Beyond Design: the Construction and BIM blog

Autodesk University 2016 – just around the corner

I can't believe #AU2016 is just around the corner! Partly because it's a couple of weeks earlier, partly just because construction at Autodesk has exploded this year and we haven't had much time to stop! To give you an idea of how important construction is to us here, here's a summary of just some of the events this year: -

Firstly, make sure you attend the Construction Launchpad (Tuesday 8:00 a.m.- 9:30 a.m). If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, this is your session. You'll hear from some of the industry's brightest stars as your peers showcase their iconic projects. And you'll get a glimpse of the next big thing for construction, and learn about how last year's "big things" have evolved. Key topics will focus on how technology can help reduce risk and improve safety on the job site, regardless of your company's size.

Julie from this blog is hosting the first Autodesk Women in Construction reception (Tuesday 4.30pm – 6.30pm), there's still a little space if you hurry. The exhibit hall will again be a focus area and you can look forward to seeing the 'Construction Site of the Future' in a way you've never experienced it at AU before! If you arrive early and are interested in MEP or Structural fabrication you can still register for the Fabricator's Forum on the Monday back on the registration page.

And make sure you're ready for this joint Leica and Autodesk announcement, so mysterious and secret that even I don't know what it is!

This year we have over 80 construction focussed sessions at AU and another 40 with a construction connection, that's compared to just short of 60 last year! This year I have three classes at Autodesk University, I would strongly advise anyone thinking about a similar feat for next year, don't!! Anyway both my beginners and advanced Navisworks classes, CS21178-L - Introduction to Navisworks (Tuesday 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM) and CS21184 - Beyond Design—Advanced Navisworks Workflows for Your Project (Wednesday 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM) are full, however add them to your favourites and keep an eye on the app, sometimes spaces become available nearer the time as people make their last minute selections. Alternatively, you can head to the room and cross your fingers that there's space in the back of the room. For those of you that use Navisworks day in day out, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the 'Beyond Design' Class and I hope you bring some of your top tips along too, we'll give you a chance to share them!

My third class, CS21174 - What Is the U.K. BIM Mandate—and How Might It Affect You, Wherever You Are? (Thursday 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM) has space which took me a bit by surprise with the increase in standards and mandates across the world. Although I think a few people were put off by the idea of a class after the big Party at the Promenade the night before. Well this is a great chance to learn more about how you might be impacted by the UK way of doing things even if you live on the other side of the world, well worth powering through that hangover!

Other classes I'll recommend, my teammate Dieter Vermeulen has a great class on Dynamo for Construction, a screenshot below showing how new technologies are supporting construction processes like crane placement. Fellow 'Beyond Designers' Lejla and Julien (in the picture above) are talking about Infraworks in Architecture, MEP design to fabrication (Fabricators Forum) and scanning and layout workflows respectively. Leica and Topcon will both be presenting how their hardware is supporting scanning and layout workflows

And to finish on my top tips every year

• Eye Drops
• Lip Balm
• Headache tablets
• Go for a run
• Read Shaan Hurley's Survival tips (essential!)
• Bring your crazy socks!

And as always, feel free to say hi to any of us at Autodesk, make new friends and try to learn something outside of your day to day work and break a comfort zone!

See you in Vegas!

Dynamo for Construction

Dynamo is a visual way of doing complex tasks, it has been around for a couple of years now and it is certainly better known for geometry manipulation and form finding processes -

did you know that it can be of great help also in the construction as well?

Dynamo is an open source visual programming platform supported by Autodesk and available as a free Revit plugin. Dynamo is shipped along with Revit since version 2016 R2, but you can always download the latest version from dynamobim.org as well, where you will also find a plenty of tutorials, videos as well as a user forum.

Basically, Dynamo provides a direct access to the Revit programming interface for non-programmers among us. It is based on a library containing pre-scripted elements  which can be connected together visually in order to accomplish a certain task.

