Revit users who rely on IFCs now have more flexibility in coding objects and models.

Autodesk today released its Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exporter for Revit as open source code. Going forward the code will be managed by a five-person committee, one of whom will be an Autodesk employee.

IFC is an AEC industry standard data model for describing building and construction industry data. It is an object-based file format with a data model developed by buildingSMART (International Alliance for Interoperability, IAI) to facilitate interoperability in the building industry, and is a commonly used format for Building Information Modeling (BIM). Several national governments have made use of IFC mandatory for projects built with government funding.

Autodesk says it is releasing its IFC exporter so that users can more directly control exported elements. Users may, for example, change the representation of exported elements, should they find another, more useful encoding.

The Revit IFC exporter open source code is managed by a five-member steering committee composed of one Autodesk employee and four members of the AEC Building Information Modeling (BIM) community. The Revit IFC Exporter Open Source Committee is chaired by Emile Kfouri, BIM application development manager, Architecture, Engineering and Construction Solutions, Autodesk.

The Revit IFC exporter open source code is now available. Access to the Revit IFC exporter open source code, as well as information regarding the Revit IFC Exporter Open Source Committee, can be found at the SourceForge repository at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ifcexporter.