Category: BIMserver

Free IFC Web Server

Luke Johnson

I have posted about BIMserver a few times before, including how to setup and run your own IFC web server. It seems that BIMserver and IFCWebserver are actually different but similar things (see this page). There is a publicly accessible instance of IFC Web Server over at this link.

The hosted version seems to be a bit of tech demonstration rather than a full production tool? Here is a link to the GitHub repos as well.

To test it out, you can take these basic steps:

  1. Create a user account and login
  2. Upload an IFC file (I tried a 20mb file which took quite a while)
  3. Wait for processing
  4. View and work with your file

Here is a look at the basic interface:

It offers a few interesting functions, including the ability to browse the data as a tree:

 

From the website:

IFC WebServer is a data model server and online viewer for Building Information Models (BIM) based on IFC standards.

It aims to simplify sharing and exchanging of information from BIM models using open and standard formats like (IFC, HTML, XML, CSV, JSON) and check the quality of BIM models (Level of Details, Level of Development). BIM managers and designers can query, filter and make reports about any information inside IFC models easily.

The project consists mainly of two parts:

(1) Data model server IFCWebServer

IFCWebServer enable 100% access to all information and relations inside IFC models. It supports  all IFC official release starting with IFC2X_Final issued on 2001 to the latest release IFC4 Add 2 release issued on July 2016. Moreover, it supports any valid IFC sub schema or extended schema so it can be used by researchers and IFC developers .

The IFCWebServer can be used also in universities as an easy to use portal within BIM courses. Students can register and upload IFC models, explore the models structure, apply filters, create sub-models, generate reports, study the IFC data model and compare IFC official releases.

(2) Online BIMViewer

Despite of having easy access to the information in BIM models as the main interest (through queries, filters, scripts and reports), the online 3D visualization offered by BIMViewer provide an handy way to view, share BIM models and visualize the results of data queries online inside the web browser.

How to Merge IFC Files for Free, and How to Set Up BIMserver 1.4.0 for Local IFC Management

Luke Johnson

Ever wondered how to install and use BIMserver to create your own IFC web viewer?

Sometimes I finish a blog post and think, what a mess…

That’s because I often sketch out things as I do them, on the fly. And so you end up with essentially a collection of notes. In any case, here are my notes on how I got BIMserver up and running on my workstation, so that I can view, merge and work with IFC files locally. I hope you can understand the fragments of thought below 🙂

Prerequisites
The bimserver Java module will be limited by the Java version on your system. So, if you want to be able use big memory, you should be running a 64 bit Java engine.

Install JDK for 64 bit windows, such as from here:

Windows x64 187.31 MB jdk-8u77-windows-x64.exe

Download and Installation
Release 1.4.0-FINAL-2015-11-04 · opensourceBIM/BIMserver

osbim.png

Put the bimserver jar file in some logical place on your computer, it will create subfolders here.

Important Note! I discovered that bimserver doesn’t play nicely with file paths that have a whitespace character, so use underscores if you have to…

Start by double clicking the JAR file – bimserver-1.4.0-FINAL-2015-11-04.jar

Then, tweak settings to your liking. Here are mine:

settings.png

Click Start

Allow the BIMserver engine to initialize itself for a few moments, it will create a bunch of folders.

Once its ready, you might have to give it access through Windows Firewall

firewall.png

Click Launch Webbrowser, then fill out the login details:

ui.png

Once logged in to the client in the browser, use Project – New Project, and give it a name.

You now have a space where you can upload, merge, view, query and validate IFC files.

To Merge IFC Files

  1. Add ‘sub projects’ for each IFC you want to merge
  2. Checkin a model to each subproject
  3. You can now view the 3D merged IFC model in your web browser by clicking on the top level ‘eye’ symbol and wait for Loading to complete
  4. Also, you can download the top level ‘merged’ project as a single IFC

 

SUBPROJ.png

To test your merged model, you can immediately create a New Project and Checkin your merged model.

Further notes
You can now create multi-tasked IFC geometry tasks, which look like this:

ifc%2Bmultitasking.png

Sometimes they use lots of memory!

geommem.png

Keep in mind that this is essentially a web application. The ‘next level’ would be to set this up to run on your company webserver to share IFC models internally or to everyone via the cloud.

The source for the web viewer is here:
opensourceBIM/bimvie.ws: Javascript client for Building Information Modelling, using open standards like IFC, BCF and BIMSie. Using Bootstrap, BIM Surfer, etc..

This video may be of interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqIVylRMRu0