Licensing optionsfor this format begin with FME Professional Edition.
The BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) is an open XML based format that supports communication of BIM issues.
This chapter assumes familiarity with the BIM format.Further information on BIM can be found athttp://www.buildingsmart-tech.org/specifications/bcf-releases.
Version
FME supports reading and writing BCF v2.0 files.
Overview
A BCF dataset is a zip file containing folders with XML and PNG files.One BCF topic, which is an issue related to BIM design, is represented in a single folder within the zip archive.A topic folder contains:
- One markup file:markup.bcf.
- One or more viewpoint files: The first, default, viewpoint file is namedviewpoint.bcfv.
- One or more snapshot files: The first, default, snapshot file is namedsnapshot.png.
Subsequent viewpoints and related snapshots files are GUID based, e.g., CA112492-BB80-4FEC-BD78-FF36124CA979.bcfv and CA112492-BB80-4FEC-BD78-FF36124CA979.png.
Reader Overview
The BCF reader interpret contents of the BCF zip file into various feature types representing the issue/topic markup, viewpoints, and snapshots.SeeFeature Representationfor details.
Writer Overview
The BCF writer accepts a fixed number of BCF feature types.Except for theVersionandProjectExtension, each feature type is either a representing a topic markup or a topic viewpoint.SeeFeature Representationfor details.
TheMarkupandVisualizationInfoare features representing the root elements of their corresponding XML files.If these are not supplied by the user then they will be automatically created by the writer.
Thexml_topic_guidandxml_viewpoint_idmust be set up properly so that the writer may group the markup, viewpoint and Snapshot features into XML and PNG files in their appropriate topic directory.SeeFeature Representationfor details.