More than 10 years ago, the original IfcOpenHouse 🏠 was created by Thomas Krijnen by using the IfcOpenShell library 🐚. It consists of a single story building with a gable roof, sitting on top of a NURBS surface ⛰️. It includes a footing 🦶, walls 🧱🧱 with openings 🕳️ for doors 🚪 and windows 🪟, a roof 🛖… but above all, it gives an overview about how to programmatically build a simple IFC model from scratch 👩🏽💻.
Navigate through the following preview for yourself. Double click 🖱️ an element to gather entity info from the underlying IFC:
Check out the original blog post, as well as the C++ source if interested:
http://blog.ifcopenshell.org/2012/11/say-hi-to-ifcopenhouse.html
https://github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell/blob/master/src/examples/IfcOpenHouse.cpp
The current repository is an exercise to recreate that same model, but with the recent higher level IfcOpenShell Python API 🐚🐍. This same API is widely used today in the native IFC editing approach followed by BIM authoring software like BlenderBIM and FreeCAD, among others. At the end, there’s also a visualization cell with IFC.js, the BIM toolkit 🛠️ for JavaScript.
It is a basic tutorial, but some basic IFC and Python knowledge is required, as well as some basic trigonometry for the sizes and coordinates 👩🎓. One of the goals is to show how powerful Jupyter 🪐 Notebooks 📒 can be 💪 as an experimentation playground. Note that this notebook uses nbdev directives to automate the production of a script and a Quarto website, as well as helping with Git-friendly Jupyter.
These set of notebooks 📒 may be conveniently browsed through their Quarto website 🌎, or alternatively be run on your own end by cloning the repository. For the former, refer to the following section. For the latter, follow these installation instructions 📝.
You’ll need Mambaforge 🐍 installed in case you don’t have it already. Then, you may run the following commands to clone the repository and install all necessary dependencies ✅.
git clone https://github.com/cvillagrasa/IfcOpenHouse.git
mamba env create --file environment.yml
conda activate IfcOpenHouse
pip install -e .Using the editable flag -e, you will be able to use any further
changes you make to the notebooks and/or Python modules immediately.
As an extra step, use dark mode 🕵️♂️ if you wish (see jupyter-themes for more info):
jt -t chesterish -T -N -klYou may now launch the Jupyter 🪐 Notebook 📒 dashboard:
jupyter notebookAnd that’s it! you are now ready to locally open the notebook
nbs/00_generation.ipynb and start having fun 🥳.
Lastly, you may also want to edit the JavaScript code 👩🏽💻 for the model
preview by running npm i from the viz directory, and regenerating
the bundle with npm run build_nb.
Alternatively, you may just start by browsing the contents firstly, and perhaps attempt to run it locally later. Just go to generation and you’ll find an IfcOpenHouse generation online walkthrough 🚀🚀🚀.