Beyond Design: the Construction and BIM blog

Industry Collections, what do they mean to you in construction?

Today we launch Industry Collections, it's a new way of thinking about how to access software and is a perfect fit for construction. Based on a term license they allow you to easily scale up and down during the course of a construction project and include contingent employees in software planning.

So what does the new AEC Collection include? And what advantages do each of these offerings bring to my construction project?

• AutoCAD, verticals, and AutoCAD 360 Pro – As a common platform used throughout the industry, this suite of AutoCAD products allows you to access and create documentation and share detailing with all partners on the project team
• Revit – The leading BIM tool to create construction parts, access schedules and convert designs to fabrication parts for coordination
• AutoCAD Civil 3D – The best tool for road, rail and earthworks detailing, cut and fills, landscaping and getting to machine control
• Navisworks Manage – Create federated models from over 50 file formats and run Clash Detection, Construction Simulation, Quantification, Design Review and Rendering
• Vehicle Tracking – For analysing site movements in advance and ensuring trucks, cranes and large vehicles can move around site
• 3DS Max – For those high end visualisations to help with winning planning, buy in from stakeholders, or winning tender bids
• Formit 360 Pro – A conceptual design tool for buildings that links to Revit that allows you to create site layouts on the PC or mobile device
• Infraworks 360 – A conceptual design tool for infrastructure that links to Civil 3D that allows you to create construction site layouts, traffic simulations and visualisations
• Insight 360 – Run sustainability analysis and verify that any significant changes in materials you make won't affect the end result
• Recap 360 Pro – Use reality capture laser scanning and photogrammetry to better understand existing conditions and verify as built conditions
• Rendering in A360 – Create quick and easy high quality renders and panoramas from Revit and Navisworks
• Structural Analysis – Do easy structural analysis to help with foundation design decisions
• Online Storage – As we work in an 'always connected' world, being able to access models, drawings from office or site

So with an AEC Collection, does my team have everything we need?

Not included in the package but worth considering for construction needs are:

• BIM 360 – A full suite of products built around the needs of a contractor, covering cloud enabled coordination, 3D layout, quality checks, safety programs, commissioning and production planning
• Point Layout – To get coordinate information to total stations seamlessly from the design and review packages and bring back for as built analysis to speed up and reduce rework
• Stingray – To 'gamify' 3D construction project data to improve understanding and health and safety on site

Want to know more? Read this FAQ and contact your reseller for more information about Industry Collections, how to get hold of them, and introduce new workflows to your firm.

Hungry, Denver? The BIM 360 Food Truck is coming your way!

Denver, what are you waiting for?  The BIM 360 Food Truck is delivering free food, refreshments and prizes to thousands of hungry construction workers in your city and I bet you have some hard-working mouths to feed.  And with all this heat recently, we bet you’re excited for some iced-cold beverages, too.

Local-fave, Bao Chica Bao Bao will be whipping up tasty, mouth-watering meals from the BIM 360 Food Truck during the week of July 25^th.  Breakfast or lunch, we’re there to feed your entire construction site for free.  And we think Korean-marinated beef burritos and miso-ginger black bean and roasted corn tacos is just the right way to get those taste-buds rocking.

If your construction team, subs and trades like FREE food, you are the luck.  To get on the list today, nominate your project at bim360.com/feedmycrew. The Top 10 sites on the leaderboard will be selected.  But hurry, the leaderboard locks on July 20^th and we come to come see YOU!

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

Syncing Field Equipment Properties with Revit

BIM 360 Field is offering a great way to track data on the building suite using your iPad, e.g. the status and install dates of certain equipment. But what if you want to see this data in Revit? 

The answer is pretty simple - the new BIM 360 Plugin for Revit gives you a very easy way to sync the equipment properties in Field with your originally shared Revit model:

 

After opening the Revit Model, go to Add-Ins > BIM 360 Equipment Properties and chose the model you want to sync with. In this window you will see all your models available in BIM 360 Glue and you will need to select the one corresponding with your currently open Revit Model. You can recognize the Models with shared Equipment Sets on the orange icon: 

 

Once the properties have been synced, you will get the following message: 

 

Now that your Field Properties have been added to your Revit Model, you can see them among the object properties: 

 

Of course, you can use the properties in schedules or in filters - in this case, we used the value for Functioning (Funktionsfähig) to create a view showing all lights colored according to whether they are working correctly (=green) or if they are defective (red). 

