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BlenderBIM – add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender

235 points by Teever 3y ago

doulouUS 3y ago
Is there a public repository of BIM files so that I can play around on potentially more complex buildings?
- aothms 3y ago
  Have a look at https://openifcmodel.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ https://openifcmodel.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ https://github.com/buildingSMART/Sample-Test-Files/ https://github.com/buildingSMART/Sample-Test-Files/ https://duraark.github.io/duraark-data/ https://duraark.github.io/duraark-data/
pzs 3y ago
When we had our home reconstructed three years ago, the architect exported the plans in BIM format from the software he used. I used Blender with BlenderBIM to arrange virtual tours with my wife to get a better (immersive?) view of how the different rooms will look after the planned changes. The result wasn't perfect, which I attribute to my very limited experience with Blender and some minor flaws around the export/import process (e.g. doors and windows were missing, some walls had the wrong dimensions). I fixed some of the problems manually in Blender after the import in a few minutes. All in all, the plugin did the job very well, and helped us make some decisions. I would gladly recommend it for a similar use case. EDIT: removed typo
vanous 3y ago
This looks interesting! It might be a great companion for the BlenderDMX addon [1]. [1] https://blenderdmx.eu/ https://blenderdmx.eu/
- msk-lywenn 3y ago
  How?
  - ZiiS 3y ago
    BlenderDMX allows you to import a lighting rig and visualise what it will look like. BlenderBIM allows you to import a building and visualise what it will look like. Using both, you can visualise what a lighting rig would look like in a given building.
    - dubcanada 3y ago
      BlenderBIM doesn't "import a building" BIM is a method of detailing a house. You export it to something like IFC and then share it. For example if you do design in Blender, but the plumber uses Revit you use IFC to share between the two programs. The plumber adds the piping to the plan, and exports it for you and then you now have a all of the plumbing required. You can then export it using BIM to a schedule which will say we need 45 90deg corners, 20 10" pipes, etc...
      - ZiiS 3y ago
        Sure it has lots of other uses. But if you get sent an IFC being able to see it in Blender even if you don't care about the schedule is very nice.
- breakingcups 3y ago
  Might be best to disclose that you seem to be the lead developer of BlenderDMX ;-)
  - vanous 3y ago
    Correct, thanks, didn't realize it's better to mention. This is an open source project.
ur-whale 3y ago
There is (among many other) one thing that I truly like about Blender: with its gigantic add-on ecosystem it is on the path to becoming the standard platform for everything 3D. Or rather: the one place where everything you can do with 3D can come together under the same roof: CAD, CAM, Architecture, Interior Design, 3D reconstruction, Scientific Visualization, Animation, 2.5D drawing, Artistic Modeling, Prototyping, Industrial Design, Simulation, Rendering, Special Effects (of course), etc ... I'm certainly forgetting 80% of the list. Take any of the other 3D packages out there in all the domains I listed: none of them has anywhere near the breadth and versatility of Blender, and pretty much none of them are capable of importing 3D work from other packages the way Blender can. I hope various industries involved in 3D will finally recognize this fact and the economic value it brings about. The SFX industry has already recognized it. Fingers crossed, the other will follow.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  How does CAD modelling work in Blender? I thought solid geometry manipulation like in CAD software was fundamentally different to what Blender does (surfaces only)?
  - blooalien 3y ago
    There's https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ addon for Blender. Blender isn't really a CAD program, but apparently it's got enough 3D functionality that it's possible to do CAD in it. Would need to hear from someone more familiar with CAD than I to know whether it's really viable yet or not. Blender's excellent for everything I've personally needed to do in 3D thus far though. (Mostly models / animations for use in game engines.)
    - blooalien 3y ago
      Thanks for all the responses. As I said, I'm not a "CAD guy", so I didn't really know for sure, but now at least (thanks to y'all folks) I have a somewhat better understanding where "the line" between Blender 3D (and similar programs like Maya, Lightwave 3D, etc) and CAD actually lies. ;)
ofrzeta 3y ago
Took me some minutes to find out: BIM is Building Information Model. EDIT: "building" as in "houses".
- Lockal 3y ago
  The one case where simply deciphering the acronym doesn't help much. Let's say: "for viewing and editing files describing architectural objects and building interiors".
  - aothms 3y ago
