export ifc with textures

[Anonymous]

Is it possible to include texture information when exporting to .ifc?

[Anonymous]

Good question. I was so pleased to see material colors imported to NavisWorks 2014 I didn't think to check the textures. I'll have to try that when get to the office.

[Anonymous]

Hi

I searched for newer threads on this topic but couldn't find them.

is there any solution to this problem??

Thanks

Luis

[fuzzytnth3]

As I understand it IFC does not support textures but it can show colours and ArchiCAD 20 now supports exporting colours

[Laszlo Nagy]

I asked GRAPHISOFT about this and I got the following response:

1. Although it is possible in IFC4 to save texture information (the specification contains it), there are no currently available Model View Definitions - MVDs - (such as Design Transfer View and Reference View) in which textures are specified or supported. Neither of these MVDs has it as a purpose to visualize textures. Thus the first step would be to demand such a MVD by users/organizations/standards.
2. Also, texture support in IFC4 currently exists only for triangulated geometry. For BREPs there is no support because it is very complicated.
3. There is no IFC-supporting application currently (including IFC model viewers) which would have even started developing/supporting texture import/export.
4. GRAPHISOFT worked very hard to get color fidelity of surfaces implemented in IFC. (that is, in an IFC file exported as BREP from ARCHICAD 20 each face of an object can have a different color, as opposed to earlier where each surface of a body had to have the same color). Besides GRAPHISOFT, only a handful of application have implemented this enhancement. So imagine, if there is such low support for color fidelity at the moment, how much support is there for texture fidelity?

Based on all the above it seems to me there will be some time before we see textures in IFC files.

[stefan]

Don't blame the format, but rather the slow uptake to fully implement what IFC can do by the vendors. And texture support is really low on the priority list.

But current ARCHICAD 20 IFC exports already look better in Solibri, due to better color export in ARCHICAD and better color import in Solibri.

[stefan]

Some time later... not much happened. As I understand now, the texture coordinates are supported in IFC for some geometry, as noted, but I have yet to encounter any IFC texture mapping to survive the transfer.

Even if your viewer supports textures for its materials, it needs a way to "map" those to the geometry. That is done with texture coordinates and while ARCHICAD (and others) support this, they don't seem to include them in the IFC export.

Conversely, in my efforts to create an IFC Model Viewer in Unity, where textures are almost a necessity to get any decent graphics, I had to resort to generating texture coordinates myself. They are thus not fully aligned with the original model. Alas...