Bonsai v0.8.3 has been released with 770 new features and fixes. The release notes describe this as a polish-heavy update, with a lot of work going into bug fixes, usability, optimisation, and smaller improvements across the project. ...
The Castle Game Engine is a free, open source, cross-platform (desktop, mobile, console, web) 3D and 2D game engine. It comes with a powerful visual editor and support for open standards like glTF, X3D, … and now IFC - a key open standard used in BIM. ...
If you had to choose software to begin working in architectural design, which would be your first choice? Many might think that a BIM solution such as BlenderBIM or FreeCAD would be the ideal choice. In many cases, they offer numerous advantages. However, despite these advanced and modern workflows, a simple 2D CAD solution can still address most of our project needs. ...
Last week, a new stable release of FreeCAD has been published, tagged 0.21. This release is mostly there to provide a stable point before implementing Toponaming resolution functionality. Toponaming is how we call the problem of unstable reference names in FreeCAD (Edge1 might become Edge5 after a shape recompute), it is the last big issue the development team wants to solve before deeming FreeCAD good for the mythical 1.0 release. ...
For the past 8 weeks, I’ve been working on the BlenderBIM Add-on’s Brickschema authoring module as part of the Google Summer of Code Program. I’m pretty new to the schema, but I’ve learned a lot about its usage and implications! ...
Imagine GIT for IFC files. That is, imagine a tool that keeps track of changes to an IFC file over the duration of a design project–a tool that allows branching or forking of different design options from a distributed team, and tool that can asynchronously merge these revisions together. ...
Google Summer of Code is an annual programme that helps students and those new to open source software make their first steps into contributing code to software projects. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors. ...
CAD Sketcher is an add-on to Blender based on SolveSpace that brings the ability to draw parametrically constrained CAD profiles, arcs, and circles. These sketches may have multiple orientations, and are then booleaned together to form parts. ...
In the AEC industry, integrating game engines into the design process has become increasingly popular due to technological advances. Add-ons such as Enscape, Twinmotion, Lumion and D5 Render provide real-time visualisation and VR capability to traditional authoring software, including Revit, Rhino and Sketchup. The common ground of that software is that those add-ons are developed based on game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity 3D. Even though they are free to use for the AEC purpose, they are not entirely open source but rather source available. ...
Over the past year, Sigma Dimensions™️ has been releasing free short-format video tutorials on IFC basics. The IFC-101 series contains 10 free episodes taking you from an introduction to the IFC schema up to building a native IFC native application - All with python. ...