    Let me try to explain it in a way that the acronym does make sense. For ages people have exchanged information about buildings in 2d and non-semantic line drawings with only an implicit symbolic meaning. In BIM, a building (or any construction work really, bridges/tunnels/...) is described as a set of components with explicit information (the I), for example: this is a wall with fire rating XYZ. The geometry/representation is only one aspect of that wall. This information is exchanged using actual data models (the M) - hopefully using IFC (another acronym, less meaningful this time), which is the open and vendor neutral standard to encode such building models. There's a lot of disciplines (architects, structural engineers, heating and ventilation, city planners and municipalities, planners, builders, owners, tenants). Also, building have a long lifetime, that extends way beyond the typical maintenance period of proprietary software. And the sector has a massive impact on our well being as well as environmental goals. Encoding this information in a semantic and computer-interpretable has enabled better ways of working together, but there's still much potential and many interesting challenges (come join us!) ahead of us to make a better built environment a reality!
    - ArchitectAnon 3y ago
      Speaking as an architect who uses other BIM software than this ‘at the coal face’, I wanted to add a bit more of a real world example onto your explanation. BIM is a system which is meant to make the notes (semantic information) that are added to the industry standard diagrams (plans, sections and elevations)[0] stay pointed at the right thing with the right information in them. It also auto generates many of the lists of components that we use. It makes some things easier; a quick video call to the engineer with a screen share of a 3d model to ask about something makes it much easier to talk about and resolve issues. It makes other things harder; generating the industry standard diagrams that we all use to analyse information is slower than just drawing them in 2d. You get 80% of the way there a lot faster but then you have to deal with all the situations that the software designers didn’t anticipate when they designed the wall, slab, roof, door and window tools and often the only way to do this is to drop objects back to ‘dumb’ geometry and rework them. You then have to go back to manually labelling them in the 2d 'diagrams' or trying to figure out how to tag them semantically with a specially generated tag so that they show up correctly in the auto generated schedules and notes. I personally find the BIM way of working more stressful as you never know when you are going to get caught out by a software glitch that halts your production, it is a lot more unpredictable than brainlessly slogging through drawing a bunch of 2d drawings. I think these are the challenges you are referring to. So lets say I'm writing a 'Door schedule', a list of all the doors on the project, when I started my career you would go through a project with the paper plans and type up a list in excel with all the specifications manually, now when you place a door object it is tagged with various information which you can query to auto generate this list of doors. However, the doors will have been placed in the BIM model quite early on in the process when we were just thinking about where the doors needed to be and which way they opened. We were not thinking about which manufacturer they were from, what the finishes and hardware are going to be and fire ratings etc at that stage. So to get this list to autogenerate correctly you have to go back to each door and locate the correct fields from among hundreds of others in a clunky data entry interface to enter this information to get it to query correctly and show up in your list of doors. It is database data entry consistency problem. The list of all the doors shows up instantly; 2 mins work to get a list with all this detailed information set up. 2 hours later, I've managed to figure out the tagging system to get it to list the last weird edge case on door D25. I could have typed the whole thing faster in excel, but now that the information is there, it is tagged to that door and as long as no-one duplicates it and moves it to another location the door schedule will still be correct... So every time you re-issue this schedule, you still need to go through it door by door and check against the plan to see what its specification needs to be and check if it is still correct. You can't trust the automatic door schedule to be correct in case somebody with ADHD (a lot of architects including me) forgot to check and edit all the semantic information after they made the visual change they wanted. Separating the process of adding written information to the drawing from the process of drawing the thing has always been a problem with CAD but with BIM it is even worse because there is a greater disconnect. In my experience BIM reduces problems with geometry not being correctly thought out and things not fitting together but it increases problems with mislabelled information because there is a greater mental distance between the thing you edit and where the information eventually ends up being presented. I'm a software minded person I have a >20k LOC python BIM customisation project I've written myself and I've coded some embedded C in the past but I struggle to get the semantic tagging to work efficiently; it is much slower than just going to the 2d output drawing and adding a dumb note. I've coded my own BIM door and window objects for my CAD package to try and streamlines this and when I can use them they way I want to