Advance Steel | ggAdvanceSteelIFC

Technical information relating to the Geometry Gym plug-in for AdvanceSteel

Note this development is Work in Progress and in an early state. If you have suggestions or requests for improvements, please let us know so we can consider improving this tool.

Advance Steel has native support for exporting IFC from their model.

However, many users have desired for improvements to make the export including more features of the model, and to make the generated IFC work more reliabily in viewers and other software consuing the model data.

Geometry Gym has been developing an addin for Advance Steel to support some of these requested improvements. It first and foremost runs the out of the box export, and then enhances the generated IFC file using the Advance Steel API to write an improved, optimized and enhanced IFC file.

Enhanced IFC Export Features

Configurable Options

• Configuration of the export to include Welds and Bolts (significant file size reduction when omitted)

• Nominate IFC placement point for Advance Steel origin

• Common Property Sets (File size reduction when permitted)

• Common Property Values (Significant file size reduction when permitted)

• Ability to create Ifc Groups from Lot/Phase

Other enhancements / corrections

• Common profiles for extrusions (Significant file size reduction)

• Arbitrary closed profile polylines made compliant

• C Shape Profiles correctly defining girth

• Plate contours simplified and made compliant

• Color styling from layers enabled in export

• Material Association enabled in export

• Additional attributes and properties enabled in export

• Common opening shapes reused (Significant file size reduction)

• Creation of IFC Element Assemblies

Getting Started

Download the Plugin from https://geometrygym.wordpress.com/downloads-windows/

Run the enhanced export command "ggIFCExportEnhanced"

You will be prompted to request a trial license for the plugin if not already enabled. Similar to https://technical.geometrygym.com/getting-started/installation#step-3-request-license

When a license is activated, the enhanced export command will run the out of the box export. You will be prompted with the out of the box ifc export summary. Close this dialog and the enhanced ifc export will proceed.

Configuration

When you run the enhanced export command, a configuration file will be generated adjacent to the dwg file path. It is a text file called "ggAdvanceSteelIfcExportConfig.json"

Presently it's contents will look like this. You can edit this JSON text file to configure future exports.

{
  "OriginBasePointX": 0.0,
  "OriginBasePointY": 0.0,
  "OriginBasePointZ": 0.0,
  "CommonProperties": true,
  "CommonPropertySets": true,
  "GroupsFromLotPhase": true,
  "IncludeWelds": false,
  "IncludeBolts": false
}

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or requests to further improve this enhanced IFC export, please reach out to us so we can review. Any sample project data will be helpful (the simpler the better).