BCF (BIM Collaboration Format), some informations and questions ...

Mods Draft, Arch & BIM
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BCF Server and Forum

“BCF Server is a Wordpress plugin to create a ‘BCF topic server’ from your wordpress installation (including a webservice API). Ready for BCF 2.0, communicating with BIMserver.org.
BimConsiderationForum is a html/javascript ‘dashboard’ that combines BIMserver, BIM Surfer and BCF Server into a single view.”

I have not much idea how to achieve the 5 points above :blush:

Is BCF Server something relevant? Do not understand the technicality in BCF-XML… Sloth seems have a UI and ‘friendly’ to me :slight_smile: Anything these could be used ? or need to “Create an interface to display BCF files in Qt Designer…”

Happy 2019!

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There are quite a lot of articles on the net about bcf api, or client-server communication, or json, etc… But all this would only make sense if we have a server to talk to. And then it’s a whole other kind of problem.

I think bcf files are a simple thing: A list of issues, each one with some metadata like author, comments, date, status, etc… Bascially a big xml. And an “attached” model (is it always an IFC file? Couldn’t find much info about that) where you can look at the issue.

So I think we should start with the simple. But we’d need a set of good test files… I couldn’t find much on the net so far

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I can create some next week when I am back to work. I heavily use bcf at work.

No it does not need to be an ifc, AFAIK bcf references to uuid of the model and uuid of the objects, so even a FreeCAD model could work.

bernd

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Example from Autodesk Revit 2020 with KUBUS BCF Manager

Edit Issue dialogue:
https://i.imgur.com/j3prbMh.png

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KUBUS BIMcollab ZOOM: (IFC viewer + BCF Manager

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Agreed this would be great to include in FreeCAD. And it is not BIM specific in any way that I know of. Just a list of object, a camera view definition and some attached status and comments. There is no need to communicate with a BCF server in the initial implementation. As far as I can tell BIM server v1.5 has BCF integration but I haven’t found a freely accessible BIM server instance to test with and it would be a mission for me to set one up. That seems like an obvious implementation route.

I started this wikipedia page which I suggest we use for documenting some of what we find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIM_Collaboration_Format I will add the names of supported software as we find it. Here’s a listing of the software we’ve mentioned so far:

Tekla BimSight native integration: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&f=23&t=22641&start=10#p276638
Solibri Model Checker native integration: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&f=23&t=22641&start=10#p276639
Autodesk Navisworks with KUBUS BCF Manager: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&f=23&t=22641&start=10#p276640
Autodesk Revit with KUBUS BCF Manager: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&f=23&t=22641&p=302043#p302043zoom
KUBUS BIMcollab ZOOM: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?style=4&f=23&t=22641&p=302044#p302044

If you want to look at the BIMcollab server implementation you can use these credentials:

join.bimcollab.com
user:freecad1@lithgow-schmidt.dk
password: FreeCAD1

I see that yorik has mentioned FreeCAD can talk to BIMserver?

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GSOC proposal to make a BCF viewer here: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35465