Collision management is one of the main benefits for the construction industry to move from 2D to 3D and BIM, and Navisworks offers some very powerful tools for tracking and managing these, which is surely nothing new for you. Dynamo can help you to create a very smooth workflow between Navisworks and Revit, as you can see in the following video:

This is a great use case that demonstrates the real power of Dynamo by giving you the full access to the Revit API without the need for programming skills. You can download the datasets used in the video above here.

In the future posts we will discuss collision management and other usecases for the Dynamo in the construction process in more detail.

If you are attending the AU Las Vegas in 2 weeks, make sure to attend CS21553 - Construction Dynam(o)ite—Explode Productivity with Dynamo (Nov. 16, 1:00-2:30 PM) by our colleague Dieter Vermeulen.  There is a more detailed workflow about the clash management with Dynamo on his Youtube Channel.

Class description:

The step from detailed design to construction in a Building Information Modeling (BIM)-enabled workflow is a challenge for many design offices and construction companies. In many situations, designs need to be changed after contractors have reviewed the models on constructability. In this class, you will discover how you can involve computational design in this process. You will learn how to use the Dynamo extension to automate all kinds of custom tasks in Revit software to make your design constructible. You will get inspired by the wide range of possibilities the Dynamo extension offers to create your own model check and to automate the creation of construction elements.This session features Revit, Dynamo Studio and Navisworks Manage

By the way, this year there will be 50(!) Dynamo sessions at the AU – which shows that this topic is getting more and more important for all areas.  

Hey Chicago! The BIM 360 Food Truck Visits the Windy City

Chicago, are you hungry? The BIM 360 Food Truck is coming to feed everyone on your site!

During the week of November 7^th, the BIM 360 Food Truck will teaming with BuiltWorlds and Microdesk, giving free meals to construction sites throughout the Chicago area. Don’t miss your chance to win a visit!   

Celebrated Bao Chica Bao Bao has got a tantalizingly delicious menu planned for the tour. Imagine a breakfast sandwich with Hashbrown bowls with togarashi home fries, peppers and onions, topped with kahlua pork and a fried egg. Yum! How about Korean Sloppy Joe with housemade pickles and asian slaw for lunch? Sounds irresistible!  

So what are you waiting for? If you are in Chicago and your construction team, subs and trades like FREE food, today is your lucky day. Nominate your construction site and start bringing in the votes. Get your project on the Top 10 of the leader board and receive a free breakfast or lunch for everyone on your construction site. But hurry, the leader board locks on October 31st!

Any questions about the BIM 360 Food Truck tour? Visit our BIM 360 blog.

HFB and BIM 360: A Construction Technology Success Story

Construction Technology for A Successful Future

Netherland’s ‘Best BIM Office Award’ winner HFB is a full-service virtual construction agency in Rotterdam where human relations and construction technology go hand-in-hand. After the 2008 crisis, embracing the latest technologies became essential to continue towards a successful future. HFB realised virtual construction as the future of construction, they quickly adopted cloud-based construction collaboration software for their business.

After exploring many technology solutions, HFB decided that BIM 360 would be the dynamic set of tools to help them in their projects and win new business. By utilising BIM 360 the company demolished the limitations of design. Now, houses and office buildings are not the only things HFB builds - they have an extensive portfolio including labs, hospitals, museums, royal palaces, city centres and more.

HFB’s adaptation of construction technology turned out to be so successful, they even took on a consultative role. The company is now providing extensive guidance to employees company-wide during the implementation of new technology methods.

Project Summertime is a great example of an HFB project taking advantage of BIM 360 to drive successful results. A design by Search Architecture and Urban Planning constructed by BAM Woningbouw Amsterdam, this unique apartment complex was designed and constructed with no two corners the same. BIM 360 was the backbone of this project as a whole, and has brought many benefits to HFB throughout the construction process.

To know more about how adopting BIM 360 helped HFB to continue towards a successful future, check out how cloud-based construction collaboration software helps HFB build without limits.

Please leave comments below to let us know how you have used BIM 360 on your projects too!

