Textures export for IFC

[Kaloyan Ivanchev]

It would be great to have the option to export the Textures from the Archicad-Model in the IFC-file. Including Alpha-Channel.
In our projects (hospitals) we often have huge surfaces with metal-grids. Modelling these grids rises the Poly count in the sky. If we just model them as walls/slabs the HVAC and Construnction-engineers usually doesn't see it and doesn't understand it as a grid.

If one can simply model a slab with the corresponding grid-texture  with alpha-channel it would save us (in the hospital model) about 1,5 - 2,5 mln. polys.

Greetings,
Kaloyan

[casafarid]

Why is there no response or solution for exporting alpha channels from Archicad? I see posts since 2005 and no response yet.

[Laszlo Nagy]

I don't think texture export and import is implemented in any of the major BIM applications. Seems like that has not been much demand for it in the past.

In any case, I will forward the wish to GS.

[mthd]

In any respect's it would be very nice if GS could find a way to reduce the ploy count right down in some way for all of us AC users. I don’t know how other CAD/BIM apps like VW and others handle this problem but it would be good to resolve this problem right around the board in AC.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Well, if there are a lot of polygons in 3D in Archicad, that is how many polygons will be exported to the IFC. So, one thing to do would be to work out how to reduce the number of those polygons. For example, if there is a huge surface on which a grid is modeled, I would try to reduce the polygon number there. One thing I can think of is if you use Walls or Columns or Beams to model them, they will all intersect and they will increase the number of polygons dramatically. So what I was thinking was you could model the horizontal pieces of the Grid with a Curtain Wall (it would be fast as you can define a pattern for it) and you could model the vertical pieces of the Grid with another Curtain Wall. The two Curtain Walls will not automatically intersect and they will not generate a huge number of polygons. Then export that as IFC.

As an example, a grid of 100 horizontal and 100 vertical pieces gives you 58,824 polygons in 3D. However, if you do model the horizontal and vertical pieces separately with Curtain Walls and they do not intersect automatically, it will be 1,200 polygons, a 49x reduction in polygons.

[ML_Arco]

IFC export with support for exporting 3D Surface material textures should be implemented.

There is a real need for this. Here in Finland, we are required to submit models in IFC4 format for building permit process and governmental archival. The models are then embedded in a 3D city model interface used by the authorities, which was just recently covered by AECMagazine. Since there is no support for IFC textures, they provide a cumbersome method of (re)texturing the model in their browser interface. It is a bit disappointing that this doesn't work "out of the box", since we already have the textures in our Archicad models. So, would really be nice if this feature was on Graphisoft's roadmap. I'm confident that this would be of great interest to everyone.