Autodesk Announces New 2014 Software Portfolio

Richard Humphrey, senior director, Industry Strategy at Autodesk, spoke about the company’s newly announced 2014 software portfolio in a press conference held Tuesday, March 26^th.

Autodesk ReCap

He also spoke about the state of the U.S. infrastructure: $US 60 trillion are needed between now and 2030 to meet the needs of infrastructure. Current industry has the capacity to put in place less than half of that. World energy consumption continues to be unrelenting. Owners are asking for better models to manage their assets over a lifecycle. Examples of complexity like these will continue to multiply, and with the increase in complexity will come greater challenges to provide technology to meet the new needs.

Autodesk’s BIM portfolio is designed to meet these challenges and address complexity throughout the lifecycle, offering a model-centric process with clarity, continuity and agility, according to the company. “BIM is rapidly transforming how infrastructure projects built and maintained,” said Humphrey.

What’s new at Autodesk is the 2014 software portfolio  that includes Autodesk, ReCap for reality capture, Autodesk Design Suites, and Autodesk 360.

Autodesk ReCap

Autodesk ReCap for reality capture enables designers, architects and engineers to add, modify, validate and document their projects by creating intelligent 3D data from laser scans and photos. They can visualize and share in the form of point clouds and deploy this visual information across Revit, Civil 3D and other Autodesk products in the Design Suites.

Autodesk Building Design Suite 2014

 Autodesk Building Design Suite 2014 enables customers to design, simulate, visualize and document all aspects of their project. Within that Suite is Autodesk Revit 2014, which sports new improved productivity and interoperability in the areas of design and documentation, building element energy analysis, interoperability and API.

Navisworks Manage and Navisworks Simulate include new tools that add powerful quantification to the coordinated model.

Autodesk ReCap is part this Suite. Autodesk AutoCAD Raster Design is also a part of this Suite, offering raster editing and raster-to-vector conversion tools to design workflows.

Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suite 2014

This Design Suite offers engineering in context, enhanced communication, maintenance of data fidelity, and is able to respond quickly to changes.

As part of this Design Suite, the new Autodesk InfraWorks (formerly known as Infrastructure Modeler) is considered “a breakthrough” in 3D modeling and visualization technology, according to Autodesk. This technology “enables customers to create convincing project proposals to win work and improve engagement with stakeholders, to engineer in 3D from the beginning, and foster project team collaboration.”

Autodesk Civil 3D 2014 extends the value of the design model with corridor improvements, pressure pipe enhancements, survey query, and compatibility that were not in the previous release.

The Design Suite also includes new specific modules such as geotechnical, rail layout, bridge modeling and river and flood analysis.

Also within this Suite are: Autodesk Revit, familiar to users for architectural design, MEP, and structural engineering and construction; Autodesk Robot Structural Analysis Pro for advanced structural analysis; and Autodesk ReCap, described above.

Autodesk Plant Design Suite 2014

 Autodesk Plant Design Suite 2014 now includes orthographic drawing and documentation, drawing checker and 4D planning and simulation tools.

This Suite includes Autodesk Inventor with Routed Systems to create and coordinate accurate digital prototypes for plant equipment and skids; Autodesk ReCap, Autodesk 3ds Max Design to create project visuals; and Autodesk AutoCAD Raster Design for adding raster editing and raster-to-vector conversion to design workflows.

Autodesk 360 + Design Suites

 Autodesk  360 offers storage, data sharing and greater compute power through the Cloud. It includes Autodesk InfraWorks 360 and BIM 360.

Summary

This announcement from Autodesk focused on serious AEC “suites” rather than incorporating any consumer type announcements at this time (a shift from the Autodesk University message). Definitely the emphasis is on tools that can ultimately help with infrastructure retrofit and build in the race against time brought to light by recent statistics. Autodesk does seem on track in its goal to move products and tools over to the Cloud, evidenced by its remarketing of Infrastructure Modeler into “InfraWorks” and InfraWorks 360. I’m certain we will see more of this in the future, as the need for computing power drives more technology to the Cloud.

Tags: AEC, Autodesk, Autodesk 2014 Software Portfolio, building design, Cloud, infrastructure, infrastructure design, MEP, plant design, reality capture, visualization

Categories: AEC, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, Cloud, construction, engineering, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, plant design, site planning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 27th, 2013 at 11:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.