topic Re: Has Archicad severe limitation with Ifcshaperepresentation in Collaboration with other software

Has Archicad severe limitation with Ifcshaperepresentation

iltonmpacheco — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:58:13 GMT

Hello everyone,

Since I believe Archicad (my choice) is a better software than Revit (the market´s choice), I´ve been trying hard to prove that Archicad can be also used for civil engineering (maybe I´m crazy or a dreamer). Thus, to prove my point, I´m facing the need of modelling rebars for concrete elements. So, as it will be naturally thousand of instances in a single project, I´m worried about the quantity of polygonal a model might end up and how it shall compromise the performance of the computer and the model.

Therefore, after consulting the buildSMART Inernational documentation for IfcReinforcingBar, I found "The representation map of a mapped 'Body' representation should contain a representation of type 'AdvancedSweptSolid' which holds an IfcSweptDiskSolid (including subtype IfcSweptDiskSolidPolygonal )". So, I´m trying to model them in a way that, when the model is exported as a IFC file, the rebars will be considered as AdvancedSweptSolid or, at least, as SweptSolids, as the Column, Beam or Slab tool does.

But everything I´ve tried so far (started with Morph, GDL, PARAM-O, it is impossible to model rebars with beam or column tool) ended within an IFC file bringing the IfcShapeRepresentation informing the RepresentationType as tessellation faces which increases a lot the number of containers and, then, the file size and not following the BSI recommendations.

I´ve even studied the reinforcement tool in Revit, which resultas with the desired AdvancedSweptSolid in the IFC file.

I have tried everywhere, read hundreds of posts in the Forum, guides etc and couldn´t find an answer for it.

Does anyone have any tip or trick or material that could help in this matter: creating Advanced swept solids instead of tessellation faces in IFC file?

Thank you a lot

Re: Has Archicad severe limitation with Ifcshaperepresentation

Lingwisyer — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:32:41 GMT

Have you tried the Eptar Reinforcement plugin to see what their elemenets export as?

Ling.

ps. Not a cheap plugin, and I am not sure if there is a trial version...

pss. There is a post from a few years back relating to the Eptar plugin, though it does not address IFC: https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Modeling/Eptar-reinforcement-and-rebar-tools/td-p/339753

Re: Has Archicad severe limitation with Ifcshaperepresentation

iltonmpacheco — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:23:44 GMT

Hi Lingwisyer,

Thank you for your reply.

Well, I haven´t tried the Eptar Reinforcement plugin...specially because there isn´t a trial version and, second, paying over 1100 euros just to try it is a bit too expensive for me.

About the discussion found in your link, unfortunately it doesn´t help much. The only valuable point there is that the plugin didn´t work automatically at the time of the post and it´s a bit tedious to work with it.

However, checking their site, one can see that everything is created with the Object tool. So, I assume that it generates rebars as object and it seems very much like using GDL scripts. Which increases the idea that the final product (modeled rebar elements) are also objects.

And, as per the Archicad´s documentation, the objects are always represented as Tessellation in IfcShapeRepresentation. So, back to step zero...😔

If anyone here could share a sample of a rebar modeled with Eptar and could share, then, I can be assertive if it is or isn´t object and tessellation.