BIMvoice

"openBIM is not really used here yet. Will this certification make a difference?"

I hear this question often.

It is a fair question. No one knows exactly when a market shifts. But I would not wait until every job post asks for it before learning it.

Here is one concrete example.

This year, a public tender in Baden Württemberg for a tunnel project asked its BIM coordinator to show basic openBIM knowledge. It named PCert Foundation as accepted proof.

The same tender gave more evaluation points for advanced training from the buildingSMART Professional Certification programme.

This does not mean every tender works this way. But it is no longer only a future possibility.

And it is not only one tender in one country.

Spain has an official plan to introduce BIM progressively into central government construction procurement. Ireland started adding BIM requirements to larger public works in 2024 and plans to extend them to all public works.

There is still no EU wide BIM or openBIM mandate. But the European Commission is revising the public procurement framework in 2026. The EU BIM Task Group is asking for common BIM requirements, including vendor neutral openBIM for larger public projects.

That is not law yet. But the direction is clear.

If openBIM is still early where you work, you have time. Time to build the knowledge and use it properly before it becomes expected.

What are you seeing in your country?

20 hours ago | [YT] | 2

BIMvoice

If you cannot explain clearly what the buildingSMART Practitioner certification will change for you, do not take it yet.

A certification is not the goal. It is a tool.

And Practitioner is not for everyone.

It requires BIM experience and a serious commitment to learn, apply, and demonstrate openBIM in practice. It also requires a meaningful investment of time and money. The exam is demanding. You work with real datasets and have to produce real outputs. You cannot pass by memorising a few definitions.

Passing is not the end either. The certification is valid for three years and then has to be renewed. This is not a checkbox you complete once and forget.

If you only want another badge, stop here. Practitioner is for professionals who have a clear reason to pursue it and are willing to do the work.

It can be a strong career move. It can help you prove that your openBIM knowledge goes beyond software use and theory. It can support a move into BIM coordination, information management, openBIM consulting, or a more senior role.

For independent professionals, it can strengthen how clients see their competence. For companies, it can support tenders and show that someone is qualified to take responsibility for openBIM delivery.

There is also the timing.

Practitioner is still extremely rare. The number of certified professionals worldwide is still measured in the hundreds. In many countries, there are none or only a handful.

Access to the training is almost as rare as the certification itself. Right now, only two buildingSMART Registered Training Providers in the world offer the openBIM Practitioner programme in English. BIMvoice is one of them.

This means professionals outside the markets where Practitioner is already established finally have a realistic path to become certified in English.

Someone becoming certified now is not joining an established crowd. They are becoming one of the early professionals in the world able to prove this level of openBIM competence.

That position will not remain equally rare forever.

But rarity alone is not enough. You still need to know what you will do with it.

Will it help you move into a better role, strengthen your credibility with clients, or give your company certified openBIM capability?

Perhaps it will make you one of the first recognized openBIM Practitioners in your market. But what will you actually do with that position?

If you have a clear answer and you are ready for that commitment, Practitioner can become much more than another certificate.

If you do not, wait. The reason and the commitment both have to be real first.

1 day ago | [YT] | 2

BIMvoice

A BIM coordinator told me this week that IFC feels like an additional task.

The project already runs through Revit, Navisworks and ACC. To use the model in Solibri or Revizto, the team first has to export it to IFC with the proper classification. Of course it feels like extra work.

But the real problem started much earlier. If object classes, classifications and information requirements are only considered at the export stage, the team is forced to reconstruct the project's information when producing the IFC.

The export button cannot create openBIM. It can only reveal the decisions that were never made.

When the required information and exchange process are defined from the beginning, IFC becomes a planned project output. When they are not, IFC becomes another task added before delivery.

IFC is not creating the confusion. It is exposing it.

2 days ago | [YT] | 16

BIMvoice

Twelve years ago I started working as an engineer on Norwegian infrastructure projects. I watched information get lost between tools, formats, and companies, over and over, on real jobs with real budgets. Fixing that became my work. Then it became my business.