it works great, but I do find myself going back and coding more features on pretty much every project I work on to allow for a situation I hadn't anticipated when I first wrote the code. It also raises an ethical issue if you are billing hourly because how many hours of troubleshooting your own BIM software can you reasonably bill for? BIM has the same issues as other areas where bureaucracy has been computerised into a rigid process; it is very poor at edge cases and buildings are full of these. CAD software really needs a huge investment in deep interaction design psychology and research to resolve these issues. [0]These are never going away because the are a very efficient abstraction to use for analysis and they need a clear presentation to be readable; you wouldn't ask an electrical engineer to give up circuit diagrams in favour of a 3d model.
KeplerBoy 3y ago
slightly off topic: What happened to Blender Apps? There seems to be a lot of potential for apps like this one. https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/ https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/
- incrudible 3y ago
  What's the point of creating such toy 3D programs? Blender already has huge amount of free training material, any serious development effort would want to integrate with its UI, rather than strip it away.
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    I'd imagine those programs would have a very different aim than Blender itself. I'm thinking of scientifc simulation tools, which would benefit from interactive 3D graphics. Coding that with a traditional game engine is a no-go for researchers.
    - ptrott2017 3y ago
      Blender Apps are on the medium to long term plans for the Blender foundation (i.e. planned on roadmap but not currently under active development). The Blender team currently have a lot of projects on and are resource bound so have prioritized focus on finishing developments such as Evee Next, GPU compositing etc before starting other projects such as Apps. For more detail see: https://www.blender.org/development/projects-to-look-forward-in-2024/ https://www.blender.org/development/projects-to-look-forward...
      - KeplerBoy 3y ago
        Happy to see the idea is not abandoned!
    - incrudible 3y ago
      Blender is already being used for that purpose, it doesn't have a specific aim, and that is one of its strengths. The question remains: Why would you strip away and partially re-implement all the UI? You never know what your users might have needed that you took away.
xyst 3y ago
This is very cool. So people don’t have to buy an autodesk product to view these types of plans. Been trying to figure out the best way to document the structure of my home. I think Blender + this add on looks like a great start. I suspect there will be a massive learning curve though.
- aothms 3y ago
  There's some great resources online, such as https://www.youtube.com/@IfcArchitect https://www.youtube.com/@IfcArchitect
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > So people don’t have to buy an autodesk product to view these types of plans. Can Autodesk products still be bought these days ? I thought they had switched to full-on leech mode (subscription).
bibelo 3y ago
Since the article use TLAs and does not explain what it's about, I guess it's not for me.
- ur-whale 3y ago
  [dead]
- msds 3y ago
  Don't worry, if you don't know what BIM is, you don't need BIM and you should be thankful about your previous life choices. Weirdly, no one in BIM really seems to agree on what BIM actually is either.
bionhoward 3y ago
As a noob who doesn’t know what BIM stands for, one easy way to improve this website would be to expand the acronym above the fold. Yes, I’ll Google it.
- dubcanada 3y ago
  It's not really for people who don't know what BIM means. Its the same as a bunch of techy stuff with techy terms, if you know the terms it is for you. If you don't just close the website and move on.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jcims 3y ago
@pushmatrix on Twitter/X has some really interesting integrations between the Vision Pro and Blender. Look at the real time modeling and Chores 2.0 posts examples. I imagine this would also be a good candidate for integration like that.
Nelkins 3y ago
Anybody know how this compares to the architecture workbench in FreeCAD?
- naasking 3y ago
  See my related post [1]. The NativeIFC add on talks about BlenderBIM. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706564
mattlondon 3y ago
Very interested in this sort of thing to create a "digital twin" of my home for various purposes (home automation visualisation, overlaying security camera feeds on "real" geometry (e.g. show camera feeds as textures on my house's garden etc in 3D view), trying out some remodelling ideas on VR etc Has anyone tried anything like this and has some advice?
- greggsy 3y ago
  Matterport is the industry standard for real estate walkthroughs, but it’s not cheap. On the other end of the spectrum, and possible the easiest way to get something up and running, is the web version of SweetHome3D [1]. It is rough in some places and somewhat limited, but it has been around for ever, and still has a lot of potential. It’s also available as an add-on for HomeAssistant. [1] https://www.sweethome3d.com/ https://www.sweethome3d.com/
  - lazulicurio 3y ago