Augmented Reality: The Next Interface for Design and Making

The AEC industry is ripe for disruption by Augmented Reality. I recently gave a "Pecha Kucha"-style presentation about Augmented Reality at the Autodesk XSummit, where I provided a brief overview and history of AR through the lens of AEC. (My co-presenter, Joel Pennington, looked to the future, where AR platforms will empower the next generation of designers and makers.) Below is a loose transcript of portions of that presentation… enjoy!

AR Overview

 

Inspiration for AR comes from a variety of sources, from heads-up displays in the military, to the great science fiction stories of the 20^th century; from the first industrial uses in manufacturing, to video-overlay AR in sports broadcasting. Augmented Reality has captured the imaginations of people seeking a better interface for designing and creating.

 

Let's be clear: AR is not VR. Unlike Virtual Reality, which fully immerses participants in an artificial environment, AR enhances the experience of the real world by incorporating contextual information when and where it is needed. By mixing the real and the virtual, AR will be more integrated into our everyday lives than VR, and a much larger market opportunity.

 

A key characteristic of AR is the spatial overlay of digital information on the physical world. AR is ideal for making comparison. Remember these puzzles? They challenged us with: "Spot the eight differences," but in the real world, we're asked harder questions, like: "Are there any differences, and if so, how many?" AR can help.

 

There are two kinds of AR hardware interfaces: displays for the head and displays for the hand. In the last decade, both form factors have evolved, from customized to commoditized. The broad availability of head-mounted displays, mobile phones, and AR-ready tablets, allows companies like Autodesk to focus on making software tools for AR.

 

For professionals in manufacturing and AEC, AR fits well into a lean story. Lean is about providing the right "stuff" to the right people, in the right place and time. AR is a technology that supports this approach, providing the right information in the right place.

 

History of AR in Construction

 

Let's look at the development of AR since the turn of the century, as applied to construction. The "Magic Book" was a landmark project that introduced and popularized the use of black square, optical markers for tracking virtual objects. It featured the first published AR construction documents, complete with pictures, text, and mixed reality experiences to guide the assembly of a chair.

 

Since that humble beginning, the construction industry has become enamored by AR. We've had prototype projects, demonstrating accurate wall framing without a tape measure, with a mobile projector as an "AR flashlight." That led to AR on active construction sites, with large-scale markers and ruggedized tablets to visualize building components like a staircase in context and at full scale.

 

AR in AEC Today

 

Today, each party in the AEC industry uses AR in different, but complementary, ways in the lifecycle of a building. AR enables owners, architects, and contractors to compare the as-is, the as-intended, and the as-built conditions, and they're doing so with a variety of software. We must extend our every-day BIM tools to include AR, in order to support this cycle, and remain competitive in the AEC market.

 

For example: architects use AR to visualize their designs in context, whether displayed full scale on a project site, or scaled-down onto physical study models. Designers are also using AR to support in-person, collaborative design reviews.

 

AR gives anyone on a project team easy access to data-rich models regardless of their experience with BIM tools. Contractors are now using AR for rapid, intuitive layout and installation without paper drawings or survey equipment. They also use it for quality control, to understand where work may be installed incorrectly.

 

Finally, for building owners, a promising use case for AR is the "ultimate stud finder," to reveal hidden construction conditions. They also use AR for facilities maintenance, overlaying meta-data on building equipment and systems to get status updates in real-time. There is no shortage of software tools we should enhance with AR, to provide AEC professionals a complete 21^st-century software ecosystem.

 

AR for AEC Tomorrow

 

The next generation of designers and makers – and, make no mistake: they are coming to replace us – will have much higher expectations, and lower tolerance, for human-computer interfaces that behave and respond intuitively. In the near future, it will not be sufficient to "bolt on" an AR module or functionality to our software tools, but rather reinvent them entirely as AR platforms that support design and making at its core.

 

Even as Augmented Reality becomes a household name, the current state of AR leaves much to be desired. There is a time and a place for everything, and AR is a vital piece of delivering the right information in the right place. The AEC industry is begging for AR solutions, the hardware to support AR is within reach. Autodesk and its customers must collectively demand and invest in augmented reality. If you don't, someone else will!

