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.
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.
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)?
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.)
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.
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).
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)
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).
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.
> ... "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.
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".
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
EDIT: removed typo
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
Has anyone tried anything like this and has some advice?
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/
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...
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.
Can Autodesk products still be bought these days ?
I thought they had switched to full-on leech mode (subscription).
https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/
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.
* https://github.com/yorikvanhavre/FreeCAD-NativeIFC
* https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench
* https://wiki.freecad.org/Arch_IFC