Is IFC authoring a plan for the future?

Features & Ideas
1

Hi,

I m architect, urban designer, and referent in 3D and BIM processes in my firm in Paris.
First of all, thanks for developing this amazing piece of software. I’m sure (and i hope) speckle will take a wider place in the industry in the years to come.

Speckle is very useful in the context of our firm. We started using it as a test, for interoperability issues. Wich is a real problem in the agency since we have 3 different disciplines, using different methodologies and different software. I won’t say that we solved everything but the data exchanges are much more fluid now.

The hardest exchange between disciplines, as far as my experience is concerned is :
Landscape architects → architects —> engineers.
(not in any particular order).
Because these disciplines use different file formats, geoplacement methods and software.
The first problem we solved was finding a common 2D/3D software that suites everyone the best.
Without going into the details, that software is rhino. And i personally think that rhino is going take more and more place in the industry because of it’s flexibility, design and drawing freedom and ability to harmonize 2D and 3D across a wide range of file formats (not even mentionning grasshoper and developper possibilities).

Anyways. there is another big issue : IFC authoring.
With the uprising of BIM and even CIM (city information modeling) these last years, clients wish to centralize data using IFC as the final delivery data structure.

While revit is dominant in the industry, as far as i’m concerned, it does not work well with ifc, especially in the context of big urban and landscape projects.
Besides that, there a a lot of commercial IFC authoring apps, but they are very rigid and costly. The one i use the most is blender bim (wich offers more options then costly ifc authoring apps)

And there is a real demand in the industry for an IFC authoring tools that is connected to interoperable 3D software.

I was wondering if there are any plans for IFC authoring ?
Are there any plans to connect blender bim to speckle ?
Speckle is able to read ifc files but will it be able to write ifc files in the future ?
(I’m aware that ifc authoring implies a huge set of other problems)

cheers,
Raouf

2

Hey @Raouf_Djema ,

Welcome to our community and thanks for the nice introduction!

While we well understand your needs and use cases, we’re not planning to support authoring functionalities anytime soon (this includes operations such as writing IFC files). Speckle’s ambition is to become the data layer/infrastructure for the industry instead, help you get rid of files, and move to web-based workflows and collaboration.

You can already send BlenderBIM models to Speckle with our Blender connector, and we’re planning to improve that integration even more.

1 Like
3

Hi,

Thanks for your fast answer.

I understand your strategy and ambition.
Being able to agregate 3d data, in both objects and informations in the speckle framework and philosophy would be great. I definitely think that IFC and other file format exchanges are complicated and costly…

By layer/infrastructure, do you mean that you guys are working on a way of classifying informations ? (costs, masterials, quantities etc…) ?

The only thing i find quite confusing with speckled is that i can’t really understand how it is possible de classify large quantities of informations in big projects in a way that the viewer can display the data in the interface.

image
image955×919 120 KB

for now, there are these type of informations, and even if that mesh is called “sidewalk” it will still display in the viewer as “mesh”.

Anyways,
thanks for your efforts !

1 Like
4

We have improved the experience of the explorer in the viewer page, have a look at our new frontend on: https://app.speckle.systems/ and let us know what you think!

2 Likes