Yesterday buildingSMART Romania announced it. BIMvoice is the first Training Provider in Romania approved for the buildingSMART Practitioner level, and one of the first Registered Training Providers globally to offer the programme in English.

Thank you to buildingSMART Romania, and to Stefan Constantinescu and Stefan Trifu specifically, for the support through the whole process.

Foundation came first. Ten BIMvoice students have sat that exam so far. Ten passed, first attempt. Practitioner is the level after Foundation. It does not stop at what you know about openBIM. It asks you to prove what you can actually do with it in a real workflow.

I deliver the training together with Menno Mekes. We are both certified openBIM Practitioners, bringing practical openBIM experience into the programme.

I read the approval confirmation three times before it felt real. The first group is already underway.

Thank you, Menno, for your support and for building this programme with me.

And thank you, @Casey Rutland. Without a chat with you last September, I probably would not be offering buildingSMART certifications today. You asked me one simple question, and that is where all of this started.

Now it is time to push openBIM forward. Not only by talking about standards, but by preparing professionals who can apply them properly and improve how information is exchanged across projects, teams, and tools.

3 days ago | [YT] | 3

BIMvoice

Many think IDS is only for checking models.

But before it checks your IFC model, it checks something else: whether your requirements actually make sense.

Take a simple one: "All walls must have a fire rating."

Sounds clear. But which walls? Which property should hold the value? Which values are accepted? At which project stage? Any exceptions?

A PDF lets this ambiguity survive for years. IDS does not. To write the specification, someone has to make those decisions.

I see it when I help people write their first IDS. They expect to fight the software. Instead they find out that many of their requirements were never clear enough to be checked in the first place.

So if working with IDS feels hard at the start, that is usually not a software problem. It is the first honest look at your requirements.

4 days ago | [YT] | 4

BIMvoice

Blender 5.2 LTS is here.

And yes, I already have Bonsai running inside it.

My current setup is simple:

Latest stable Blender version.

BonsaiPR instead of the normal Bonsai release.

BonsaiPR automatically combines the latest open pull requests into an installable build. This means compatibility fixes and new features can become available there before they reach the normal Bonsai releases.

There is an important warning.

This is the bleeding edge version. The changes have not all completed the normal review and release process. Something may break, so test it before using it on an important project and always work with copies of your IFC files.

Also, never enable Bonsai and BonsaiPR at the same time. They conflict with each other and will not work correctly.

I am not saying that the normal Bonsai release officially supports Blender 5.2 already. I am saying that Blender 5.2 LTS with BonsaiPR is working on my setup.

For me, this is currently the best way to use the latest stable Blender together with the newest Bonsai work.

Have you tested Bonsai with Blender 5.2 yet?

4 days ago | [YT] | 1

BIMvoice

Working inside Blender does not mean every change reaches your IFC.

If the change is not written to the IFC, it is not part of the model.

This is one of the most important things to understand when starting with Bonsai.

Bonsai reads and writes IFC data.

Blender works with Blender objects, meshes, materials, and properties.

Something you change with a Blender tool may look correct inside the scene, but it does not automatically become part of the IFC model.

You need to bring that change into IFC through the appropriate Bonsai operation.

Otherwise, it stays in Blender.

That is how people end up with a .𝚋𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚍 file that looks correct and an IFC file that does not contain everything they expected.

If you want to change something in an IFC model, first try to do it at the Bonsai level.

Use the IFC aware tools for geometry, classifications, properties, materials, styles, and relationships whenever possible.

Only use a different Blender workflow when Bonsai cannot do what you need.

And before doing that, make sure you understand what will happen when the IFC is saved.

Will the change become IFC data?

Will it remain only in Blender?

Will another IFC application be able to read it?

If you are unsure, ask before changing the model.

