IMAGINiT Clarity for Revit helps BIM teams focus on data that matters

Rand Worldwide announced in December at  AU 2014 that its IMAGINiT Technologies division released key features provide more power, flexibility and enhance BIM coordinators’ abilities to monitor projects with IMAGINiT Clarity, IMAGINiT Clarity Connect and IMAGINiT Clarity Connect LT.

The latest release of IMAGINiT Clarity for Revit offers more flexibility and tools for coordinators, administrators and users. With multiple data sheet templates, more tools for understanding task failures, email alerts and 3D visualizations without plugins; IMAGINiT Clarity for Revit helps BIM teams focus on what matters, instead of required, but not valuable tasks.

I spoke with Joe Eichenseer, Building Solutions Team Manager for IMAGINiT at AU in Las Vegas last year, who noted that everything in the new release is there as a result of customer feedback. What the new release aims to address is “the data problem.” Says Eichenseer: “It’s a matter of identifying what works for a company; how do we get the data to work for that company and to talk?”

AECCafe Voice: What kinds of things are customers most excited about?

Joe Eichenseer: Visualization and management are the two key things. One is the management of Revit projects and models and being able to have automatic notifications coming your way when certain databases inside the Revit model get too large. Also to start recovering performance, so there is a feature for conditioning the model so it gets back to better performance.

There are a lot of management and monitoring features.

The other big one is the new Autodesk Viewer that hopefully gives everyone a much better way to work with the files inside the browsers.

AECCafe Voice: Is the product backwardly compatible?

JE: Yes. We’re still supporting Revit’s version 2015, 14 and 13 and Revit Server 2015,14 and 13 and still maintaining backward systems, while progressing forward.

We’re seeing more requests for services more related to specific projects. Traditionally IMAGINiT still does a lot of training and content development. Yet people have jobs coming in as markets are steadily improving, and they may have a crisis moment for that one job going out the door. So what we’re doing is helping them with BIM management, becoming an outsourced BIM champion for a project, aiding with model maintenance, reviewing the quality of the Revit model, the skill sets that people are using, etc. In a small company we are someone who can act as a BIM manager. In bigger companies we are being an extra resource to help the manager get through the job, to go through the coordination review meeting and representing that company in those meetings. We’re seeing that companies need to get rid of some of the overhead burden they have so they can focus on their core competencies.

AECCafe Voice: What about people who are not able to manipulate the BIM model themselves?

JE: Clarity can help with that. With Clarity we have all the information from the model so we can create different data sheets of the objects and allow somebody to give permission to make change to the information sheet of a room and/or piece of equipment and submit that back to Revit. For changes to the model, Clarity opens access to people who don’t normally have access to Revit or to that model. Other types of services we offer include taking information from Revit and pushing it to an Excel spreadsheet. For someone who doesn’t know Revit, they can manipulate the data in Excel, and pull the changes back into Revit. It’s a matter of identifying what works for that company, how do we get the data to work for that company and to talk? It’s a data problem.

We’re also seeing people looking at how we can blend BIM in a general sense, mostly BIM Revit, with the ongoing life of this facility, i.e., building lifecycle management or facilities management. If we’ve got this good information in Revit, why can’t we use it inside the project?

We are looking at doing a program where people can do dry runs of what their model looks like, an Archibus facilities management system. One of the key things we can do is plug in lots of rich information inside Revit but not all that matters. We need to bring the correct information in but also allow for easy access back to the Revit data to get back to that less important information when the user needs it. You may not care about hot and cold water pipe placement most of the time but when you get to that renovation project, then it becomes important.

So we deal with facilities and the data structure going forward and leave that other data in another accessible place.

AECCafe Voice: What are the most important trends this year for you?

JE: There’s certainly more excitement around scanning and reality capture. People are trying to understand whether they can use it and others are actively using it.

A man running our reality capture services group this last week had a drone flying over a grain pile, scanning it , so they could find out how many cubic feet of grain was in this massive mound in Nebraska.

Another trend is we are looking at non-standard educational platforms. The idea of sending someone to a four-day fundamentals class in Revit is great for some situations, but other times there are people coming to work who have some knowledge and are looking to fill some gaps. So we are looking for targeted solutions-based training or a blended offering that has the instructor-led component plus a self-paced component so they get knowledge when and how they need it.

We’re seeing new hiring. There are cases where a contractor is using a point cloud as their document in existing conditions. They’re not remodeling in Revit. What’s the point? They already scanned it; they have all the data. What they scanned is going to be different in six months. We’ll use the scan cloud as existing conditions.

We also have Scan-To-BIM. For that you open up the point clouds, click a button, and walk away. When you come back you will have found all cylinder hole objects within a range, for example, then convert it to Revit Pipes natively inside Revit.

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Availability & Pricing

All IMAGINiT Clarity products are available with perpetual licensing or on a subscription basis for those who want to use the tools for a specific timeframe.

IMAGINiT Clarity offers an unlimited number of users and projects and also includes basic installation and training. Maintenance fees apply. For organizations that need to collaborate with internal and external teams, IMAGINiT Clarity Connect and IMAGINiT Clarity Connect LT can be packaged with Autodesk Revit Server or can be integrated into an existing installation. Setup and training is included and managed by IMAGINiT’s trusted team of implementation and training experts. Pricing is dependent on number of locations, hosts, accelerators and task servers. Maintenance and subscription fees apply.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, BIM, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, engineers, infrastructure, laser scanning

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D printing, AEC, AECCafe, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, buildingSMART, Cloud, collaboration, construction, data archiving, file sharing, IMAGINiT, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, point clouds, project management, reality capture, video

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