To learn more about BIM 360 please have a look at the BIM 360 website and visit our online help for BIM 360 Glue and BIM 360 Field. 

Autodesk opens up about interoperability for design and construction software

Interoperability in the software used for project design and construction is vital to the collaborative process required by the AEC industry. More than that, interoperability is good business for AEC firms and asset owners. Our recent agreement with Trimble to increase interoperability by exchanging APIs and developer tools is one more demonstration of Autodesk's commitment to offering our customers the best workflows possible and to improving the way buildings and infrastructure are designed, built and managed.

Nearly half (49%) of contractors surveyed in a 2014 McGraw Hill Construction Smart Market Report rank collaborative BIM processes high on their list for BIM investments, citing standardized deliverables and repeatable workflows as "vital to improving the effectiveness of the broader ecosystem."

We heard that! Expanding software interoperability and supporting leading industry standards, such as IFC and COBie, helps AEC professionals deliver higher quality work more safely, on time, and on budget. Sure, its good business for software vendors too, but with an open approach such as ours, project teams choose the best tools for the job, ensuring a more accurate flow of information crucial to meeting today's complex project requirements.

Autodesk has long been focused on furthering interoperability across vendors and platforms. Our interest in open ways of working started in the 1980's—long before anyone had ever heard of BIM and (frighteningly) maybe years before many of our current software users were even born! Let's review:

• Autodesk was founded on an open platform: the PC. In the earliest days of CAD, most vendors offered tightly coupled hardware/software systems that were proprietary. But Autodesk customers could run AutoCAD® on any PC.
• The DXF file format is still one of the most efficient and popular ways of sharing CAD graphic and attribute data and the DXF schema is available for all to use.
• In 2008, Computerworld predicted that "reading on screen" and "social everything" would take off. (Imagine!) It's also the year, Autodesk signed an interoperability agreement with Bentley Systems to expand interoperability between our portfolios -- exchanging software libraries, including Autodesk RealDWG, to improve the ability to read and write DWG and DGN formats in mixed environments with greater, fidelity and supporting the reciprocal use of available Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
• No one beats Autodesk for export and import certifications. See for yourself by looking at our list of certifications that support the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) standard. You'll find the IFC standard used in many Autodesk products, including Revit, AutoCAD Civil3D, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Navisworks, and Autodesk BIM 360 Glue.
• COBie (Construction Operations Building Information Exchange) is critical to simplify the capture of project handover data. The Autodesk COBie Extension lets you pull COBie-compliant information directly from a Revit model. In the COBie for Design challenge organized by buildingSmart, Autodesk scored a perfect 100 percent by producing a complete COBie deliverable that required zero additional processing or edits.
• Pulling COBie-compliant information directly from Autodesk Navisworks is now available, which supports the export of non-Revit and infrastructure information to the COBie standard format.  
• In 2015, Autodesk introduced the Forge platform to help foster a cloud-connected developer community, making design and engineering information available in virtually any format and enabling build-on functionality with open APIs. Forge includes APIs to tools like Autodesk BIM 360 to bring more of the ecosystem into a construction project, expand their insight, and improve decision making capabilities.
• Now, with the Autodesk and Trimble agreement on interoperability, AEC professionals can look forward to more tightly integrated processes, further enhancing the ability for project teams to collaborate more seamlessly while using the products they choose.

Just like ComputerWorld understood the potential for the internet way back in 2008, we know that our customers don't want to feel that their data is "locked" in a specific application or with a specific vendor. The notion of a single tool for a single job is rapidly becoming antiquated -- data needs to flow across teams, projects, and applications. Interoperability helps to drive a tightly connected Building Information Modeling (BIM) process on projects. Our commitment to keeping the open in OpenBIM truly open is unwavering.

To learn more about how BIM 360 supports interoperability with support for over 50 different file formats, please look at the BIM 360 website.

BUILD X: The BIM 360 Food Truck is Coming to SAN FRANCISCO!

We're coming for you, San Francisco!  On June 6th, the BIM 360 Food Truck will make it's second tour, this time to the Bay Area. After a successful run in Boston, we're excited to bring free food, drinks and prizes to construction workers on the West Coast.  Don't miss out on free Izzy's Cheesesteaks for all contractors, subs and trades on your site.