Communities such as BIMvoice Academy and OSArch exist exactly for questions like these.

Blender is the environment.

Bonsai is the IFC authoring system.

The IFC file is the source of truth.

5 days ago | [YT] | 3

BIMvoice

I am not a programmer.

Until recently, when I or one of my students found a bug in Bonsai, I opened an issue and waited.

Now I ask Claude to investigate it, test a fix, and prepare a pull request for the IfcOpenShell maintainers to review.

That is a completely new thing for me.

So far, 39 contributions I initiated have been accepted and merged into IfcOpenShell. Together, they resolved 20 distinct issues.

Some fixed bugs that were affecting me or members of my training. Others addressed older issues that had been sitting in the backlog for years.

One contribution protects IFC files from corruption when a save is interrupted. Others fix geometry, quantities, XML handling, and Bonsai workflows that crashed on valid files.

For years, my main contribution was financial. BIMvoice has donated more than USD 8,000 to IfcOpenShell and OSArch because I believe in what these communities are building.

I always wanted to do more than promote the tools. Buying Claude Max and putting it to work on the issue backlog gave me a way to contribute.

I want to be precise about my role. I did not write the code. I gave Claude contribution rules, directed the work, and checked some of the issues and results.

I did not inspect every line or personally verify every pull request. Every decision to merge remains with the IfcOpenShell maintainers.

There is also an uncomfortable part of the story.

Across this experiment, 320 pull requests have been opened. Today, 263 are still waiting for maintainer review.

GitHub shows 57 as closed. That includes the 39 merged contributions and 18 that were closed without merging.

Dion Moult's feedback was clear. Overall, the work is helpful while automatic merging remains disabled. But without enough steering, AI can produce a superficial fix instead of addressing the deeper problem.

I agree.

I have no plans to merge anything myself. My goal is to help move forgotten issues forward and give maintainers something concrete to review.

I plan to continue, but the next step is better steering, better issue selection, stronger checking, and fewer weak submissions.

This is not perfect. I am very aware of the limitations.

But I still think it is better to contribute carefully than to wait and rely entirely on others.

I am grateful that I can finally do more for these tools than only talk about them.

That is where I am with it so far. I will keep sharing what I learn.

6 days ago | [YT] | 3

BIMvoice

BIMvoice has a new home.

Last week I rebuilt the bimvoice.com homepage from zero. Just me and Claude Code, iterating until it looked and felt the way I wanted. Dark, fast, straight to the point. No cookie banner chasing you around the page. You visit, you read, that is it.

The part I care most about is called Field Notes. Practical openBIM articles: problems from real projects, the workflows that fix them, the things I would tell you on a call. Six are live already, and a new one comes out with my weekly email almost every week.

There is a new logo too, and I updated the YouTube channel and my profile here to match. Wherever you meet BIMvoice now, it looks and sounds like one thing. That was the whole point. BIMvoice means clarity in openBIM, and the brand should work the way the training works. Clear, no noise, nothing hiding.

Have a look and tell me one thing: what should I write about next in the Field Notes?

1 week ago | [YT] | 4

BIMvoice

Some of the most important software in AEC has never bought an ad.

- If you ever opened an IFC in Blender, it was IfcOpenShell.
- If you ever validated an IFC file with a free tool, good chance it was IfcOpenShell underneath.
- If you ever converted, checked, or fixed a model without paying for a license, somewhere in that chain, probably IfcOpenShell.

It is infrastructure. Like a water pipe. Nobody thinks about it until it is not there.

The people who maintain it do not get your license money. They get bug reports at midnight and pull requests to review on Sundays.

What keeps a project like this going is visibility. Contributors join projects that look alive. Companies trust projects that look used.

On GitHub, that visibility is measured in stars.

So if this project ever carried a piece of your work, go star it.

github.com/IfcOpenShell/IfcOpenShell

You spent years benefiting. This costs ten seconds.

1 week ago | [YT] | 12