What's the optimal way to output 3D-text in IFC?

VisualARQ
1

Hi,
I have a simple IFC model of a building’s facade element distribution. Each element is described as a solid box with a name and a color set as material. This model, when saved to IFC is around 7Mb.

A portion screencap of the model geoemtry.

kuva
kuva1161×661 25.7 KB

I wish to incorporate the element code as a visible tag. I have the tags in Rhino as text objects.

kuva
kuva1087×649 21.4 KB

And I have converted them to 3D mesh objects. (First to polysrf, then _extractRenderMesh)

kuva
kuva1321×703 56.6 KB

However, an IFC file containing just the meshed text is 449Mb. Which seems disproportionality large compared to the model’s info and use.

I know the reason for the file size is the resolution of the meshed letters, which could be optimised a bit of course. But my question is, if there is a profoundly better way to display textual information in 3D space within the IFC format?

2

Hi Toni,
I’m not sure if we can help it here, since this seems to depend on the software you use to read that IFC file. I mean, the ideal situation would be that the software you use to open these IFC files could read and display the text you have in Rhino, without the need to create 3D texts, is that right?
On the other hand, that software should read the annotation objects (the texts that VisualARQ exports to IFC) in the IFC file, which is something that not every IFC reader does.