Nominate your construction site today!  But hurry, voting will close on June 1st, and we don't want you to miss a chance to get your project on the map and vote on your favorite construction site.   Want to continue the momentum?  Share your construction selfie with the hashtag #GoBuildX for a chance to win!

Upcoming Webcast: Building a Culture of Safety

You've always wanted to ensure that everyone on your job site was safe and protected from harm.  But how can you create practices that help all of your workers?  

Join Autodesk and industry thought leader Steve Jones, Senior Director Industry Insights Research at Dodge Data & Analytics  as he discusses the impact of building and implementing a safety culture in your company.  We will review the thirty-three leading indicators of a strong safety program and explore the safety practices identified as the most effective, critical factors driving investment in safety practices in the construction industry.  

We hope to see you on June 9th!

Register today.  

Happy 5th birthday Beyond Design!

Happy Birthday to us,

Happy Birthday to us,

Happy Birthday Beyond Design!!

Happy Birthday to us!

Five years ago today myself and Paul Walker launched this Beyond Design blog. When we first launched our aim was to "focus on the functionality, workflows and interoperability between Autodesk Construction solutions". At that time that was mostly Navisworks and certain tools in Revit and AutoCAD. What a difference a few years makes in technology as BIM 360 and the cloud have become our core platform for coordinating and delivering models to site, and fabrication is no longer a siloed part of the process. In the five years since we started this blog mandates for usage of BIM have come in place all over the world and many governments now see digital construction as a high priority to reduce waste and costs in major building and infrastructure projects.

So whilst it doesn't seem that long ago since Adele topped the US charts with Rolling in the Deep and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film was number one around the world, the construction site has changed considerably.

• Mobile devices have gone from a rarity on the most tech savvy sites to commonplace across industry. Powerful computers in your pocket or the size of a notebook allowing you to do multiple jobs in one go rather than needing 6 or 7 devices, printing bills have dropped and more people are using tools like BIM 360 Docs to load the latest construction documentation straight to their phone or tablet and feed issues back to the office.
• Connectivity and the Cloud has shifted from the latest buzzword to a normal part of our everyday lives. Think back 5 years, most people were still adding to their CD, DVD and Bluray collections, now they're gathering dust in many people's attics due to companies like Netflix and Spotify. In construction, the link between office and site has changed the way technology is perceived by many firms with investment in decent internet connection on site and suitable hardware becoming a priority.
• Drones and UAV's have become the must have toy for many children and big children but the real life applications to help with inspections of hard to reach areas, and ability to create 3D models accurate enough for cut and fill calculations from photos taken by these self-piloted devices, would five years ago have been dismissed as something from a sci-fi film.
• Reality Computing is an area that already had traction back in 2011 but was still scarce, over the last five years drops in hardware costs, innovative new data capture methods like from backpacks, cars and UAV's and new technology like Project Tango from Google have made a conventional laser scanner look boring.
• Wearables such as the prototype Google Glass, DAQRI smart helmets, smart watch's and location and sensor technology embedded in safety vests might not have taken over construction yet but we are seeing a change in tone from why to how, in five years' time I think we'll see more of this technology becoming standard on larger projects and filtering down to certain personnel on those smaller projects, like tablets are doing today.
• The Internet of Things and sensor technology in buildings, again have gone from a rare example of how things could be done to a common part of many people's lives. For example I can't imagine how I'd get on without my Nest, a thermostat that allows me to switch off my heating from my phone on the other side of the world, now many of the largest projects in the world such as Hudson Yards, are looking at sensor technology as an essential part of their design.
• Increase in use of Big Data as a way to measure projects to identify problems early in an industry notoriously bad at predictions, allowing contractors to make better decisions about which subcontractors they work with and when to invest in additional resources.
• With 3D printing we've seen a couple of false starts such as the story of ten 3D printed houses in a day which was found recently to be faked, however there's still a lot of interest in how this method of manufacturing on site could change how buildings and infrastructure are delivered in the future with many proof of concepts that just weren't around five years ago. There's starting to be more of a push to 'local factories', where items are built on or very close to site for quicker assembly, mirroring some of the trends we see in manufacturing.
• We have seen a surge in the interest in Advanced Robotics for construction with companies such as MX3D are looking at how to 3D print a bridge in the middle of Amsterdam using these robots, and other examples of robots being used for bricklaying!

