Getting tired of re-exporting your Ifc files for submission and exchanges just because of a few tiny changes or corrections in the model? In fact, an Ifc file is not the end product of your BIM planing, but actually a start of you BIM journey. There are many ways to modify Ifc files, aside from re-exporting them. Let me just use this quick note series to document the workflows I found for different topics and leave the details for later.

Here the first topic - modifying Ifc files - and, by far, my personal favorite goes to:

Coding in Python with IfcOpenShell

Having known IfcOpenshell for a while, not unitl I dig more into it, did I realize how powerful and beautiful when using it with Python and its numerous available modules. Here are the tools one needs:

Personally, I like to put all of the resources together in one folder, in case I forget how it went later on. That’s why, for me, the virtual environment of Python together with VS Code create a great playground for coding and for the uncountable trials and errors. Here is the quick note for setting up:

  • Create a folder, where you want to gether all for your project.
  • Open the folder with VS Code.
  • Select your default Python intepreter
  • Open a terminal in VS Code, and do:
    • Install virtualenv pip install virtualenv
    • Install ifcopenshell pip install ifcopenshell
  • Create a virtual environment
    • Windows Python3 -m venv /path/to/venv
    • Mac python3 -m venv venv
  • Select Python intepreter form the virtual environment /path/to/venv/Scripts/Python.exe
  • Activate the virtual environment
    • Windows /path/to/venv/Scripts/activate
    • Mac source /path/to/venv/bin/activate
  • In terminal, run pip install ifcopenshell
  • Create a play.py file for testing
    • import ifcopenshell
    • ifc = ifcopenshell.open(/path/to/ifc)
    • print(ifc)

That’s it! Now you can retrieve information and also modify the ifc model. Let’s go into some details later on. Until then, there are great examples and documentations for ifcopenshel:

  • Like learnig every other programming language, Hello World is always the best first step.

Stay tuned!