Greetings, love the work you guys are doing here, keep it up!
I see a rapid development with Blender and BlenderBIM. Often i feel like both Revit, ArchiCAD and Rhino is not that great for reading and writing IFC and other BIM formats. As an consultant engineer I usually receive IFC and need to work from there. So my question is: will there be a Blender plugin for Pollination? I have seen some Ladybug tools blender work previously. What are your thoughts on Blender?
Hi @tk1, Thank you for the kind comments.
The short answer is that we don’t have any immediate plans to support Blender/IFC as an official integration. I know this is not what you were hoping for but that’s the hard decision that we had to make to ensure we can guarantee the minimum quality of the workflows.
Here is the longer answer:
I would like to think about this as an integration with IFC knowing that BlenderBIM is using IFC under the hood as their authoring format. The idea of IFC <> HBJSON/Pollination has come up a few times. Here are a few links from old to new.
The main challenge is the reliability of the IFC files. I have copied my comments from LinkedIn here that explains why we don’t have official support for IFC at this point:
What I have come to learn is that building workflows that rely on formats with a broader scope like IFC and gbXML can be unpredictable and because of that disappointing.
I’m following the development of BlenderBIM from far away but with so much hope to finally have a platform to visualize and fix the downstream issues with the IFC models. If that happens then writing a translator from IFC to HBJSON is not necessarily so hard. In particular, for IDA-ICE - and since it doesn’t need solving the adjacencies for the input model - if your model has the correct IFC spaces, simplifying the apertures and making the HBJSON is very doable.
I don’t think we will officially support the IFC format anytime soon until we know there are ways to validate the input IFC reliably. This is not to make the workflow perfect but to make it predictable so people can rely on it for their day-to-day job.
Thank you @mostapha for elaborating and links. I totally agree with the challenges with unpredictable IFC models. A lot have happened the past 6 months and I am optimistic about the future 