Work is underway on Bonsai Viewer, a dedicated free software IFC viewer for model coordination and review. The gap is straightforward: there is no mature free software equivalent of Revizto, BIMcollab, Solibri, and similar coordination viewers. Bonsai Viewer aims to fill that gap, while also making it easier for others to build their own desktop, tablet, kiosk, on-site screen, or web-based IFC viewer applications on top of IfcOpenShell. ...
FreeCAD and BRL-CAD are both participating in Google Summer of Code 2026. GSoC remains one of the more practical ways for new contributors to enter established free software projects: applicants work with mentors on scoped development projects, while the host communities get focused time on features, refactoring, documentation, testing, and tooling that can otherwise be hard to fund. ...
Bonsai v0.8.5 has been released with 962 new features and fixes. The release is described as a “line in the sand”: a compatibility and consolidation checkpoint driven partly by Blender 5.1 support, the move to Python 3.13, and a lot of structural work preparing for larger changes ahead. ...
Bonsai v0.8.4 has been released with 1111 new features and fixes. The release brings Bonsai compatibility with Blender 5.0, which matters because Blender 5.0 is a major platform update and required compatibility work throughout the add-on. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
A new whitepaper has been published on Native IFC methodologies, authored by Bruno Postle, developer of Native IFC software Homemaker, and co-authored by Thomas Krijnen and Dion Moult, developers of Native IFC libraries and interfaces. The whitepaper helps define Native IFC, and how applications can collaborate in a decentralised, distributed manner. ...