Autodesk / Autodesk/revit-ifc

IFC meshing is bloated: can meshing be better optimised, especially where fillets occur?

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#381 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement export geometry performance
Dominant language
C#
Stars
637
Forks
225
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

In any extruded profile where there is a fillet, when exported to IFC where Revit converts it either to a FacetedBrep or to a IfcPolygonalFaceSet, it seems as though the meshing process creates rather bizzarre, bloated meshes. This is described in full here: https://wiki.osarch.org/index.php?title=Revit_and_IFC_Geometry - but for end users, this means that export times grow out of control, IFC filesizes are also bloated, and importing IFCs back into Revit basically become an impossibility. So - it wastes time for the consultant exporting, the consultant downloading, and the consultant importing - 3X the time wasted. A current project I'm on now has doors coming out with 17,000 polygons, or referenced 3D DWGs of relatively simple objects suddenly becoming 250,000 polygons, simply because they combine fillets with other arcs. I've attached what a sensible meshing of a fillet should perhaps look like:

![2021-11-25-144802_202x234_scrot](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/88302/143376595-f2902be2-1bc9-4664-a245-f118a855ff4b.png)

... compared to what Revit does ...

![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/88302/143376642-a3a7e441-0d0f-4a11-9150-63976cfefa81.png)

Users then have to recreate their families to avoid this problem.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

The issue does not name a repository file, test, or entry point. Start by reproducing an IFC export of an extruded profile with fillets and compare the generated FacetedBrep or IfcPolygonalFaceSet with the linked examples. Done means filleted geometry produces substantially smaller, sensible meshes without making IFC export or Revit import impractical.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
csharp
Domain
computer-graphics
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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