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. ...
Louis Trümpler announced that point clouds are coming to IFClite as part of the same browser-native openBIM workflow, rather than as a separate viewer or visual overlay. The first pass includes LAS / LAZ streaming, E57 / PLY / PCD readers, Web Worker decoding, WebGPU point rendering, colour modes for RGB, classification, intensity, height, and fixed colour, plus federation-aware point picking. ...
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. ...
Olympus has been open sourced as a toolkit for building and prototyping 3D web applications for architecture, engineering, construction, and operations. The project combines a Three.js-based 3D editor, Monaco code editor, Chart.js dashboards, undo-redo, configurable UI, and an extensible addon system. ...
Louis Trümpler announced federated loading support in IFClite, a browser-native IFC viewer and toolkit built with WebGPU and Rust/WASM. For IFC4.3 and earlier workflows, federation means loading multiple IFC models side by side with collision-safe IDs, per-model visibility, unified spatial hierarchy handling, and selection across model boundaries. ...
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. ...
The Blender Foundation has announced a major leadership transition. Ton Roosendaal, Blender’s founder and long-time chair and CEO, will step down from those roles on 1 January 2026. Francesco Siddi, currently Blender’s COO, will take over as executive director. ...
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! ...