[HN Gopher] BlenderBIM - add-on for beautiful, detailed, and dat...
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BlenderBIM - add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM
with Blender
Author : Teever
Score : 206 points
Date : 2024-03-14 03:54 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blenderbim.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blenderbim.org)
| pzs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This looks interesting! It might be a great companion for the
| BlenderDMX addon [1].
|
| [1] https://blenderdmx.eu/
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| How?
| ZiiS wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Might be best to disclose that you seem to be the lead
| developer of BlenderDMX ;-)
| vanous wrote:
| Correct, thanks, didn't realize it's better to mention. This
| is an open source project.
| ur-whale wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's 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.)
| phkahler wrote:
| Blender doesn't support STEP file import or export, so it
| is not a viable CAD program. The add-on is probably great
| for creating dimensioned parts for use in animations and
| other things Blender does. But there is no interoperability
| with manufacturing or simulation tools.
| aliher1911 wrote:
| It is a stretch to call Blender a CAD. What I think
| distinguishes parametric CADs is that in Blender you edit
| the body while in CAD you edit a set of operations that
| produce the body. This sequence is then processed by
| geometric modelling kernel to produce the end result.
| Editing and rendering is the easier part of it.
|
| Sketcher mentioned is probably letting you create dimension
| accurate objects by hand, but it is far from being a proper
| CAD.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| A 5s check of the documentation (so I may be way off),
| looks like Sketcher co-opts blender's UI to make it a
| front end to a CAD app (SolveSpace). So it does get you
| operations modeled to geometry like a real CAD app.
| chossenger wrote:
| In my experience, it isn't really very good at it. I've moved
| to OpenSCAD for cad work, and am very happy with its design
| philosophy (if not its user experience)
| tdudhhu wrote:
| CAD modeling in Blender is only possible with geometry nodes.
|
| I did some projects using geometry nodes. It is a nice step
| towards CAD modeling because it is fully parametric.
|
| CAD models are mathematical models and thus infinit accurate.
| Solid models are not. But sometimes they are good enough. I
| create a lot of models in Blender for 3D printing.
| Moult wrote:
| In the BlenderBIM Add-on, CAD modeling works by providing a
| dedicated modeling interface that interacts with the IFC data
| model. IFC is an ISO standard that describes geometry, data,
| objects, processes, and relationships, for the built
| environment (i.e. BIM). IFC's geometry is based on STEP, so
| modeling in IFC has similarities to modeling in STEP. You can
| have swept solid extrusions, revolutions, true arcs and
| circles, but also some things that don't exist in STEP but
| are specific to the built environment, like the parameters
| for an I-shaped beam.
|
| So like other Blender add-ons that do this already (e.g. CAD
| Sketcher) the BlenderBIM Add-on bypasses Blender for most
| geometric operations. You define using the dedicated modeling
| interface, the IFC data model is updated, then the triangles
| are visualised by Blender, but the under-the-hood CAD
| definition is there.
|
| The geometry processing layer is done by IfcOpenShell, which
| is a layer on top of OpenCASCADE (but in the future, may make
| more use of CGAL or its own custom geometry processing code).
|
| That said modeling buildings are typically simpler than
| manufacturing CAD modeling. Buildings have forgiving
| construction tolerances, and are often assemblages of off-
| the-shelf products where it is not necessary to redefine the
| exact product shapes. (i.e. place a packer here, place a
| sprinkler there, whether the sprinkler looks like a sprinkler
| or is geometrically just a cube in my model makes little
| difference to construction or maintenance operations).
| blooalien wrote:
| > ... "on the path to becoming the standard platform for
| everything 3D."
|
| For a great many purposes it's already there, and for what
| little that Blender isn't capable of in that space, there's
| always things like the Godot Engine, which happens to be a
| rather Blender-friendly game engine. If I remember correctly,
| there's a couple few other open source game engines that also
| go out of their way to support Blender as a part of the
| workflow, but Godot is the one I'm currently learning /
| somewhat familiar with.
