Tip of the Month: IFC Export of Doors and Windows only

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Dear Community Members,

Targeted IFC exports can make coordination with consultants much easier. This month’s tip highlights a clever tip shared by @Laszlo Nagy , showing how to export only doors and windows as IFC, without their host walls, by using Archicad’s collision‑detection settings and IFC geometry filter together.

The challenge

Consultants sometimes request an IFC that contains just the openings—doors and windows—so they can focus on checking positions, clearances, and clashes against their structural or MEP models, without the extra geometry of walls, slabs, and other building elements.

Full model (left) vs openings-only IFC export (right)

The solution

Archicad’s Building Materials include a flag called “Participates in Collision Detection”, and IFC Translators have an option “Export only geometries which Participate in Collision Detection”.

By temporarily turning this flag off for all Building Materials and then enabling the IFC option to export only geometries that participate in collision detection, you can filter out all construction elements that use Building Materials (walls, slabs, roofs, beams, etc.), while doors and windows—implemented as library parts and not controlled by those materials—are still exported.

Step 1: Work in a copy of the project

1. Open your project and use File → Save As… to create a separate file (for example: Project_IFC_DoorsWindowsOnly.pln).
2. Make sure all changes in the following steps are done in this copy only, so your main project’s Building Materials and IFC settings remain unchanged.

Step 2: Turn off collision detection for all Building Materials

1. In the export copy, go to Options → Element Attributes → Building Materials….
2. In the Building Materials dialog, select the first material in the list, then use Shift‑click or a “Select All” command to highlight all Building Materials.
3. In the properties area, find the “Participates in Collision Detection” checkbox and untick it while all materials are selected.
4. Confirm with OK to save the change.

From this point on in this copy, no construction element that relies on these materials (walls, slabs, roofs, beams, columns, etc.) is considered to participate in collision detection, which the IFC filter will use in the next step.

Step 3: Configure the IFC Translator to export only collision‑detection geometries

1. Open File → Interoperability → IFC → IFC Translators….
2. Select the translator you normally use for coordination (for example “Exact Geometry Export”), then Duplicate it and rename the copy to something like IFC – Doors & Windows only.
3. With the new translator selected, click Settings… and go to the Geometry Conversion (or similarly named) panel.
4. Enable the checkbox “Export only geometries which ‘Participate in Collision Detection’”.
5. Leave other options (IFC schema version, property sets, etc.) as your office standards require, then click OK to save the translator.

Because all Building Materials now have their collision‑detection flag off, this translator will skip elements built from those materials, but it will still export doors and windows whose geometry is not filtered by that flag.

Step 4: Export the IFC with doors and windows only

1. In the export copy, choose File → Save As… and set the Format / Save as type to IFC File.
2. Name the file clearly, for example Project_DoorsWindowsOnly.ifc.
3. In the same dialog, choose the translator you configured (IFC – Doors & Windows only).
4. Click Save and let Archicad complete the export.
5. Open the resulting IFC in your preferred viewer or back in Archicad (File → Open… → IFC File) to confirm that it contains doors and windows (and any other pure library parts), but no walls, slabs, beams, or roofs.

Openings-only IFC model

Optional: Combine with a full‑model export

Because this method filters out all Building‑Material‑based elements, you might also want to send a more complete model alongside the openings‑only IFC:

1. Use your standard translator to export the full building model as usual.
2. Or, for a “model without doors/windows,” turn off the 3D display of doors and windows in Filter and Cut Elements in 3D, then export again with your normal translator.
3. Let the receiving party load two IFC files: one with only doors/windows and one with everything else, depending on what they need for coordination.

The result

With this collision‑detection‑based tip in place, you can generate an IFC that contains only doors and windows whenever a consultant needs a focused openings model, without changing your main project structure or manually moving elements to special layers.

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you! Here’s the link to the original forum discussion where you can leave kudos to @Laszlo Nagy for this tip. 

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