Autodesk recently celebrated the one-millionth app download on the Autodesk Exchange Apps, a web-based design and engineering app store created for the Autodesk community. In three years since launching, the site has published 1,800 apps from third-party developers, which are available for download in 14 different languages and in 191 countries.
CADtoEarth 2.2 for Autodesk® Revit® extending a family of add-ins that establishes a bi-directional connection between CAD environments and Google Earth or Google Maps. The CADtoEarth 2.2 add-in now allows users to create personal accounts on the CADtoEarth web application and provides individual control over the visibility of uploaded data.
Rand Worldwide announced that its IMAGINiT Technologies division is partnering with Pix4D, leading developers of 2D and 3D mapping and modeling software. This collaboration will help architectural, civil and manufacturing design engineers extract imagery taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and convert it into usable 2D and 3D models.
New features and enhancements AutoCAD Plant 3D plant design software and P&ID arriving with the new 2016 release of Autodesk products include replicating the plant database to distributed teams to make it faster and able to manipulate data. The main focus of Plant is to take something and process it into something else. The industries served include pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, and food and beverage, all who require special material needs such as stainless steel that must be cleaned daily.
BioGen has built their own cogeneration plant to provide efficient energy to all buildings on their Cambridge campus. The plant converts natural gas fuel into electricity. The waste heat generated by making electricity creates steam used to heat and cool their buildings.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Convention held in Atlanta two weeks ago, was the setting for a number of AEC vendors to announce new products and services.
Last week media trekked to Autodesk’s new Innovation and Design Building in the heart of Boston for the Autodesk AEC Media Summit. While the previous LEED Gold headquarters in Waltham, Mass. was a testament to the company’s commitment to sustainable design, the Innovation and Design Building speaks to their branching out in their innovative capacities.
“As if It Were Already There” – sculpture by Janet Echelman in Rose F. Kennedy Greenway
Environmental Systems Design is a consulting engineering firm that addresses the AEC industry. According to vice president ESD Global, the company does all the engineering in the building that you can’t see “but you really notice unless it doesn’t work, such as, heating, cooling, electrical, lighting, low voltage work, computer networking and data centers.”
The $1.2 billion Kingdom Tower, which will stretch 3,280ft into the Saudi Arabian sky, has so far only been illustrated through concept sketches and a rendering showing the bank-busting building from afar.
Nasuni, a provider of enterprise storage to global organizations, announced at Autodesk University in December 2014 the availability of the Nasuni Service version 6.2 with enhanced global file locking support for Revit Worksharing features. Nasuni also introduced a new entry-level desktop appliance, the NF-50 Filer, adding to the broad range of Nasuni Filers now available.
Chris Scotton, president and CEO of ClearEdge, talked with AECCafe Voice about the latest release of EdgeWise, EdgeWise 5.0. In this release, the ClearEdge team has updated the core automated feature extraction algorithms. The EdgeWise 5.0 release is for the BIM Suite and the Plant Suite.
Stuart Broome, Business Manager, Engineering North America at Tekla, a Trimble company, spoke with AECCafe about the recent addition to the Tekla portfolio, Tekla Structural Designer, a dedicated analysis and design software for structural engineers working on commercial building projects.