when focusing on doing the visualization work for other companies or clients, .ifc export has been somewhat useful in that we don’t need to own any expensive software licences to get what we need. I guess as long as the data smith export plugins are available without requiring a subscription to unreal studio, the clients should be able to export for unreal studio for us.
Having a more universal exchange format is probably wishful thinking, but I think it would be nice to be able to do the visualization work for different groups no matter what software they are using and still have the same pipeline with a shareable format.