BIMvoice

A BIM title can hide a competence gap.

The title tells you the responsibility, not whether the person can meet it.

None of those titles proves that the person understands IFC, IDS or IFC model validation.

The role tells you what they are responsible for.

It does not prove that they can do it.

If the role is responsible for openBIM delivery, the tender should ask for evidence of openBIM competence.

A buildingSMART Practitioner certification could be one accepted form of that evidence.

1 hour ago | [YT] | 0

BIMvoice

I give away everything I know for free.

Inside BIMvoice Academy there are full courses on IFC, IDS, Bonsai and openBIM workflows, made by me and four other instructors who teach from their own project work. Practical exercises, real files, and a community where real questions get real answers every week. Thank you Menno, Lloyd, Stefano and Yuri for your dedication and for the amazing materials you created.

People ask me why we do not charge for it. The honest answer is that the industry's problem is not too few paid courses. It is that most people never get past the buzzwords to the practical part, and that keeps the whole field smaller than it should be.

The BIMvoice Academy access is free and stays free: www.skool.com/bimvoiceacademy

1 day ago | [YT] | 5

BIMvoice

The first question anybody asks a model is what is this.

Not what are its properties. Not what system is it in. What is it. Everything else is built on that answer, and if it is missing nothing else can be used.

That is why a model full of proxies is worse than a model with missing properties. A wall with no fire rating is still a wall. Somebody can find it, count it, check it and come back to you about the one thing that is missing. A proxy is not anything. There is no list it belongs to.

I see this most often with custom families. They were never mapped in the export, so they came through as proxies, and nobody noticed because in a viewer a proxy looks like whatever it is shaped like.

The people who notice are the ones who receive the model. They notice immediately, because their first filter returns nothing.

If you want to know whether this is happening in your own deliveries, it takes a minute. Open the last model you sent and count how many elements are proxies. Not the properties, not the naming, just how many elements do not say what they are.

Geometry answers what it looks like. The class is what makes it a model instead of a drawing.

2 days ago | [YT] | 5

BIMvoice

For a long time I thought IFC was unreliable too.

I would export a model, open it in another tool and something would be wrong. Missing properties, geometry that behaved strangely, elements that came through as the wrong type. It was easier to blame the format than to work out why.

What changed it for me was learning to read the file itself instead of only looking at it in a viewer. Once you can see what is actually inside, the mystery goes away fast. The information was not lost. It was never exported.

Usually the export settings were at default and nobody had touched them. Sometimes the properties the other side needed lived in a place the mapping did not cover. Sometimes the geometry was written as a mesh, which looks fine on screen and falls apart the moment anyone tries to use it.

None of that is IFC failing. That is a file doing exactly what it was told by settings nobody had decided.

The harder lesson underneath it is that you cannot configure an export properly until you know what the receiver actually needs. Without that you are guessing, and the export dialog is just where your guess gets saved.

I still meet companies who tried IFC once, had a bad experience, and stopped. I understand why. But nobody goes back to check whether it was the format or the settings.

If it went wrong for you, did you ever find out which one it was?

And if you want to get better at this part, there are a few good courses on it inside BIMvoice Academy. Free to join: www.skool.com/bimvoiceacademy

3 days ago | [YT] | 5

BIMvoice

A BCF issue can contain the correct comment and the correct camera position, and still show the wrong elements.

I saw a case this week where a viewpoint created to isolate three elements did the opposite in the receiving tool. It hid those three elements and showed everything else. The sender highlighted a problem. The receiver looked at a screen where the problem was the only thing missing.

This happens because a viewpoint is more than a camera. It also carries visibility instructions. Which components are visible, which are selected, which are colored, where the clipping planes sit. The camera part is simple. The visibility part leaves room for interpretation, and tools do not always interpret it the same way.

So two people can open the same issue and see two different things, both convinced they are looking at what was sent.

If your issue workflow depends on BCF, it is worth one simple test. Create a viewpoint that isolates a few elements in your tool, open it in the tool your partners use, and compare. Five minutes, and you know whether your issues arrive the way you send them.

Have you ever had a BCF issue that made no sense until you opened it in the original tool?

4 days ago | [YT] | 2

BIMvoice

Some IFC models simply have too much stuff inside.

Furniture. Lighting. Mechanical fasteners. Heavy proxy geometry.

All useful information for somebody. But not every person working with the model needs to load all of it every time.

Lloyd started with a 109 MB IFC exported from Revit. He took these elements out of the main file and placed them in separate IFC files.

Then he linked them in Bonsai and worked with the files as a federation.

The main working IFC became 65 MB. It opened in Bonsai in 21 seconds instead of 38. In Revit, it opened in 3 minutes 13 seconds instead of 4 minutes 44 seconds.

All five files together were still around 108 MB. The point was not to make the complete dataset much smaller.

The point was to stop forcing every person to load information they did not need for their work.

Watch the video to see how Lloyd separated the IFC and federated the files in Bonsai.

5 days ago | [YT] | 3

BIMvoice

I started BIMvoice while working in Norway. Today I run it from Sibiu, Romania.

The 13 students who have passed the official buildingSMART Foundation exam with BIMvoice are based in 12 different countries:

France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States.

I am especially happy that this latest exam brought our first successful Foundation student based in Africa. Welcome, Dennis from Uganda.

openBIM is international by definition. Still, seeing people from three continents learning together inside BIMvoice means a lot to me.

Thirteen students from twelve countries. All passed on their first attempt.

Thank you for trusting me with your preparation.

6 days ago | [YT] | 5

BIMvoice

Louis Trümpler recently added a Ribbon menu to IFClite.

You can still switch back to the Classic bar, so now you can choose between the two.

Which one do you prefer?

Ribbon or Classic?

1 week ago | [YT] | 5

BIMvoice

IFClite has 291 stars on GitHub.

I think the real number of people using it is already in the thousands. I cannot prove that because you do not need an account to open the browser tool. But 291 stars still feels far too low for what this project has become.

It started as a lightweight way to open an IFC in the browser. Today the repository can parse, view, query, edit, validate and export IFC. It supports IDS, BCF, model comparison, clash detection and much more.

The repository already has 1,410 commits and 87 forks. This is serious open source work by @Louis Trümpler and @LTplus AG, available for anyone to use and build on.

I use IFClite regularly in my own model reviews and training. It runs in the browser, processes the IFC locally and does not require another software licence just to inspect what is inside your file.

If you have never used it, open one IFC today: www.ifclite.com/

If you already use it, or simply want more open source IFC tools to survive, star the repository: github.com/LTplus-AG/ifc-lite

This tool deserves more than 291.

1 week ago | [YT] | 18

BIMvoice

The next buildingSMART Foundation exam with BIMvoice is on 22 August.

If you have been thinking about taking Foundation, there is still enough time to prepare for this sitting.

The training takes around 15 hours and is self paced. Most students complete it in two to four weeks while working full time.

You go through the five modules, complete the quizzes I made, then join at least one live preparation meeting with me. That meeting is where we check if you are ready before I register you for the exam.

Ten BIMvoice students have taken the official Foundation exam so far. All ten passed on their first attempt.

I will not rush anyone into an exam. If your preparation shows that you need more time, there will be another sitting in September.

Want to take the exam on 22 August?

Send me a message with FOUNDATION and I will send you the details.

1 week ago | [YT] | 3