be fairly complicated, so we received a funky massing from the consultant that served as our max voume. My revit skills are fairly good, but not on the concept design modeling side. So I made the failry blocky concept massing within the maximum envelope in Blender, and then converted to nurbs in rhino and imported in Revit. I had to do the nurbs conversion because Revit doesn't allow snapping to mesh points, and I needed to precisely snap walls in Revit. The round trip may be uneccessary but for anyone that has to constantly do concept design massings in Revit, I definitely don't envy them

  • edited April 2021

    @dimitar well, you did say it was a bit hacky. The Revit Massing Environment should have been enough for what you describe - or is there something I'm missing? Even just floors at different thicknesses ... How did we get from OpenBIM & Rhino to Revit+Rhino+Blender ... what a mess we are in now.

  • Unfortunately, at the moment, you can't say BIM without Revit. You could, but at some point, someone will need to interact with IFC, etc in a Revit based environment. It's just where the industry is at the moment. So, yea, a hot mess. Sorry to divert here, back on track - VisualARQ is a BIM plugin for Rhino that's pretty decent, and it's actually made by very close associates of the McNeel team in Barcelona. VisualARQ also imports and exports IFC files. Rhino+VisualARQ also ends up being the cheapest non-open source BIM solution.

    paullee
  • Probably to add to this discussion is that @fbpyr is working on a Rhino->BlenderBIMAddon->Revit bridge, almost the opposite of the workflow you described @dimitar . This has led to the creation of quite a few features where meshes in Blender (faceted breps, and tessellations) are then auto-converted into parametric solids, that Revit can understand, convert to native Revit elements, snap, edit profiles, etc. With these new features, it is no longer necessary to do the nurbs conversion I suspect.

  • So what are the best options for getting good IFC files out of Rhino? Our Rhino page looks sad but our Inkscape page looks good

  • Probably to add to this discussion is that @fbpyr is working on a Rhino->BlenderBIMAddon->Revit bridge

    FYI: @fbpyr will be presenting in the next monthly meetup, I am expecting some relative info from him versus the end of this week to make the announcements

  • @duncan our best bet right now for open source options (unless @geometrygym changes his mind and makes his offerings open source!) is to use the Blender 3DM importer, and then use the BlenderBIM Add-on. I daresay with @fbpyr 's upcoming release, this workflow will be smoother.

    Alternatively, Rhino exports to many other formats - so any of those formats as dumb geometry can be brought into Blender or FreeCAD, and then enriched with IFC data.

  • @Moult thx for the mentioning. (-:
    @Jesusbill exactly - I plan on demo-ing not only the ifc_void_data addon, but also the rh2bb2rvt addon, which is the aforementioned bridge we use there for a specific use case.
    but credit where credit's due: I am also just "building on the shoulders of giants" this bridge basically uses a python library / blender addon to read rhino models into blender: https://github.com/jesterKing/import_3dm
    luckily this not only works well for the basic geometries we have in that use case, but also brings along all the needed element meta-data which we mirror into Psets with our bridge addon. If you are interested to see it in action, please join the next monthly meetup.
    Thanks to the fantastic help (!!) by @Moult it is possible to write IFC files in a way, that we get typed floors and walls in rvt, which is a big deal for our models on the rvt side.

    Jesusbill
  • Fwiw, a part of the GeometryGym IFC library is open source. Not all of it. It’s a .net library, which is comparable to an extent to XBIM, but the open sourced part is not as extensive. I’ve tested both inside Unity.

  • @StefanBoeykens cheers, I assume https://github.com/GeometryGym/GeometryGymIFC might be the library you're referring to? We should probably add this to the Wiki! But yes, as you say, it is only the library.

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