    Seconding the plug for sh3d. And the source is relatively accessible if you want to make modifications---I patch my personal copy to allow zero-height walls and floors which can make doing more complicated geometry easier.
  - filleokus 3y ago
    > Matterport is the industry standard for real estate walkthroughs, but it’s not cheap The hardware is not cheap, but if you have a (friendly) realtor in the area they might be able to let you scan it for a resonable price. Or a dedicated scanning company if you have those in your area. Worked at a company who had these for doing scans of offices, and you could get the scan in different standard file formats for not a huge price (iirc). https://support.matterport.com/s/article/Matterport-Assets-You-Can-Download?language=en_US&ardId=kA05d000001DX13CAG https://support.matterport.com/s/article/Matterport-Assets-Y...
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  I continue to use SketchUp for that, as is the closest thing to CAD I can quickly work in without needing to spend a month in training first.
sahillavingia 3y ago
Big believer in Blender becoming the default tool to design and build buildings this century.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  ok - except more interesting buildings were built long before 3D models. I see repetitive and featureless buildings done with this software, for sure. Other than that, not certain at all..
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
greggsy 3y ago
I would love to see this integrated with data from Home Assistant. Presumably would be difficult with MQTT.
1-6 3y ago
Revit is not BIM and it’s terrible at it.
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
Related: BIM and IFC – What are IFC models, and how do BIM and IFC relate?: https://plannerly.com/bim-and-ifc-models/ https://plannerly.com/bim-and-ifc-models/
idontknowtech 3y ago
I'm an architect, and I can't imagine using blender to design anything architectural. Purpose built architecture BIM software like Revit is just way better. Expensive, but better
epaulson 3y ago
The fun thing about BlenderBIM is that it's IFC-native. (IFC is the 'Industrial Foundation Classes' - a data model/structure for modeling buildings and the components, systems, and intangibles like construction schedules.) BlenderBIM is internally managing everything with the IfcOpenShell library - all of the data uses the Python interfaces of IfcOpenShell (which internally has a lot of C) to keep the model state. Blender is more a rendering backend and nice UI to manipulate the state of the IFC model with IfcOpenShell - but basically everything you can do with the Blender GUI you can pop open a shell and just type in Python and do the same thing. This means you'll occasionally see some Blender things that don't do what you expect to the model you're editing - there are ways to have Blender do state modifications that don't all get translated to the IFC data underneath, so sometimes doing things like selections or modifiers are surprising for Blender users. (I think over time the list of things that are like this has gotten a lot smaller, and BlenderBIM is now pretty good about keeping the state of what's displayed in Blender in sync with what the underlying IFC model is storing) The main commercial player in this space is Autodesk Revit. There is a lot of thinking that perhaps Revit has reached a point as a platform where Autodesk can't keep building on it (i.e. it has so much tech debt that it's getting hopeless) - see https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ Autodesk has a number of other 3D modeling software packages and I sometimes think that for their next generation of Revit they should consider the BlenderBIM approach and maybe build on top of Maya or one of their other offerings.
- tylerflick 3y ago
  Has anything actually been moving in this space? From what I recall Autodesk had the US market bottled up, and IFC was really only being adopted in the EU.
naasking 3y ago
FreeCAD also has some BIM options: * https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC * https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench * https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC
airbreather 3y ago
If anyone wants to create an additional capability for modelling all the stuff with wires (power, comms, security etc) I can give you an exact spec how to do this, there is a little more to the detils than first apparent. I don't really have the current ability, or time, to do it myself but for the right person a good spec could really head them off in the right direction. How would I know? I just spent near two decades working with an in house tool developed for electrical/instrument modelling alone. I have seen some things that do work, some that don't and a bunch of details, over this time period as they developed and refined, and have a pretty good idea what would work. Msg me if anyone is interested.
- Moult 3y ago
  This would be very much appreciated. The best way to do this is to post on https://community.osarch.org/ https://community.osarch.org/ with as much details as possible on a specification. You will also find other electrical engineers there who can provide feedback. It may also "not be the right time" (i.e. all the devs are busy tackling other issues) but sooner or later someone will look at it and find it a valuable resource to implement.