Design to Construction : MEP Fabrication

 

As a rookie in this blog team, I just wanted to shortly introduce myself : my name is Julien Drouet, I am based in Autodesk Paris Office and am focused on everything about MEP and Construction.

You certainly noticed that our Construction Portfolio is constantly growing and evolving, and MEP Fabrication is one of the area where Autodesk is investing and aspiring to propose better and better solutions.

That's why in the following weeks, I will propose you a series of blog posts related to workflows and solutions to bring the MEP Design to Construction through MEP Fabrication area.

Please consider this nice video as a teaser…

 

Skanska Norway and BIM 360 Field: A Resounding Success

The Statoil Pilot Project – A Success Story with Construction Technology

Skanska, one of the world’s most successful project development and construction firms, has been implementing BIM on projects around the world for many years. By utilising state of the art construction technology, they have been improving communication amongst project stakeholders, saving time, reducing budget, increasing efficiency and limiting risks.

When it comes to the implementation of BIM on Skanska projects, one country stands out with its strong and successful bond with BIM 360: Norway! Skanska Norway’s relationship with Autodesk has born through the implementation of BIM 360 Field during construction of one key project in 2011. The Statoil Building, seen above, was inspired by Mikado sticks.  It has spectacular architectural features, designed with five column-free shells that are three floors high.  The impressive building, completed with the help of BIM 360 Field, spans over nine floors and 67.000 square meters. After so much success on this project, Skanska Norway made BIM 360 an essential dynamic tool for new projects throughout the region.

Safety, of course, is a top priority for Skanska Norway.  In order to keep construction risks to a minimum, they use BIM 360 Field for safety and tidiness inspections. Using BIM 360 Field has been helping them detect and fix potential safety issues before they arise.  Just ask Project Manager Kristin Ingebrigtsen.  She says “we have addressed many issues in advance of construction which helps us save significant time and budget by detecting issues before they escalate. BIM 360 Field has helped us to capture the building site documentation during the entire construction process."

To know more about how BIM 360 Field helped Skanska complete this challenging project within a tight schedule and budget, check out how construction management technology helps Skanska succeed.

Announcing Navisworks 2017 Update 1!

We are pleased to announce the release of an important update for Navisworks 2017. From today, subscription customers will be alerted of its availability through the Autodesk Desktop App. This update represents the culmination of a lot of work to focus on existing customer issues, and we hope that you find it of high value to your workflows with Navisworks.

Follow the simple instructions to install, and benefit from the following updates:

New IFC Loader

As Open BIM practices are now increasingly established globally, we have seen a rising number of users reporting issues with how Navisworks handles IFC files. Outside of Autodesk formats, it is the most used format in Navisworks today. And here at Autodesk, we take interoperability very seriously.

So when we started to look at some of the issues being reported, we also wanted to find a way to improve how to stay on top of this file format. It wasn't long before we looked sideways and saw what a great job the Revit team have done with IFC, and an idea started to form…

What if we could leverage that good work, and take advantage of an open source, community led, and regularly updated piece of technology? The good news is that I am not going to go into how, but can reveal that's exactly the approach we took. With some radical collaboration between our development teams, we have shared this technology, and Navisworks now has a new IFC loader. For our users, this means you should see parity with performance and updates with Revit IFC, which we think is pretty cool - and it fixes over 80% of our known bugs too..!

Until we update Navisworks with a full release, we have decided to make this loader an optional choice, so that we don't disrupt any existing workflows. Next time we release Navisworks we intend to make this the default, but we wanted to let users try it out and give us feedback - so please do that however you like: here, by email, or on Twitter using our @navisworks handle.