| fsloth wrote:
| Rendering the triangle meshes and polygon meshes is actually a
| 'nice to have' tip of the iceberg in CAD/CAM/BIM flows and
| Blender doesn't really help in the domain problem as such.
|
| In general design workflows feed data to downstream consumers.
| Two top 'consume' pipelines are around drawings and CNC machine
| control (STEP).
|
| Rendering everything nicely is something that is nice to have
| but does not help in the design process, and for project
| coordination you probably want an online shared project view
| (e.g. Trimble Connect and many others).
|
| As a private consumer it's ofc nice to have a free too to use
| to tap into industrial data flows but it does not really help
| you in integrating into them (at least yet, but I might be
| wrong - data is just data).
| ur-whale wrote:
| I never claimed that Blender was at the level of more focused
| CAD/CAM and other specialized tool.
|
| I also never claimed that rendering was the only thing you'd
| ever want to do downstream of building a CAD model. There is
| a ton of things other than rendering you might want to do
| with a 3D model initially produced in a cutting-edge CAD
| package, none of which are possible in the package itself.
|
| On the other hand, if you've ever tried to import - say - an
| animation or a blob-based model in something like Fusion 360
| or Catia ... the whole thing is simply laughable.
|
| Whereas Blender can gobble up pretty much anything that looks
| like 3D data and give you a huge list of tools to manipulate,
| edit, display, and change it. No other tools, proprietary or
| OSS can get anywhere near it in terms of generality.
|
| The fact that Blender, and everything it can do even for a
| straight CAD-to-manufacturing pipeline is not on your radar
| doesn't mean it doesn't exist or make it less interesting.
| rjsw wrote:
| I still think that it would have been better if BIM had not
| been created in opposition to STEP.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Took me some minutes to find out: BIM is Building Information
| Model. EDIT: "building" as in "houses".
| Lockal wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jchrisa wrote:
| This seems like a textbook case where AI could let you
| have your cake and eat it too. Eg work in the easy 2d
| domain with maybe unstructured sticky notes. have a
| deterministic pipeline from 2d to geometric checking,
| with I guess patch points for the manual stuff. and then
| have AI draw up and maintain the BIM. It seems tailor
| made to copilot those adhd tasks you describe.
| buzer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Would it be useful if elements contained some kind of
| "confirm date" field as well as "create date" field
| (create date would be the time it got pasted) and likely
| "last modified" on objects? Or would it be unreliable due
| to them e.g. not really taking surrounding changes in
| account?
| fsloth wrote:
| BIM is a well known acronym in the building&construction
| market where this plugin is intended to be used.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| 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/
| incrudible wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Happy to see the idea is not abandoned!
| incrudible wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's some great resources online, such as
| https://www.youtube.com/@IfcArchitect
| ur-whale wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Since the article use TLAs and does not explain what it's about,
| I guess it's not for me.
| msds wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| @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.
| doulouUS wrote:
| Is there a public repository of BIM files so that I can play
| around on potentially more complex buildings?
| aothms wrote:
| Have a look at https://openifcmodel.cs.auckland.ac.nz/
| https://github.com/buildingSMART/Sample-Test-Files/
| https://duraark.github.io/duraark-data/
| Nelkins wrote:
| Anybody know how this compares to the architecture workbench in
| FreeCAD?
| naasking wrote:
| See my related post [1]. The NativeIFC add on talks about
| BlenderBIM.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706564
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| filleokus wrote:
| > 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-Y...
| lazulicurio wrote:
| 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.
| sahillavingia wrote:
| Big believer in Blender becoming the default tool to design and
| build buildings this century.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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..
| greggsy wrote:
| I would love to see this integrated with data from Home
| Assistant. Presumably would be difficult with MQTT.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Revit is not BIM and it's terrible at it.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Related:
|
| BIM and IFC - What are IFC models, and how do BIM and IFC
| relate?:
|
| https://plannerly.com/bim-and-ifc-models/
| idontknowtech wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FreeCAD also has some BIM options:
|
| * https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC
|
| * https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench
|
| * https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC
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