What is inside a ceramic BIM package, and what should be

A BIM package for a covering is a ZIP with files inside. What matters is which files, and what they say. We opened 121 real packages published by 18 tile brands from 9 countries (Revigrés, Arcana, Vives, Cotto d’Este, Portobello, Marazzi, Atlas Concorde, Pamesa, Porcelanite, INCEPA and others) and read them with a script. This is what we found, and what an architect needs to find.

The open format: IFC

69 of the 121 packages include an IFC: 138 files. 72 are IFC2x3, the 2007 schema, and 66 are IFC4, from three brands: Revigrés, Cotto d’Este and Panaria. The other 52 packages carry no IFC: they deliver one program’s formats (.rvt, .rfa, .lcf, .adsklib or .pln), or only images.

What should be there: an IFC4 per product, always, generated from the same data as the Revit file.

Validation

We sent one IFC from each brand to the buildingSMART validation service, the official one: seven files. The three IFC2x3 files from Atlas Concorde, Vives and Arcana pass. All three IFC4 files fail, from Revigrés, Panaria and Cotto d’Este, and so does one IFC2x3 from Casalgrande.

What should be there: the official validator’s result, with its identifier, inside the package, together with everything else that was checked and what was not. Stratyo’s IFC4 files pass.

What the IFC says the product is

In 78 of the 138 IFC files, the tile is a covering (IfcCovering), which is what it is. In the rest it is not: 45 declare it a wall (IfcWall), 11 a slab (IfcSlab) and 4 a generic element.

The difference is not just a name. A program that reads IFC classifies, filters and quantifies by entity: a tile that claims to be a wall or a slab shows up in the wrong list, with the wrong properties.

Test data

93 IFC files carry test results, and 73 cite the standard. Casalgrande, for instance, writes “Water absorption: < 0,1 % [UNI EN ISO 10545-3]”. It is good data, but it comes written as text, as in the other 92: a program cannot filter by absorption or compare two products. As a number, with its unit: none.

What should be there: every test result as a number, with its unit and its standard, and no export filler around it. We declare 30 product properties.

Textures

Here the market does better than we thought. Where the file name states how much the image covers, the measured resolution has a median of 1.97 pixels per millimeter. Grespania delivers up to 48 faces per format, and 39 packages carry relief maps, a grayscale image describing the physical texture (Revigrés, Portobello, Landmark, Pamesa, INCEPA and Porcelanite). They have relief maps and we do not; we log it as a gap.

What should be there: every real face of the product, one per image, at a scale checked against the declared dimensions, so the floor does not repeat. In our standard package they go from 5 to 15 faces, at 2 pixels per millimeter, with their real scale in millimeters written next to them.

Revit versions

The 269 Revit files in the corpus range from 2015 to 2024. Arcana and Vives already publish new series in 2024, while the older ones stay on 2015 and 2018: nobody regenerated, re-verified or republished them.

What should be there: regeneration with every new Revit, and the previous version in the history. Today we publish in a single version, Revit 2025, and a Revit 2025 file does not open in Revit 2024 or earlier: opening in the version the studio has installed is something we do not deliver yet.

The machine path

269 of 269 Revit files carry the disk path of the machine that generated them.

Our own measurement, September 2026, of 121 packages published by 18 manufacturers in 9 countries. Official validation: buildingSMART Validation Service, 26 September 2026. File names, schemas and properties were read with a versioned script; instrument and data in the repository.