Can BIM Models Become 95% Smaller?

When I started my computer-aided design journey in the 1980s, we could do amazing things with software and hardware that now seem ridiculously underpowered. Today, we have thousands of times more computational resources, but not enough for BIM, as many feel. I talked with Antonio González Viegas last Friday about this dilemma and what he and his team are doing to tackle it.

Antonio’s pivot

Antonio is an avid software developer but started as an architect.

While working at a Spanish company that created structural analysis tools, Antonio became interested in software development. As a hobby project, he created an open-source IFC viewer, which gained attention from buildingSMART and the BIM community.

This eventually led him to abandon his architectural career ambitions and become a full-fledged software developer with a mission.

Democratizing BIM development

I first met Antonio at BUILT Europe in Riga last year. He talked about how BIM development should be like game development, where you don’t have to start from scratch to create new products. Instead, you have engines and components that every developer can use.

That is not the case in BIM software development, which has a high threshold for new entrants. Antonio calls the current situation a seller’s market in which customers have few choices outside established large AEC software companies.

Antonio felt customers and developers should have a choice and started collaborating with like-minded professionals to make that happen.

That Open Company

Antonio co-founded That Open Company in 2023 to allow BIM developers the same freedom as the game industry.

“ What we are trying to achieve is improving the BIM software market by making it easier to become a seller and a BIM software developer,” he says.

The company’s website declares it “The Open Ecosystem where you can build your own AECO software, help free the industry and make money out of it.” The site offers free tools, infrastructure, and learning resources for a growing community of BIM developers.

Recently, Antonio posted on LinkedIn about a high-performance BIM file format he and his colleagues have developed. The format, Fragments, will be released soon.

Fragments

Working with large BIM models can be slow, regardless of computing power. For example, exporting a model as a traditional IFC file from Revit can result in a multi-gigabyte STEP text file that is not fast to operate. Antonio feels that the IFC file format was primarily designed to describe buildings and infrastructure in detail, not for performance.

That notion inspired Antonio and his teammates to ask whether they should develop a format that offers outstanding performance and radically smaller file sizes while retaining the model’s data integrity.

They succeeded, and the result was Fragments.

“ We are not trying to impose a new standard or a new format, at least for now, we are just making what is necessary to give our users what they have been asking for years,” Antonio remarks.

Performance for anyone to reach

Fragments is designed for performance. It provides pre-indexed data to make querying BIM models faster and more efficient than in a traditional IFC / STEP text file. Thus, a two-gigabyte IFC file can become an 80-megabyte Fragments counterpart without losing any data.

Antonio explains that Fragments’ optimization is not linear but exponential. The bigger the original IFC file, the more data redundancy there is, leading to smaller file sizes after optimization.

Fragments is optimized for modern workflows, making it easier for developers to integrate BIM data into their applications. Fragments uses FlatBuffers, a Google open-source technology, that helps develop a Fragments exporter or importer for Revit or other BIM software in any primary programming language.

That Open Company will release Fragments as an MIT-licensed open-source library that anyone can use commercially for free without the developers’ permission. The first release will include an IFC converter.

Feedback and the way forward

That Open Company has consulted for companies in their open-source projects to speed up development from months to weeks. They call this service Accelerator.

The Accelerator clients have had early access to Fragments and have been enthusiastic about it. According to Antonio, “100% of the companies say, we love it, it’s fantastic. It opens even the biggest models, even in the phones, super-fast.”

Antonio hopes Fragments will be successful, but eventually, that’s up to the developers and the decision-makers in their companies.

“ The best thing about open source is that you know how the story starts, but you never know how it will end. And when I started this project, for me, it was just a project to learn and to become a better 3D developer for fun. Today, it is a company; it is my way of living.”