Ease-of-Use, Owner Involvement are Big Themes at Rand IMAGINiT

Carl Storms, Senior Applications Expert, for Rand IMAGINiT and Matt Mason, director of Software Development, for Rand IMAGINiT spoke with AECCafe at Autodesk University in November 2016 about the direction of the AEC industry. Rand IMAGINiT is a consulting and software development firm and Autodesk Partner. Carl Storms is “out in the trenches,” working with real world problems in AEC while Matt Mason is behind the scenes in the software development department, realizing the solutions to those challenges.

When asked about popular products and trends in AEC, Storm said, “Dynamo and visual programming are still a big thing. It’s been around a couple of years and now people more comfortable with it. Autodesk’s latest release of Dynamo Player is for people who are maybe not well versed in technology. They can just hit a button and play something. It’s like a playlist, you can pick a track you want to play. It accesses the information inside of your Revit model. It will, for example, have your text go from lower case to upper case with just the click of a button. It really gives people the benefit of using the technology without spending a lot of time learning the programming.”

According to Matt Mason, “Dynamo is still used by the power users, but to make it available to the rest of the people in the firm it needs to be more approachable. It’s been a challenge historically because you had to open the power users’ big complicated graph and understand it. From a usability standpoint, for the other 95% who aren’t at the level of doing Dynamo, it really helps democratize and leverage the Dynamo concept. The players can take advantage of the power users’ skills and have pretty much on-demand access.”

“Another big thing is augmented and virtual realities,” said Storms. “It’s now in more client and consumer based products. You have things as simple as Google Cardboard where you spend $12 to get the little lens and use your own smartphone, to high end devices, but they all allow you to immerse yourself in the data. Whether it’s a virtual reality type of device where you get immersed in the world of your model, you can walk around in your model and see what’s going on. Or you bring the reality into your reality so you can still see people and have conversations. You can see your interaction. People have been talking about it and have lots of thoughts and ideas for using it, and it will become more mainstream.”

AECCafe Voice: And what about point clouds?

“Having access to point clouds and scanned data is still a big thing because of the whole idea behind how the process works,” said Mason. “In the renovation market, where you have access to scanners and scan what’s already there, you may have a 100-year-old as built and you have to do an educated guess of using this latest technology.  If we can use this scanned data, we can bring it into what we modeled physically or thought was there. Sometimes it’s not the same so you bring this all together and collaborate with that data. It’s the ability to merge what’s there with what we thought was there.  This is another technology that has been there for years but has achieved more acceptance in the marketplace.”

AECCafe Voice: To me it was interesting at SPAR 3D that people were asking, should I use this technology?

“Everyone goes through their own technology adoption curve,” said Mason.  “It’s also interesting to see that with more options such as photogrammetry and drone based, data is not captured at the same level of detail, but people are still getting the value and it doesn’t require a surveying crew. What you can use it for is different than what you use tripod based systems for, but people are appreciating the value and finding this much investment gets me this much. Instead of just a few price value points, there’s now a range for people to find their own level.”

“People are starting to realize it’s not just a value-based proposition, but rather, you don’t have to make every solution solve every problem,” said Storms. “Drones are so much easier to use with relaxed regulations and you can program them yourself. They take off by themselves, gather the images, and stitches them together for you, whether it’s for renovation or construction. They take weekly progress photos, providing you with a backup. This also covers you against litigation at a more reasonable price point.”

“Collaboration for Revit, the cloud based file sharing system, is taking another step toward mainstream acceptance,” said Storms. “At least in terms of number of firms that are trying it out on a project, almost every firm I know. People are getting over the fear that their content is in the cloud. they’re starting to be more trusting with it.”

“One of the areas we’re kind of excited about is BIM Analytics – trying to harvest data from your BIM, to be able to use traditional Business Intelligence tools to try to get an understanding of what’s going on inside these models and compare to previous projects you’ve done,” said Mason. “In larger firms where they’re managing lots of different projects and support staff that oversees all these projects, they need a way to keep oversight without necessarily needing to be in it. IMAGINiT Clarity does this. It is the “Swiss Army knife;” it extracts out. We’re currently doing about 50 different metrics of every model that you can extract out and have access to over time, and we’re starting to provide some of the dashboard tools to let you have a sense of what’s going on in a project. Also, our data is open, and more sophisticated users are using Microsoft Business Intelligence to merge data together into dashboards. It’s relatively new for people to be extracting data from projects on a large scale — from projects that are already completed or a work in progress.”

“A lot of people are getting into big data and data mining,” said Storms. With BIM we have so much data, there’s a lot of value there. As you get more data you can make corrections as you go. It’s been adopted in a lot of industries first. This portion of the data has been missing until there were better tools to extract it. It’s great that the toolsets out there for industries are all very well developed once you have data in hand.”

“A lot of our customers ask about the use of Dynamo to attack large problems running across huge numbers of models,” said Mason.  “We’ve done some work on the development side to enable that with Clarity — to be able to take tasks you’ve developed as Dynamo and run them against thousands of models, update them or get data out of them.”

AECCafe Voice: Are there industry areas you’re doing more work in than others?

“We cover the whole gamut, but from my view on the AEC side, we’re finding our way more into the contracting end, because they’re mixing more with design professionals, getting involved earlier on in the process, so they’re taking advantage of the models and clash detection earlier on,” said Storms. “They’re the ones who have to get it done and they have less and less time to get it done, so they’re getting involved earlier on. We deal with them more as a collaboration sometimes, it’s not just A/E, it’s a group bidding on a project work together, more of an IPD scenario.

Another trend out there slowly rising, is involving the owner in receiving the data at the end of the day. It’s been talked about forever, but some owners have developed their own standards. It seems incrementally better this year than last.  There is increased awareness that you need to have a plan for data and standards in order to get the benefits of BIM. All that data you have needs to be usable. It makes a big difference if you’re on a design or construction team and you’re involved with the data for one or two years. When you’re an owner you have a much longer commitment of perhaps 100 years. You have to be careful not to jump into the latest trend. Having owners work with data and BIM is the right way to go but you can understand why they are more cautious.”

“The tool being made more accessible to owners makes a huge difference,” said Mason. The systems they use for managing the buildings, such as Maximo, etc., encourage more people to do BIM oriented workflow. Ultimately, this brings more acceptance to BIM data if it’s done correctly.”

IMAGINiT Clarity 2016-1 and Clarity Owner Data Portal ODP Released

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk University, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, point clouds, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, apps, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, buildingSMART, civil information modeling, collaboration, construction, convergence, field solutions, file sharing, IMAGINiT, integrated project delivery, IoT, mobile, point clouds, project management, reality capture, virtual reality, visualization, wearable devices

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