Why use the IFC Guid

BIMWorkplace aims to establish open communication with various BIM software. For this, strategies were developed to make this communication possible and effective.

For Revit users, it is important to know a little more about identifying the elements that make up your BIM model. This ID is unique for each element, however this identifier established by Revit is not the same as the IFC Guid (IFC Global Unique Identifier), recognized by BIM modeling software.

In the following image, we see the ID and an IFC Guid of the same element:

By obtaining the IFC Guid we guarantee collaboration in projects with files from different software, allowing us to “define” each element in an exclusive way.

To standardize processes and ensure that all models in different formats (rvt or ifc), coming from different software can be managed in BIMWorkplace, whether in obtaining metadata, extracting quantities or creating viewpoints, it is necessary to that the elements have the IFC Guid identifier.

In case there are elements that do not have the IFC Guid, for example, in the visualization of the viewpoints created for these elements, they will not be found and therefore, they will not be visualized.

In the following example, the captured viewpoint of the “Window” element does not have the IFC Guid, note that when fetching the viewpoint, the element is not visible:

How to generate IFC Guid in Revit models?

A simple way to generate the IFC Guids of the model is to export the model to the IFC format. To do this, install the BWP Plugin in your Revit and click on the Generate IfcGuid command to generate a value for the IfcGuid parameter.

Note that until the 2022 versions of Revit, the IfcGuid parameter did not exist. This command allows users to generate a value for this parameter when needed.

Thus, for versions 2023 and onwards, Revit itself creates and populates this parameter, so users do not need to worry about it—unless they delete this content and need to generate a new value for the parameter.

When updating the version of your model in BIMWorkplace, it will be possible to visualize the IFC Guid of the elements, and thus the viewpoints will be created with perfection in the visualization of the elements.