The tools I will introduce below are all open-source and cross-platform, and so despite the misleading title of this article, you can use these tools to view IFC files freely and with a battle-tested implementation on Windows, or even Mac. For instance, the popular Solibri Model Viewer cannot be considered an authoritative model viewer. If somebody is using a IFC viewer that is not open-source and not cross-platform, that IFC viewer cannot be considered to be an authoritative implementation of IFC, as it does not allow inspection of the code, and doesn’t prove cross-platform compatibility which is the purpose of IFC. Linux is especially conducive towards open-source development, rapid protoyping, and is the gold standard for data processing. Other than Windows, it is important to consider platforms that are less widely used in the architecture industry, such as Linux. An IFC file integrated into Excel, viewed with open-source LibreOffice Calc. One example is where you can open an IFC file in Microsoft Excel and use this Excel spreadsheet to perform BIM queries. This allows the BIM models to have a consistent dataset that can be queried and integrated with other BIM tools and databases, regardless of the technology vendor. How to view BIM IFC files on Linux How to view BIM IFC files on LinuxĪrchitectural, engineering, and construction BIM models should be written into the international ISO standard IFC format.

Bimx file format