235 points by Teever 3y ago

doulouUS 3y ago

Is there a public repository of BIM files so that I can play around on potentially more complex buildings?

aothms 3y ago
Have a look at https://openifcmodel.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ https://openifcmodel.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ https://github.com/buildingSMART/Sample-Test-Files/ https://github.com/buildingSMART/Sample-Test-Files/ https://duraark.github.io/duraark-data/ https://duraark.github.io/duraark-data/

pzs 3y ago

When we had our home reconstructed three years ago, the architect exported the plans in BIM format from the software he used. I used Blender with BlenderBIM to arrange virtual tours with my wife to get a better (immersive?) view of how the different rooms will look after the planned changes. The result wasn't perfect, which I attribute to my very limited experience with Blender and some minor flaws around the export/import process (e.g. doors and windows were missing, some walls had the wrong dimensions). I fixed some of the problems manually in Blender after the import in a few minutes. All in all, the plugin did the job very well, and helped us make some decisions. I would gladly recommend it for a similar use case. EDIT: removed typo

vanous 3y ago

This looks interesting! It might be a great companion for the BlenderDMX addon [1]. [1] https://blenderdmx.eu/ https://blenderdmx.eu/

msk-lywenn 3y ago
How?
- ZiiS 3y ago
  BlenderDMX allows you to import a lighting rig and visualise what it will look like. BlenderBIM allows you to import a building and visualise what it will look like. Using both, you can visualise what a lighting rig would look like in a given building.
  - dubcanada 3y ago
    BlenderBIM doesn't "import a building" BIM is a method of detailing a house. You export it to something like IFC and then share it. For example if you do design in Blender, but the plumber uses Revit you use IFC to share between the two programs. The plumber adds the piping to the plan, and exports it for you and then you now have a all of the plumbing required. You can then export it using BIM to a schedule which will say we need 45 90deg corners, 20 10" pipes, etc...
    - ZiiS 3y ago
      Sure it has lots of other uses. But if you get sent an IFC being able to see it in Blender even if you don't care about the schedule is very nice.
breakingcups 3y ago
Might be best to disclose that you seem to be the lead developer of BlenderDMX ;-)
- vanous 3y ago
  Correct, thanks, didn't realize it's better to mention. This is an open source project.

ur-whale 3y ago

There is (among many other) one thing that I truly like about Blender: with its gigantic add-on ecosystem it is on the path to becoming the standard platform for everything 3D. Or rather: the one place where everything you can do with 3D can come together under the same roof: CAD, CAM, Architecture, Interior Design, 3D reconstruction, Scientific Visualization, Animation, 2.5D drawing, Artistic Modeling, Prototyping, Industrial Design, Simulation, Rendering, Special Effects (of course), etc ... I'm certainly forgetting 80% of the list. Take any of the other 3D packages out there in all the domains I listed: none of them has anywhere near the breadth and versatility of Blender, and pretty much none of them are capable of importing 3D work from other packages the way Blender can. I hope various industries involved in 3D will finally recognize this fact and the economic value it brings about. The SFX industry has already recognized it. Fingers crossed, the other will follow.

bboygravity 3y ago
How does CAD modelling work in Blender? I thought solid geometry manipulation like in CAD software was fundamentally different to what Blender does (surfaces only)?
- blooalien 3y ago
  There's https://www.cadsketcher.com/ https://www.cadsketcher.com/ addon for Blender. Blender isn't really a CAD program, but apparently it's got enough 3D functionality that it's possible to do CAD in it. Would need to hear from someone more familiar with CAD than I to know whether it's really viable yet or not. Blender's excellent for everything I've personally needed to do in 3D thus far though. (Mostly models / animations for use in game engines.)
  - blooalien 3y ago
    Thanks for all the responses. As I said, I'm not a "CAD guy", so I didn't really know for sure, but now at least (thanks to y'all folks) I have a somewhat better understanding where "the line" between Blender 3D (and similar programs like Maya, Lightwave 3D, etc) and CAD actually lies. ;)

ofrzeta 3y ago

Took me some minutes to find out: BIM is Building Information Model. EDIT: "building" as in "houses".

