Homemaker add-on

Design buildings the pointy-clicky way

About

The Homemaker add-on tries to automate the tedious work of designing buildings. Just indicate with simple geometry where you want walls, floors and roofs, and the software figures-out what building elements are needed to create that building. The result is an industry-standard IFC (BIM) model, suitable for taking the project towards construction.

The software is a general python library for turning 3D geometry and style definitions into IFC building models, it is initially provided as a Blender add-on, but is designed to be usable with other awesome 3D design platforms such as FreeCAD.

Features

• Will assemble buildings from any geometry, as long as the faces overlap enough to define cells for rooms. The only assumption is that walls are vertical and floors are horizontal.

• Adaptable style system, styles can be subclassed or overriden entirely. Different parts of buildings can be assigned different styles.

• Fully compliant industry standard IFC output.

• Free Software, no annual licenses, these are your tools to use, customise and share as you wish.

Documentation

There is some Homemaker reference and API documentation

Roadmap

This is a big project that will take a lot of work to reach its full potential, so the following are just a few of the areas where help is welcome:

• Pattern Languages. The main Homemaker evolutionary design tool, illustrates that Pattern Languages form a complete theory of architecture. By adding an evolution engine with a Pattern Language as fitness criteria it shows it is possible to design humane buildings that are a good fit to their environment, fully automatically. This add-on builds-on this result but creates the interactive design tool that is needed. The high-level models created in this library are well suited for assessment using a Pattern Language, so a priority is to implement as many patterns as possible to guide the hand of the designer with continuous and early feedback.

• Management of circulation and stairs was lost when porting from Perl, this needs reimplementing.

• Other platforms in addition to Blender, i.e. FreeCAD

• Extended style system, buildings can be styled with an extensive inheritable style system, but this is just the start, there is lots more that needs to be done: grillages, subtractive geometry etc.

• Assets such as windows, doors and extrusion profiles are currently provided in DXF format, these need to be ported to a native IFC Library.

• Costing, Carbon and Life Cycle Analysis. IFC can hold detailed information on quantities, costs and scheduling, the library needs to make this stuff easy.

• Structural and environmental analysis. The generated models contain IFC Structural Model data and 2nd Level Space Boundary data for thermal analysis, these need testing in a range of analysis software.

• But not least, let's take architecture out of the hands of architects and put it back in the hands of people who need good ordinary buildings.

Requirements

• topologic a pybind11 python interface to the TopologicCore library.
  • TopologicCore. This is a C++ library which you build and install using the standard cmake build system. It requires the opencascade library and headers which should be available from your distribution.
• blenderbim blender add-on, just download the ZIP and install from the blender preferences menu.
• pyyaml python module.
• ezdxf python module for reading assets, which are in DXF format until we can figure out how to use IFC asset libraries.

About

This software would not be possible without leaning heavily on other software, in particular Topologic, Blenderbim and IfcOpenShell.

The homemaker-addon is a python port of the Homemaker Topologise blender add-on.

Copyright 2021, Bruno Postle [email protected] License: GPLv3. 3D and 2D asset and style files bundled with this software are additionally licensed 'CC BY 4.0'