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Question

Does FME Workbench support the conversion of Open Building Designer files to IFC 4?

  • April 28, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 27 views

sobdm5
Participant
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Hi all!

I am trying to convert the Open Building Designer file to IFC 4. It was found that the IFC exporter in the Open Building Designer does not map features to the correct IFC entities, most of them will be classified as ifcBuildingElementPoxy. Therefore, I plan to try the conversion using FME. However, there is no reader format for Open Building Designer.

 

Should I start the conversion by reading the Bentley MicroStation Design V8 format instead?

 

1 reply

carlw
Safer
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  • Safer
  • April 30, 2025

Welcome to the FME community!

It sounds like you’re on the right track already - if you export from OpenBuildings Designer as V8 DGN, then the Bentley Microsystem Design (V8) reader will let you read that data into a workspace. You can then manually map the features to the appropriate IFC 4 classes - there are two tutorial articles that I think would be particularly useful here:

Reading MicroStation (DGN) Tags with FME
AutoCAD to IFC Conversion Example

I also see that there is an IFCTemplater transformer on the Community Hub, but I have not used it before and cannot speak to how useful it might be in this situation.

All that being said - have you tried manually mapping the IFC classes? I came across that section of the Bentley documentation and figured it might be worth sharing on the off-chance that it saves you a bit of time and effort.


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