Lockal 3y ago
The one case where simply deciphering the acronym doesn't help much. Let's say: "for viewing and editing files describing architectural objects and building interiors".
- aothms 3y ago
  Let me try to explain it in a way that the acronym does make sense. For ages people have exchanged information about buildings in 2d and non-semantic line drawings with only an implicit symbolic meaning. In BIM, a building (or any construction work really, bridges/tunnels/...) is described as a set of components with explicit information (the I), for example: this is a wall with fire rating XYZ. The geometry/representation is only one aspect of that wall. This information is exchanged using actual data models (the M) - hopefully using IFC (another acronym, less meaningful this time), which is the open and vendor neutral standard to encode such building models. There's a lot of disciplines (architects, structural engineers, heating and ventilation, city planners and municipalities, planners, builders, owners, tenants). Also, building have a long lifetime, that extends way beyond the typical maintenance period of proprietary software. And the sector has a massive impact on our well being as well as environmental goals. Encoding this information in a semantic and computer-interpretable has enabled better ways of working together, but there's still much potential and many interesting challenges (come join us!) ahead of us to make a better built environment a reality!
  - ArchitectAnon 3y ago
    Speaking as an architect who uses other BIM software than this ‘at the coal face’, I wanted to add a bit more of a real world example onto your explanation. BIM is a system which is meant to make the notes (semantic information) that are added to the industry standard diagrams (plans, sections and elevations)[0] stay pointed at the right thing with the right information in them. It also auto generates many of the lists of components that we use. It makes some things easier; a quick video call to the engineer with a screen share of a 3d model to ask about something makes it much easier to talk about and resolve issues. It makes other things harder; generating the industry standard diagrams that we all use to analyse information is slower than just drawing them in 2d. You get 80% of the way there a lot faster but then you have to deal with all the situations that the software designers didn’t anticipate when they designed the wall, slab, roof, door and window tools and often the only way to do this is to drop objects back to ‘dumb’ geometry and rework them. You then have to go back to manually labelling them in the 2d 'diagrams' or trying to figure out how to tag them semantically with a specially generated tag so that they show up correctly in the auto generated schedules and notes. I personally find the BIM way of working more stressful as you never know when you are going to get caught out by a software glitch that halts your production, it is a lot more unpredictable than brainlessly slogging through drawing a bunch of 2d drawings. I think these are the challenges you are referring to. So lets say I'm writing a 'Door schedule', a list of all the doors on the project, when I started my career you would go through a project with the paper plans and type up a list in excel with all the specifications manually, now when you place a door object it is tagged with various information which you can query to auto generate this list of doors. However, the doors will have been placed in the BIM model quite early on in the process when we were just thinking about where the doors needed to be and which way they opened. We were not thinking about which manufacturer they were from, what the finishes and hardware are going to be and fire ratings etc at that stage. So to get this list to autogenerate correctly you have to go back to each door and locate the correct fields from among hundreds of others in a clunky data entry interface to enter this information to get it to query correctly and show up in your list of doors. It is database data entry consistency problem. The list of all the doors shows up instantly; 2 mins work to get a list with all this detailed information set up. 2 hours later, I've managed to figure out the tagging system to get it to list the last weird edge case on door D25. I could have typed the whole thing faster in excel, but now that the information is there, it is tagged to that door and as long as no-one duplicates it and moves it to another location the door schedule will still be correct... So every time you re-issue this schedule, you still need to go through it door by door and check against the plan to see what its specification needs to be and check if it is still correct. You can't trust the automatic door schedule to be correct in case somebody with ADHD (a lot of architects including me) forgot to check and edit all the semantic information after they made the visual change they wanted. Separating the process of adding written information to the drawing from the process of drawing the thing has always been a problem with CAD but with BIM it is even worse because there is a greater disconnect. In my experience BIM reduces problems with geometry not being correctly thought out and things not fitting together but it increases problems with mislabelled information because there is a greater mental distance between the thing you edit and where the information eventually ends up being presented. I'm a software minded person I have a >20k LOC python BIM customisation project I've written myself and I've coded some embedded C in the past but I struggle to get the semantic tagging to work efficiently; it is much slower than just going to the 2d output drawing and adding a dumb note. I've coded my own BIM door and window objects for my CAD package to try and streamlines this and when I can use them they way I want to it works great, but I do find myself going back and coding more features on pretty much every project I work on to allow for a situation I hadn't anticipated when I first wrote the code. It also raises an ethical issue if you are billing hourly because how many hours of troubleshooting your own BIM software can you reasonably bill for? BIM has the same issues as other areas where bureaucracy has been computerised into a rigid process; it is very poor at edge cases and buildings are full of these. CAD software really needs a huge investment in deep interaction design psychology and research to resolve these issues. [0]These are never going away because the are a very efficient abstraction to use for analysis and they need a clear presentation to be readable; you wouldn't ask an electrical engineer to give up circuit diagrams in favour of a 3d model.

