Hello,
Finally we had some time to test IFC 4.3 Export/Import plugin and we found out that the biggest problem is in missing design workflow how are infrastucture projects are created. Not sure about other infrastructure design companies, but we have never been able to deliver finished road or rail 3D model directly from "raw corridor model.
There are two obvious reasons:
1) Civil 3D still is not functional enough to handle all transitions, details and final touches for perfect geometry in IFC model that is requested by customer.
2) Working with non-graphical data = property sets. According our data standards we have to partly manually and partly automatically "feed" different type of data into property sets. Very good examples are pavement layers, as we have to work with them as separate objects. To achieve this, we use "Export solids from corridor" workflow.
When the solids are exported, additional 3D objects are added or created and all the final touches are done, then it is time to export whole BIM model to IFC 4.3. Resulting IFC infrastructure model is not structured correctly, because during intermediate step, it lost information about its "source" in this case - from corridor.
On the other hand, all corridor solids keep information (except subassembly name, why is missing?) about their parent source, so it should be possible to assemble it into right "tree" structure of IFC 4.3, which is requested...
Is there a chance to fix it or we have to develop our own IFC 4.3 export plugin to achieve correct IFCs?
Thanks
Martin