Here's a quick overview of what to expect with the new workflow:

1. Global Options – selecting the 'Revit_IFC' loader

   

2. After opening an IFC file, be sure to use the shaded view to see colours (IFC import doesn't support Autodesk materials directly, but does take colour through)

   

3. Newly supported IFC elements (yay – this is good news!) are now visible by default in Navisworks 2017. We'll update this to be hidden in the next release, but for now you should be able to hide them using these search sets that I created to help you – please see below:
   1. IfcZone and IfcSpace elements

      

   2. IfcOpeningElements

      

Performance Updates

Another area that we receive a lot of feedback on is performance. We started to notice a trend in some reported issues that seemed to be related. After some investigation, we were able to narrow this down to some well hidden issues with viewpoints, and we have implemented some fixes that I know many of you are going to be delighted with (you know who you are!). Here is the list of issues this piece of work deals with:

Customer Support: "Saved Viewpoints" are Becoming Incredibly Large Making Model Unusable

Customer Support: Abnormally Large BIM 360 Shared Views Crashing Glue & Field Mobile, and Very slow performance to open Shared Views from Navisworks

Viewpoints with overrides casues NWF filesize to increase drastically

NWF filesize increases significantly once you override colours and transparencies

Longer opening time in NW 2016 than in 2015 and Model created using Navisworks Manage 2016 SP1 is too big

As well as fixing this in this update (so it doesn't happen any more), we realised that many of you will have existing files that you will want to clean up and improve performance working with.

So this is new for Navisworks 2017 Update 1.  Linked to this issue, we have also added the ‘optimise on load’ option to the Model - > Performance section in global options. It is disabled by default, but when enabled, will perform certain optimisations on load :

• Delete duplicate redlines. All duplicate redlines from existing saved viewpoints will be deleted.
• Optimise saved viewpoint overrides – Some old files could have saved viewpoint overrides with the same appearance stored multiple times. This optimisation removes that redundancy.
• Delete duplicate material attributes – Some files loaded from IFC could have nodes with many 10s or 100s or material attributes on them. This optimisation removes all the extra material attributes from nodes.
• These optimisations should help fix up existing NWD/NWF files that customers have.

These optimisations should help fix up existing NWD/NWF files that customers have.

Other fixes

• Improved performance when switching views containing appearance overrides.
• Added support for Solidworks 2015/2016 formats
• Fixed an issue that could cause CER when using the Set Scale from measurement dialog for 2D sheets.

So that's it. We hope that you find these updates of use to your workflows, and that they make a difference. We've really tried to focus our attention on customer issues for this update, so it would be great to hear back from any of you that take advantage of this update and see some benefit. We continuously strive to fix the bugs we know about, so please keep telling us about them and we'll work hard to prioritise them and fix them if we can.

Enjoy, and thanks from all the team at Navisworks.

Creating “Win-Win Success” using Navisworks Quantification with BAM UK

It's always better when someone else tells your story for you right? Well recently BAM Construction UK shared how they worked with the team at Autodesk to do just that. Their story tells how they used Navisworks Quantification as part of their BIM workflows to make things better, so we thought it would be good to share that with you here.

"Reporting quantities using Navisworks means there are no surprises. And no surprises translates into more cost certainty and reduced risk for our client."

Mark Taylor, Digital Construction Manager at BAM Construction UK, tells us how they quickly develop cost plans and eliminate the need for external estimating parties using Navisworks. 

After BAM started using Navisworks in 2012, they quickly realised how to collaborate more efficiently with clients, helping manage costs in a more productive and proactive manner. One of BAM's first uses of Navisworks for quantification was for the construction of a new school building for Royds Hall Community School in Huddersfield. The £6M project provides space for an additional 420 primary school children in West Yorkshire, England. BAM was responsible for both the design and construction of the building, using BIM (including Revit) for its design in combination with Navisworks for quantification, project coordination, clash detection, and construction planning. This collaboration allowed the team to react very quickly to their client's needs. As revisions and change orders could be quickly incorporated into the design model, the combination created "a win-win situation all around.

BAM Construct UK is a leading construction and property company in the U.K., providing a range of services including design, services engineering, construction, facilities management, and property development.  For more about BAM, visit their website to learn about how to create and maintain better buildings.

Read the full story about utilising Navisworks for quantification.

