Tridify, an IFC data streaming service that supports open source

Tridify, an IFC data streaming service that supports open source

screenshot of tridify viewer

Tridify is an IFC data streaming service to facilitate BIM models visualizations. With Tridify you can easily share and view IFC models in any web browser. Although it is a proprietary service, Tridify supports open source projects, according to Jukka Muhonen, Head of Production at Tridify:

We think that open BIM is the cornerstone of virtual construction and information sharing. Tridify has always been a contributor to several open source communities like ifcOpenshell, BabylonJS, IFC standard and others. The reason being is we see open source and open standards as assets for the whole industry. Our Tridify solution aims to solve specific use cases but also, by providing our expertise to the open source communities, we help them to be more innovate when solving the broader spectrum of use cases and issues for the whole industry.

The service works by publishing the IFC data directly to Unreal Engine. Using a standard format such IFC proved to be the best choice as Muhonen mentions: “To be able to reach as wide an audience as possible, we chose IFC since it’s a standard in the AEC sector and can be exported from any BIM/CAD authoring tool. We wanted to give our users the opportunity to choose which design tool they wanted, without any vendor locking or proprietary formats.”

One of the open source projects that is used to provide this service is IfcOpenShell, that helps with the conversion of the IFC geometry. Muhonen highlights the importance of this open source project to their business:

When Tridify was started in 2012, 9 years ago, we were a project company undertaking visualizations for AEC sector. In order to scale the business, we researched how to best deliver an automated BIM cloud processing service that offered the maximum amount of flexibility and precision when converting BIM models to polygon models. That’s when we discovered ifcOpenShell. We started creating our cloud service with ifcOpenShell as part of our BIM processing pipeline. From there on, we have been part of the ifcOpenShell community and have also been contributing to the project. ifcOpenShell is by far the best IFC to polygon open source data conversion SDK out there.

Thanks for Jukka Muhonen and the Tridify team for kindly attending to our questions.

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