BIMvoice Academy has opened its practical openBIM training library for free. In an OSArch community post, Petru Conduraru says the free material includes courses on IFC schema in practice, IDS, Revit to IFC, native IFC building modelling, bridge modelling in IFC4x3, Bonsai, and drawing production directly from IFC. ...
IFClite has merged PR #1024, replacing its two boolean backends with a single pure-Rust exact CSG kernel. The browser build previously relied on the C++ Manifold library via WASM cross-compilation; the native server path used an in-tree BSP port. Both are gone. The new kernel is a clean-room mesh-arrangement implementation: operand meshes are intersected conformingly (shared symbolic vertices for line-plane and triple-plane intersection points), re-triangulated under exact predicates, then classified for difference, union, or intersection. Every topology decision routes through a predicate cascade (interval filter, fixed-width tier, BigRational oracle) built on Shewchuk adaptive predicates for explicit coordinates and Cherchi-style indirect predicates (Attene 2020) for implicit intersection geometry. The public API (processGeometryBatch, SDK surface) is unchanged; consumers see different triangulations wherever booleans fire. ...
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. ...
Yorik van Havre has announced LinesCAD, a new side project exploring a simpler free software BIM and 2D CAD application. The first public code is a proof-of-concept IFC viewer in a single Python file, using IfcOpenShell, Pivy/Coin3D, and PySide/Qt to open IFC files without FreeCAD’s OpenCASCADE and C++ application stack. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...