KeplerBoy 3y ago

slightly off topic: What happened to Blender Apps? There seems to be a lot of potential for apps like this one. https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/ https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/

incrudible 3y ago
What's the point of creating such toy 3D programs? Blender already has huge amount of free training material, any serious development effort would want to integrate with its UI, rather than strip it away.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  I'd imagine those programs would have a very different aim than Blender itself. I'm thinking of scientifc simulation tools, which would benefit from interactive 3D graphics. Coding that with a traditional game engine is a no-go for researchers.
  - ptrott2017 3y ago
    Blender Apps are on the medium to long term plans for the Blender foundation (i.e. planned on roadmap but not currently under active development). The Blender team currently have a lot of projects on and are resource bound so have prioritized focus on finishing developments such as Evee Next, GPU compositing etc before starting other projects such as Apps. For more detail see: https://www.blender.org/development/projects-to-look-forward-in-2024/ https://www.blender.org/development/projects-to-look-forward...
    - KeplerBoy 3y ago
      Happy to see the idea is not abandoned!
  - incrudible 3y ago
    Blender is already being used for that purpose, it doesn't have a specific aim, and that is one of its strengths. The question remains: Why would you strip away and partially re-implement all the UI? You never know what your users might have needed that you took away.

xyst 3y ago

This is very cool. So people don’t have to buy an autodesk product to view these types of plans. Been trying to figure out the best way to document the structure of my home. I think Blender + this add on looks like a great start. I suspect there will be a massive learning curve though.

aothms 3y ago
There's some great resources online, such as https://www.youtube.com/@IfcArchitect https://www.youtube.com/@IfcArchitect
ur-whale 3y ago
> So people don’t have to buy an autodesk product to view these types of plans. Can Autodesk products still be bought these days ? I thought they had switched to full-on leech mode (subscription).

bibelo 3y ago

Since the article use TLAs and does not explain what it's about, I guess it's not for me.

ur-whale 3y ago
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msds 3y ago
Don't worry, if you don't know what BIM is, you don't need BIM and you should be thankful about your previous life choices. Weirdly, no one in BIM really seems to agree on what BIM actually is either.

bionhoward 3y ago

As a noob who doesn’t know what BIM stands for, one easy way to improve this website would be to expand the acronym above the fold. Yes, I’ll Google it.

dubcanada 3y ago
It's not really for people who don't know what BIM means. Its the same as a bunch of techy stuff with techy terms, if you know the terms it is for you. If you don't just close the website and move on.
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jcims 3y ago

@pushmatrix on Twitter/X has some really interesting integrations between the Vision Pro and Blender. Look at the real time modeling and Chores 2.0 posts examples. I imagine this would also be a good candidate for integration like that.

Nelkins 3y ago

Anybody know how this compares to the architecture workbench in FreeCAD?

naasking 3y ago
See my related post [1]. The NativeIFC add on talks about BlenderBIM. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706564

mattlondon 3y ago

Very interested in this sort of thing to create a "digital twin" of my home for various purposes (home automation visualisation, overlaying security camera feeds on "real" geometry (e.g. show camera feeds as textures on my house's garden etc in 3D view), trying out some remodelling ideas on VR etc Has anyone tried anything like this and has some advice?