Virtual Reality in AEC: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

It's been 25 years this summer since I was first turned on to the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) as the "holy grail" of design visualization in architecture, thumbing through inspirational musings and essays published in magazines like Cadence and Cadalyst (yes, they were printed on real paper in 1991!). Indeed, VR took hold of many an imagination about that time, as popular media glimpsed into bleeding-edge work by pioneers in research labs like MIT's Media Lab and the Human Interface Technology Lab ("HIT Lab") at the University of Washington. Sadly, VR failed to live up to the hype as it rarely breached the Ivory Tower and into common industry use, and interest in VR largely waned after the 90's like so many Beanie Babies.

That's not to say there weren't valiant attempts to embrace VR in architecture and construction: for decades, VR has captured the imagination of creative professionals seeking the ultimate experience for design and creation. Unfortunately, those visionaries were saddled with limitations like prohibitively expensive technology, strained workflows for content development, clunky interfaces, an infantile internet, and the lack of clear business cases – keeping a lid on any industry enthusiasm for VR for far too long.

Until now. Or, more precisely, until about two years ago, when practically out of nowhere, Virtual Reality – and the hype that comes with it – came storming back into popular view. This time, fueled by a ubiquitous internet, wifi, and mobile/wearable devices with cheap GPUs, VR (and it's cousin, Augmented Reality) caught the attention of Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other big name in computing media. And this time around, architects and contractors are not immune to the visions that VR inspires. We have amassed untold amounts VR-ready content with Building Information Models (BIM), bolstered by a widespread industry ecosystem of BIM tools, processes, and culture.

Indeed, VR can be thought of as a natural extension or evolution of BIM: immersing designers, creators, and their customers into an environment as the ultimate medium for conveying a concept as spatial experience. While BIM and other media can represent the characteristics of a space, VR can convey the experience of a place. To paraphrase Michael Abrash of Oculus, the immersion, interaction, and intuitive interfaces offered by VR will ultimately require participants to suspend belief, reminding themselves that they are not, in fact, experiencing reality.

With traditional BIM tools, users are on the outside, looking in to a scaled representation of a space.
With VR tools, participants are immersed in a full-scale experience of a place.

So VR is back, and promising that it has changed, and really means it this time. But, will VR last? Maybe so, at least in B2B and professionally, if not for consumers. This time around, the tools are better, the processes and workflows are in place, and popular culture has never seemed more ready to accept wearing computing devices and displays (That said, with apologies to Mark Zuckerberg, grandmothers on Facebook may not be willing to strap a phone on their face to interact with their grandchildren for another 25 years). And with the one-button export from Revit BIM content to VR experience enabled by Autodesk LIVE and Autodesk Stingray, the barrier of entry low enough that every architect, engineer, contractor, and owner can harness the power of VR as easily as they can watch a YouTube video.

The use cases are there for VR as well. No doubt, VR can differentiate you from your competition today. VR can accelerate your design process. VR can inspire confidence in your vision. VR can help communicate your plan. VR can help train your labor force. VR can help you understand what you are buying.

But more importantly than a disappearing technology threshold and interesting use cases; are the business cases there to justify an investment in VR tools and processes? I think so. The use cases, combined with the democratization of the VR technology, alters the equation for business justification and should offer a meaningful return on investment. Professionals in the AEC industry face sufficient pain trying to accelerate design thinking, communicate design ideas, and inspire confidence and comprehension in design and preconstruction visualization. There seems to be just enough disjoint between AEC professionals and visualization specialists, just enough disconnect between documentation-friendly BIM and real-time rendering, just enough disillusionment by owners who expect to experience their projects in order to understand them, just enough dissatisfaction to train craft labor in the field to operate safely and flawlessly, to explore and invest in VR for real this time.

As an industry of professionals specializing in the design and construction of a physical, spatial environment, we are uniquely suited to master this new(ish) virtual, spatial environment. VR and AEC go together like hand-in-Data-Glove. What are you waiting for?

Look at the Autodesk LIVE user guide to get started today.