SAN RAFAEL, Calif. – Autodesk announced last week that the company’s Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exporter for its Revit products is now accessible as open source code, licensed through a LGPL v. 2.1 licensing agreement. Since 2005, Autodesk Revit products have provided IFC file export, making it possible to export replicas of project models to the standard IFC file format. IFC files can then be imported into any design program that is compliant with the same standard, helping to support greater interoperability in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry.
Enabling the Revit IFC exporter code to be licensed as open source software provides users of Autodesk Revit products, including Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012, Autodesk Revit MEP 2012 and Autodesk Revit Structure 2012, with greater flexibility to customize their Revit IFC file output to help them better meet the needs of specific project or government IFC file input requirements, according to a press release. With access to the Revit IFC exporter source code, users can add custom parameter sets to elements exported to IFCs, or custom quantities to the elements exported. Users may also, for example, change the representation of the exported elements, should they find another, more useful encoding.
“For several years now, our customers have been asking for greater flexibility with the Revit IFC file format output,” said Jim Lynch, VP, Building and Strategic Technology Group, AEC Solutions at Autodesk, in a statement. “The decision to release the Revit IFC exporter code as open source furthers our ongoing commitment to support the IFC standard, and marks the latest demonstration of the Autodesk drive to encourage full data exchange within a Building Information Modeling workflow.”
The Revit IFC exporter open source code is managed by a five-member steering committee composed of one Autodesk employee and four members of the BIM community. The Revit IFC Exporter Open Source Committee is chaired by Emile Kfouri, BIM application development manager, Architecture, Engineering and Construction Solutions, at Autodesk.
The Revit IFC exporter open source code is now available. Access to the Revit IFC exporter open source code, as well as information regarding the Revit IFC Exporter Open Source Committee, can be found at the SourceForge repository at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ifcexporter. For more information about the IFC standard visit the buildingSMART organization site at www.buildingsmart.org.