greggsy 3y ago
Matterport is the industry standard for real estate walkthroughs, but it’s not cheap. On the other end of the spectrum, and possible the easiest way to get something up and running, is the web version of SweetHome3D [1]. It is rough in some places and somewhat limited, but it has been around for ever, and still has a lot of potential. It’s also available as an add-on for HomeAssistant. [1] https://www.sweethome3d.com/ https://www.sweethome3d.com/
- lazulicurio 3y ago
  Seconding the plug for sh3d. And the source is relatively accessible if you want to make modifications---I patch my personal copy to allow zero-height walls and floors which can make doing more complicated geometry easier.
- filleokus 3y ago
  > Matterport is the industry standard for real estate walkthroughs, but it’s not cheap The hardware is not cheap, but if you have a (friendly) realtor in the area they might be able to let you scan it for a resonable price. Or a dedicated scanning company if you have those in your area. Worked at a company who had these for doing scans of offices, and you could get the scan in different standard file formats for not a huge price (iirc). https://support.matterport.com/s/article/Matterport-Assets-You-Can-Download?language=en_US&ardId=kA05d000001DX13CAG https://support.matterport.com/s/article/Matterport-Assets-Y...
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
I continue to use SketchUp for that, as is the closest thing to CAD I can quickly work in without needing to spend a month in training first.

sahillavingia 3y ago

Big believer in Blender becoming the default tool to design and build buildings this century.

mistrial9 3y ago
ok - except more interesting buildings were built long before 3D models. I see repetitive and featureless buildings done with this software, for sure. Other than that, not certain at all..
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greggsy 3y ago

I would love to see this integrated with data from Home Assistant. Presumably would be difficult with MQTT.

1-6 3y ago

Revit is not BIM and it’s terrible at it.

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

Related: BIM and IFC – What are IFC models, and how do BIM and IFC relate?: https://plannerly.com/bim-and-ifc-models/ https://plannerly.com/bim-and-ifc-models/

idontknowtech 3y ago

I'm an architect, and I can't imagine using blender to design anything architectural. Purpose built architecture BIM software like Revit is just way better. Expensive, but better

epaulson 3y ago

The fun thing about BlenderBIM is that it's IFC-native. (IFC is the 'Industrial Foundation Classes' - a data model/structure for modeling buildings and the components, systems, and intangibles like construction schedules.) BlenderBIM is internally managing everything with the IfcOpenShell library - all of the data uses the Python interfaces of IfcOpenShell (which internally has a lot of C) to keep the model state. Blender is more a rendering backend and nice UI to manipulate the state of the IFC model with IfcOpenShell - but basically everything you can do with the Blender GUI you can pop open a shell and just type in Python and do the same thing. This means you'll occasionally see some Blender things that don't do what you expect to the model you're editing - there are ways to have Blender do state modifications that don't all get translated to the IFC data underneath, so sometimes doing things like selections or modifiers are surprising for Blender users. (I think over time the list of things that are like this has gotten a lot smaller, and BlenderBIM is now pretty good about keeping the state of what's displayed in Blender in sync with what the underlying IFC model is storing) The main commercial player in this space is Autodesk Revit. There is a lot of thinking that perhaps Revit has reached a point as a platform where Autodesk can't keep building on it (i.e. it has so much tech debt that it's getting hopeless) - see https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ https://letters-to-autodesk.com/ Autodesk has a number of other 3D modeling software packages and I sometimes think that for their next generation of Revit they should consider the BlenderBIM approach and maybe build on top of Maya or one of their other offerings.

tylerflick 3y ago
Has anything actually been moving in this space? From what I recall Autodesk had the US market bottled up, and IFC was really only being adopted in the EU.

naasking 3y ago

FreeCAD also has some BIM options: * https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC * https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench * https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC

airbreather 3y ago

If anyone wants to create an additional capability for modelling all the stuff with wires (power, comms, security etc) I can give you an exact spec how to do this, there is a little more to the detils than first apparent. I don't really have the current ability, or time, to do it myself but for the right person a good spec could really head them off in the right direction. How would I know? I just spent near two decades working with an in house tool developed for electrical/instrument modelling alone. I have seen some things that do work, some that don't and a bunch of details, over this time period as they developed and refined, and have a pretty good idea what would work. Msg me if anyone is interested.

Moult 3y ago
This would be very much appreciated. The best way to do this is to post on https://community.osarch.org/ https://community.osarch.org/ with as much details as possible on a specification. You will also find other electrical engineers there who can provide feedback. It may also "not be the right time" (i.e. all the devs are busy tackling other issues) but sooner or later someone will look at it and find it a valuable resource to implement.