How to Merge IFC Files for Free, and How to Set Up BIMserver 1.4.0 for Local IFC Management

Sometimes I finish a blog post and think, what a mess…

That’s because I often sketch out things as I do them, on the fly. And so you end up with essentially a collection of notes. In any case, here are my notes on how I got BIMserver up and running on my workstation, so that I can view, merge and work with IFC files locally. I hope you can understand the fragments of thought below 🙂

Prerequisites
The bimserver Java module will be limited by the Java version on your system. So, if you want to be able use big memory, you should be running a 64 bit Java engine.

Install JDK for 64 bit windows, such as from here:

Windows x64 187.31 MB jdk-8u77-windows-x64.exe


Download and Installation

Release 1.4.0-FINAL-2015-11-04 · opensourceBIM/BIMserver

Put the bimserver jar file in some logical place on your computer, it will create subfolders here.

Important Note! I discovered that bimserver doesn’t play nicely with file paths that have a whitespace character, so use underscores if you have to…

Start by double clicking the JAR file – bimserver-1.4.0-FINAL-2015-11-04.jar

Then, tweak settings to your liking. Here are mine:

Click Start

Allow the BIMserver engine to initialize itself for a few moments, it will create a bunch of folders.

Once its ready, you might have to give it access through Windows Firewall…

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