The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex and huge models.
ABDCE_disciplines: AECOsim Building Designer, Bentley’s multi-discipline BIM application, provides architectural, structural, electrical, and mechanical tools so you can coordinate your designs better across disciplines with a streamlined workflow.
For AEC firms, it is very common to use multiple software products within the same organization, as well as outside the organization. No single BIM software solution or integrated system can fulfill the requirements of the AEC industry. All these products throughout the design process need to be able to communicate with one another.
Standards organizations have come forward to suggest that they have the answer to interoperability in the BIM world. But currently what most vendors are able to achieve is perhaps an increase in interoperability. Does anyone offer total interoperability?
Some of our respondents define BIM interoperability in this way:
“Interoperability is about handing over the right amount of information, to the right people at the right time,” says David Lash, product manager, Trimble, Tekla Structures Division. “It’s about hitting milestones for people who want to stay up to date with the wider project, even on a daily basis.”
“Communication, communication, communication,” says Joe Eichenseer, director, Building Lifecycle Solutions, North America IMAGINiT. “Interoperability allows us to communicate better and reduce or eliminate the chance of translation errors between systems.”
Last week Vectorworks released the 2019 versions of Vectorworks Architect, Landmark, Spotlight, Fundamentals and Designer, as well as BraceworksTM and Vision. Significant improvements have been made in increased design efficiency through overall performance and quality, plus innovations to greatly improve the 3D and BIM modeling, 2D documentation and presentation workflows for architectural, landscape, interior design and entertainment designers.
Vectorworks 2019 Architect
In an interview with Vectorworks CEO Biplab Sarkar, he talked about the importance of the new release, including 3D site model sculpting; the unique ability to have BIM objects display with varying levels of detail in plan, elevation and section drawings; enhanced openBIM interoperability; and a new partnership integration with AutoTURN online for analyzing vehicle swept paths.
“We improved and streamlined the creation of drawings from the models,” said Sarkar. “The primary reason BIM models are used is for people to drive presentation drawings from the models. When you have an object, a kitchen sink or an appliance and you want to present in different views: side, front and back view, for example, you really need a simplified presentation depending upon the scale of the drawing. So, what we introduced is 2D from 3D components for hybrid objects. If you look at the object from the top plan, it will give you a simplified top plan view and if you look at it from any other view it will show a 3D presentation of the object.”
Vectorworks Landmark 2019
The 2019 version extends the view from the top plan to other views. You can have a left view, front view, bottom view, and all these views can be stored in the object. You can choose low, high or medium view selection and specify so details can be changed depending on the view. You simplify the view depending on the scale. For very small scale and everything close together, you don’t want to show all the details of the object, and for a large scale you want to display all the details of a complicated object.
GRAPHISOFT and Surbana Jurong Consultants, a Singapore-based multi-disciplinary urban, infrastructure and management services consultancy firm, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) effective September 3, 2018, to cooperate and collaborate in BIM, Virtual Design & Construction (VDC), and Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD)-related research and development to combine their different areas of expertise. GRAPHISOFT will focus on BIM and related software technologies, while Surbana Jurong will focus on design and construction domain.
The need for temporary housing has arisen in recent years for various reasons. For one, there have been more natural disasters in the world, and/or other situations that require finding temporary housing for large numbers of people very quickly. There are also creations such as described in the article, How Burning Man is Built, a temporary city that evolves in the desert from scratch for a massive festival, attracting people from all over the globe. Each year, a team of 21 surveyors spend seven days laying the lines and waypoints of a 5.62-mile plan, creating the largest and most iconic art installation at Burning Man – the city itself.
Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
In an interview with former CEO of SolidWorks, John McEleny, co-founder of the new company OnShape, we discussed the new paradigm shift in the CAD industry that OnShape represents.
Vancouver, British Columbia is the venue for the 45th SIGGRAPH 2018 conference, this week, August 12-16, where technology vendors and aficionados gather to view the latest and greatest in virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), computer graphics and interactive techniques.
The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex models.
Bay Bridge East Span Seismic Safety Project To prove the project was viable, the California Department of Transportation shared detailed 3D designs with potential contracting firms.
The Architecture 2030 Challenge, adopted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), offers a path to reducing the building sector’s negative impacts and reaches for carbon neutral design as standard practice by the year 2030. The building sector is the single largest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Designed to provide continuing education credits, the AIA+2030 Online Seriesprovides courses in high performance design, building a comprehensive understanding with each class in the series. The series will teach and inspire architects to meet the 2030 Challenge through design strategies, efficient technologies and systems, and the application of renewable energy resources.
Epson announced this month two new high-speed, easy-to-use wide-format SureColor® T-Series printers – the Epson SureColor T3170 24-inch desktop printer and the SureColor T5170 36-inch floor-standing printer. While these printers benefit professionals and workgroups across a range of industry segments including architecture, engineering, CAD, GIS, education, corporate, home and small office settings, the new wireless printers also feature an all-new clean and compact design coupled with the reliable printing performance inherent in Epson’s technical printer solutions.
