Collaboration with other software
About model and data exchange with 3rd party solutions: Revit, Solibri, dRofus, Bluebeam, structural analysis solutions, and IFC, BCF and DXF/DWG-based exchange, etc.

Consultant wants to use our IFC as backgrounds, walls are acting funky.

mi_jan
Enthusiast
Every time I send out backgrounds I include IFC model + DWG's, all of our consultants use the IFC as a reference to work in, and insert the provided clean floor plan DWG's as their background. I have one consultant that is pushing to only use the IFC but we are having a couple of issues to set this up.

The main issue is that when they open the IFC in Revit it triangulates and shows each skin of the walls and it shows some things with a thicker line than others even tho they're the same complex profile. I have Graphic Overrides set so it ignores skins and it overrides model surfaces to whitewash but they don't appear to transfer in the IFC.

I can't find a way to remove the wall skins in the model (that will actually export to IFC). The only workaround I can think of is duplicating all my complex profile walls (12 variances) to be a solid material instead of multiple skins for the IFC export. - This means I would have to replace each of the walls to the solid material complex profile alternate just to export for a single consultant. If this is the only workaround it seems like a lot of work on my part, just to save them a couple of minutes.

I have sent them exports with almost every single translator, but they say this one is the better one so far. I have no Revit experience to do any testing, it might be as simple as checking or unchecking a setting in Revit.

Any Suggestions?
iMac - MacOs Big Sur 11.6.6
Archicad 24 - Latest Build
Archicad 25 - Latest Build
4 REPLIES 4
Karl Griffith
Booster
I have an engineer client who was having the same issue. We resolved it by using the export to Revit now available for ArchiCAD instead of ifc.
ArchiCAD 22

Win 10
mi_jan
Enthusiast
Karl,

Thanks for this suggestion, it solved the triangulation and lightweight issues.

It is still showing the individual skins of the complex profile walls and they're not connecting correctly.Essentially I just want to remove the skins completely for consultant Background purposes. Any suggestion to achieve this?
iMac - MacOs Big Sur 11.6.6
Archicad 24 - Latest Build
Archicad 25 - Latest Build
Erwin Edel
Rockstar
Looks like it might be a result of the 'new' way of resolving corner solutions, that has already lead to other problems with pen weights and such.

If you select your walls in ArchiCAD (one by one) you can actually see how the corners connect and it looks like it is being exported as seperate parts, with the breaking up at those connections.

Maybe you can set something in Geometry Conversion for IFC Translators to simplify things.
Erwin Edel, Project Lead, Leloup Architecten
www.leloup.nl

ArchiCAD 9-26NED FULL
Windows 10 Pro
Adobe Design Premium CS5
daviddelven
Advocate
mi_jan wrote:
Karl,

Thanks for this suggestion, it solved the triangulation and lightweight issues.

It is still showing the individual skins of the complex profile walls and they're not connecting correctly.Essentially I just want to remove the skins completely for consultant Background purposes. Any suggestion to achieve this?
Hello, mi_jan

Could you find a workaround for this issue?
In our experience, this behaviour is just related to "complex profiles", no matter which IFC Schema version and its translator settings you use.

It seems that Archicad tries to keep the information about geometry shapes across the Height of the element. But It should keep the simple representation as it already does properly with Composite structures.
David Delgado Vendrell

http://www.daviddelgado.cat
i7-7820HK CPU 2,90GHz 32GB RAM
Triple Monitor 17"+25"+32" Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080
SSD+HDD, Win10 Home - 64 ENG
AC18-AC26 INT/SPA (64-bit, latest build)
Surfing with Archicad since 2013