Git for Designers in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

This is my talk from the Creative Freedom Summit 2024. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a building design technique where everything in a construction project is modelled, ie. information and data as well as 3D geometry. IFC is the only open format for BIM data, and BlenderBIM (now renamed Bonsai) is the first of a new class of tool that does Native IFC editing. One of the unexpected benefits of the Native IFC paradigm is that is is possible to design buildings using asynchronous collaboration tools such as Git. This video shows multiple designers editing the same building, sharing their changes as Github pull-requests, and merging these changes into a single model - all without leaving BlenderBIM (now Bonsai). We can now do the whole fork, branch, pull-request, and merge Git workflow, but for 3D building models rather than source code. I was asked a question: why or what is the benefit of being able to work with these BIM models in Git? and I mumbled something about how the building industry has terrible document handling and needs to get with the programme and use modern asynchronous collaboration tools, but ultimately I don't really care whether the AEC building industry adopts more efficient working practices - beyond the extent where these practices bother me day to day. This boils down to the whole reason that I'm spending time working on Free Software in the first place, I don't do it because I enjoy coding or am particularly good at it, I don't get much pleasure from computer technology. I do it because I see a glimpse of a world where we share and build on each others work, where we own our own tools, and get to make our lives better in concrete ways. We need to expand free and open culture beyond software, it's great to see how far free software has come, it won the argument. But there is a whole world outside of software. The buildings we design and build are a planetary level catastrophe, to change this we need to make creating, sharing and borrowing building designs as easy as it is with software. BlenderBIM (Bonsai) is two things: it's rapidly becoming an essential tool for a lot of people in the AEC industry, vast quantities of IFC files are exchanged daily, people need to fix and manipulate them, and BlenderBIM (Bonsai) is the only IFC editor - free or proprietary; but it is also the tool that does everything we need to create a sharing culture of open collaboration in building design - BlenderBIM (Bonsai) has all modern BIM features and it has modern Git collaboration built-in. Bonsai: https://extensions.blender.org/add-on... Native IFC: https://github.com/brunopostle/ifcmer...