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Lapin is back, rebuilt on the BubbleBIM Pro engine. On your desktop, and now in your browser too
Hi everyone, Some of you used the first Lapin in the browser, and some of you noticed it went quiet for a while. That pause was on purpose. Lapin has been rewritten from the ground up. Today the first test builds are out for Windows, macOS and Linux, and a web version runs the very same engine right in your browser. Here is what changed, why, and how it works under the hood. Why I rewrote it The first Lapin was built on a fork of ifc-lite by accident. I've miss-understood the requirements for ifcsheets given by @Petru Conduraru , and distiled and exposed into the UI editing functions in ifc-lite. The project only needed documenting ifc models, so I split the project. I wasn't expecting the popularity jump that in got in only 3 days. It was a great place to start. It let me prove that a modelling tool on the IFC schema, with layered walls, joins, roofs and drawings, could feel fast and simple. But a fork is a borrowed house, and I had three reasons to build my own. 1. One engine, my engine. For a while I've been building BubbleBIM Pro, a C# engine with its own geometry kernel, session, undo and module system. Running Lapin on a different core meant maintaining two worlds and solving the same problems twice. I wanted Lapin's ideas, workflows and test cases re-linked onto the BubbleBIM Pro core, written in one language, with one architecture I understand end to end. 2. A modelling tool, not a coordination platform. ifc-lite is rich in tooling for BIM management and coordination: viewing, federating and checking models, and working with them across a project. That is valuable work, but it's not my field, and I'm honestly not the right person to carry it. Lapin has one job: authoring a model. Forking a large toolkit meant carrying a lot of code I didn't need, didn't fully understand, and couldn't maintain well. 3. Less friction with a community I respect. I admire the ifc-lite project and the people behind it. A fork that keeps diverging creates confusion: whose code is this, which licence applies where, and what should flow back upstream? I'd rather each project be clean and fully itself. Lapin and ifc-lite now meet where they should, at IFC files, with no tangled history in between.
Lapin is back, rebuilt on the BubbleBIM Pro engine. On your desktop, and now in your browser too
0 likes • 12d
@Ionut Ciuntuc Awesooome! I feel ashamed that I didn't mention glb/gltf...that't pretty much the best format to exchange 3D stuff, including animations and PBR materials. Speaking of which 😁🤓😉... Haven't checked Lapin's texturing capabilities yet, but... it'd be very cool if we could somehow download and texture our models directly in Lapin from Poly Haven or Ambient CG. An extension/Plugin/addon called "Texture Library for IngeTrazo" has been made for IngeTrazo. And here the YouTube video for it. Don't know how IFC handles textures or if it can even handle all the PBR textures at all. But I imagine that you're planning to add a basic hatch styles library (if it's not in there allready).
0 likes • 12d
@Ionut Ciuntuc Wauw you're quick with adding features! Will check it all out later. Is adding features to the web version easier than to the standalone version? I take it that the standalone version would be able to handle heavier models then the web version, or is this not the case?
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Ephraim Isaac
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@ephraim-isaac-8740
I'm a Producer that's mosty influence by Teddy Rily and DarkChild

Active 14h ago
Joined Oct 25, 2026