That's how our world has changed over five years, here's some interesting stats about that journey you've joined us on: -

• Nearly half a million views!
• 35% of users from the US, 10% from the UK, and 5% each from Australia, India and Canada
  • In fact the only countries I couldn't see any visitors for were Chad and Vatican City (hurry up Pope, get into BIM!)
• Around half of you find us by searching through things like Google!
• 10 Authors who have contributed regularly so far (with 2 more added today)
• 277 posts (that's over one a week!)

Some of the most popular posts were about: -

• Navisworks Keyboard Shortcuts (update here)
• 14 things you'll be shocked you never knew about Navisworks
• Autodesk Graphics about an improved view in Navisworks
• BIM 360 Glue on the go about the mobile app
• Clash Rules to reduce false positives

So to celebrate we have had a reshuffle of our authors and would like to welcome Lejla Secerbegovic and Julien Drouet to the Beyond Design Team! They'll bring a different perspective on how fabrication and improved use of the design tools can bring more to the contractor and more tips and tricks to improve your day to day workflows.

You may also notice a new look to the blog, one of the things this allows is better mobile access so you can view our blog on the move!

Our aim hasn't changed in the last five years, so it leaves us to thank you for your support, feedback and continued use of our software, and here's to another five years and more!

Are you BIM Level 2 Ready?

BIM Level 2 is here

BIM Level 2 is now a requirement for all new government projects in the United Kingdom. As a contractor, you must be able to detail the processes you will use to meet the mandate and adhere to the new standards. But not to worry, we are here to help!

Our BIM Level 2 infographic will help you understand what, when and how information should be created, shared and managed. As you become more familiar with the mandate, check out our BIM Level 2 white paper for solid direction on relevant standards and specifications and how Autodesk solutions can help you comply on your next project.

And once you become more that Level 2 go-to expert, make sure you register for our Webinar: Autodesk Solutions and BIM Level 2 where we will cover how to implement BIM Level 2 projects, how to respond to the Level 2 requirements and how to configure your existing Autodesk solutions to support the mandate and specifically BS 1192.4 and PAS 1192.2.

Want to learn more about how to become Level 2 compliant on your next project? Check out The BIM Level 2 Toolkit: Your Path to Compliance. For more about what’s new in our construction portfolio, visit the BIM 360 blog.

Construction Collaboration at it’s Finest

Navisworks 2017 working together with BIM 360 Glue

What’s new in Navisworks 2017?  You’re familiar with the ‘connected desktop’ functionality within Navisworks.  Now, our newest version of Navisworks has enhanced integrated workflows with BIM 360 to better support construction collaboration in the cloud.    

Check out the new BIM 360 Shared Views feature which allows a more tightly integrated workflow between desktop and cloud, using Shared Views.  European Region Support provides more control of access to projects within BIM 360 Glue and Autodesk 2017 Product Integration helps ensure the latest version of design models and data can be reviewed and analyzed with Navisworks 2017 updated file readers, exporters and integrations.

Quality and Stability updates also provide faster and more reliable model display with BIM 360 Glue files, an easier and more intuitive UI, CLIC licensing access via a single license, greater clarity with model markup through a new Arrow Redline Tool, new additions of CADworx custom data property fields, and viewpoint switching improvements, all which continue to support your more connected experience.

Want to learn more about how BIM 360 and Navisworks can help improve your workflows?  Read the full article about construction collaboration. For more about what’s new in our construction portfolio, visit the BIM 360 blog.

Please submit your comments below!

Announcing the AEC Excellence Awards 2016

Nominate your story about Construction Collaboration!

First introduced in 2012 to recognize BIM in Infrastructure projects, this year’s competition includes Building and Construction categories and will showcase innovative and connected BIM technology use.  

Categories include 1^st and 2^nd place for Building, Construction, and Infrastructure projects. There are also categories specifically for small or niche projects, such as fabrication, communication & collaboration, computational design, small & large building construction projects and more. We will also award a Philanthropic Award that addresses the fields of public interest, social impact, community, humanitarian or sustainable design.

The deadline for entry is June 30. Finalists for each category will be announced during a live streamed event in August, and then winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at AU Las Vegas 2016 in November.

If your project takes BIM to the next level, submit it to the competition and you could get recognized with an award!  Show us your construction excellence today!