A few years ago, I worked on IFC format support for Sweet Home 3D with the help of another developer, but the plug-in still needs some refinements before being published. It's not so motivating because there aren't so often requests about this feature. My feeling is IFC / BIM world doesn't seem to match the target of Sweet Home 3D. The few IFC examples we could find at that moment were rare and generally reproduced big buildings. Not really the same thing as Sweet Home 3D, where you can find many examples (probably because it's open source), reproducing not very large homes. But maybe this changed during the past years...
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
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Re: SH3D and IFC
IFC is relevant these days, with IFC you can create a workflow with Revit, AutoCAD Architecture and FreeCAD, if you check in the freeCAD forums, they are trying to create an import-export SH3D format, but they are requesting for help.
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Joined: Jun 24, 2020
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Re: SH3D and IFC
A few years ago, I worked on IFC format support for Sweet Home 3D with the help of another developer, but the plug-in still needs some refinements before being published. It's not so motivating because there aren't so often requests about this feature.
I just have a question, why finish a html5 export instead IFC import export plugin? Is html5 easier or superior to IFC?
My feeling is IFC / BIM world doesn't seem to match the target of Sweet Home 3D...
You might check old autodesk dragonfly, revit formit or sketchup files for inspiration, sh3d is considerated a predesign program and that mean that already can be considerate as part of a bim workflow
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Re: SH3D and IFC
[...] they are trying to create an import-export SH3D format, but they are requesting for help.
I would suggest to look at the DTD of Sweet Home 3D at http://www.sweethome3d.com/SweetHome3D.dtd or in HomeXMLHandler Javadoc. The file format is quite simple: a SH3D file is a zip file containing a Home.xml entry respecting that DTD and entries for images and 3D models referenced by icon, planIcon, model and image attributes. The data structure is quite similar to IFC as far as I remember.
why finish a html5 export instead IFC import export plugin?
Even if it's a big task, I prefer to finish HTML5 support for Sweet Home 3D because applets for its Online version and Viewer are dying from the lack of support of the Java plugin in browsers and they need a replacing solution. Support for IFC is a new feature so, as long as it isn't published, maintaining it isn't required yet. Keep also in mind that Sweet Home 3D is a program for a general audience, therefore supporting IFC in Sweet Home 3D is probably not the first thing expected by this public.
If you have some IFC files you can share, please send them to me or share them wherever you want.
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
...yes SketchUp and DragonFly probably are the best competitors for SH3D, but SH3D can create fastest drawings, and if they add a direct integration with PyFlow being both open sources, similar to Revit with Dynamo, could be more powerful and fastest than SketchUp.
