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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
The Seed Eco-Home 2 is an ambitious project to be the world’s only open source house design to be offered as a product you can replicate, not only as a DIY, but as a commercial offering. The open source design features a 1,000sf house that you can build for only 50,000USD in just one week with a friend. The house is code compliant, modular construction for a incredibly short build time, with the ability to build in parallel with non-skilled workers who can put together pieces like Lego. The end goal? To help solve affordable housing, and to transition the built environment economy away from the proprietary and towards the collaborative. ...