Is it possible to explode a GDL object in 3D?

[Sam Karli]

Hi,

I'm working on a wall panel placer tool that puts wall panels into a wall.

I'm wondering whether (for calculations) is it possible to explode or extract these wall panels into standalone (GDL or not GDL) objects. The goal is to have an ifc export one by one.

I think it's not me who the first is to ask this.

[Barry Kelly]

You mean explode a single compound object (multiple sub objects) into the individual component objects?

No.

You can only explode the 2D view into lines and fills.

You can convert them to morphs though.

Barry.

[runxel]

Sadly no. There is no way to tell how an object should be separated for IFC.

However I think there is a workaround where you assign different BMats. In that case you can group by BMat in the IFC tree.

[Sam Karli]

I mean for calculating in a different software i want to access panels one by one, somehow.

Another approach would be to place panels one by one using an addon but it's out of scope, too expensive. So I'm searching for a "cheap" and simple alternative.

[Sam Karli]

Problem is that in GDL I cannot define Building Material afaik.

[runxel]

Do you mean using?  building_material is the command for that.

Or actually defining? 🤔 Well yeah, then you're out of luck; we can not define new complete BMats. But that's not really needed, because you can override all the parts (fills/surfaces) of the BMat anyway.

[Sam Karli]

At the end of the day I have to make it possible to make a schedule based on the ifc export. (3rd party software makes it based on the export).

It's possible that i start with a "prepared" pln file with many enough building materials (named like "BM001", "BM002" etc. and then assign a building material to every single panel.

However at the end of the day I need to assign some data to the ifc export.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

For some test I once converted the roof accessory add-on tiled surface to morphs, which resulted in fine individual tiles and cut tiles each with its own GUID.

[Sam Karli]

I've checked it and works. The problem here is that obviously this way we loose attached information (just getting the pure geometry).

The Building material trick works the same way (if we assign every panel a different building material, they become ifcBuildingElementParts), but I am still not able to assign any info to those parts in GDL (a dynamically generated name would be enough).

[Sam Karli]

I can define a surface having a chosen name in GDL and then assign it to an object, and by assigning different building materials to every panel, I can make them different IfcBuildingElementParts. This way, I can deliver (only one piece of) info that can be dynamically set.

Unfortunately, it seems that I cannot set/map anything more using the ifc translators, as their Component/Material settings work only for per-building material set properties (I mean, I can use "surface", but not the actual surface of the panel, but the preset surface of its building material).