How are IFC file material relationships maintained across platforms

Question

IFC files have an IFCMATERIAL property which names a material and is referenced by other components in the model.

The IFC file doesn't point to a materials library, doesn't indicate a system variable that points to a library and uses very general names such as "concrete".

How are these relations managed across multiple interfaces and systems? For example, I have an IFC exported from Revit, where I to import this into xBIM on a system without Revit, how would xBIM know what materials to bind to the objects?

Thanks.

Answer 1

An excellent question.

The short answer is - it wouldn't know what materials to bind to the objects - and that's a headache for many.

Revit has a set of textures it uses to render - but there's no clear existing path on how to neatly export those textures into a non-autodesk program (or there wasn't when I worked on the issue a year+ ago).

Even exporting into another autodesk program, like Maya for example - wasn't a smooth process - there was a provided way to link up the programs so textures would go across correctly into the maya environment ) but I recall it being error-prone.

I think there are some more obscure ifc standards for specifying specific files - but Revit doesn't (or didn't) use them when exporting to ifc.