IFC misses material information

Features & Ideas
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Hello!

I am working with the latest IFC updates! Great work and thanks for enhancing the IFC connector. It is very important to have a reliable IFC connector.

I am now looking at the materials and struggling to find the right information. I understand that the renderMaterial is still the only material which is primarily used for visualizaion pruposes. Is this correct?

We miss some more info, but as a minimum, it would be nice to have material names. Yet, there are two problems I am facing.

1. Single-material elements
The renderMaterial is the only available material information container. When using IFC, however, the renderMaterial only includes a number in the name (see image below). I also didn’t manage to link the number to any other object in the IFC file or Speckle object. This issue seems to be the same for IFC2x3 and IFC4 from both Revit and Archicad.

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2. Multi-material elements
Now, when having multiple materials in one element, like is often the case with layered walls, I suddenly have material names in the quantity sets. These are only names without further descriptors. Essentially, they could just be random properties in the set, so it is quite hard to identify them as material information without human interpretation. It would be nice to have them more structured. The second issue relates to files using the IFC4 Reference View Export from Revit.

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Could you share some insights on whether I missed something to fix the problems, or if you could consider implementing these changes? I believe the first one should not be too complicated, as you somehow manage to extract all materials, including the right name, which should be straightforward.

Thank you!

Kilian

2 Likes
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Hi @ks4

I have some updates to share with you.

Render Materials will now have their actual names, not the IFC_MATERIAL and step id value you were seeing previously.

There have also been several changes to material quantities and property extraction that you might want to check out, as they may address the limitations you encountered.

I’m curious what you think of the current state of our IFC importer. Please let me know if you spot any limitations.

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@Jedd Just tested this with an IFC 4 model and I can confirm that materials from the IFC are not available in Speckle, thus also making Carbon Calculations impossible.

IfcWall object in Speckle:

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Same object in BIMCollab ZOOM:

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image649Ă—345 47.9 KB

Speckle material mapping error with aforementioned IFC model:

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image369Ă—121 3.1 KB

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Hi, @hwollersheim,

The Material mapping in dashboards only supports .rvt models.
IFC models are not currently supported in this way.

We could consider adding support if there’s enough demand.

As far as material data is concerned, Is the material data you expect under the Quantities property?

Which specific material data is missing?

1 Like
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@Jedd got it, thanks for clarifying.

The Quantities property only includes the IfcBaseQuantities for that element:

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The properties that I’m missing can be seen in the ZOOM Screenshot in my previous post. In the case of an IFC4 file exported from Revit, this includes a PSet called “Material” which contains numerous material properties such as Name, Category, Class, Color, Roughness etc.