IFC

IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is an open international standard (ISO 16739) for Building Information Modeling (BIM). It uses a data model to describe geometry, properties, relationships, and lifecycle information of building components, enabling data exchange and multi-party collaboration between different BIM software.

IFC is oriented toward engineering semantics rather than rendering. It records components like walls, beams, columns, and their relationships, which browsers and game engines cannot render directly. To view or display IFC, it must first be converted to a mesh format. After conversion, semantic attributes are simplified to pure geometry, so the original IFC file must still be retained in the BIM toolchain.