Unity 3D’s PiXYZ Plug-In Real Time 3D Tool Changes the Face of Workflow Models

Tim McDonough, general manager of Industries, for Unity3D spoke with AECCafe Voice about the PiXYZ plug in that can be now used to host AEC projects in Unity3D.

PiXYZ Plugin and PiXYZ Studio for Unity allows you to import IFC BIM files into Unity. The 2018.3 version of the PiXYZ products are now available and can import the geometry from Revit and all BIM 360 data.

“We have a dedicated team that does nothing but AEC,” said McDonough. “There is an incredible demand for people to have modern experiences when they’re developing a building, whether it be doing it on an iPad, or augmented reality program, or putting on a headset and being able to walk around in virtual space. The PiXYZ Plug in is a software plug in that fits inside Unity. You can not only the import the geometry from Revit but also all the BIM 360 data.”

The workflow to get things out of Revit and into Unity, a real time 3D tool, has been hard. Typically, users would put data into fdx and when going into retrieve it, you would lose the BIM data.  “You can put it into Unity but in that kind of workflow models are always changing, so every time you change that model you export your model into Revit from an IFC file,” said McDonough. “You jump into Unity and go to the plug in, and you have control over the types of parameters you want to import and what resolution and scale, and hit a button. It then pulls in the IFC format and gets all the geometry. You get the BIM data, and so we’ve taken what was a process that took a lot of time and we’ve cut the time way down and removed the data loss that historically was just there because we hadn’t yet done our collaboration with PiXYZ and Autodesk.”

To update your file, simply export your IFC again and the next time you go to launch your project in Unity you notice the IFC files have changed. It will ask would you like me to audit and update your model, so now you have a more natural workflow and you’re not repeating steps. “It’s providing access for data visualization as this is about looking at the data in a model.  A whole lot more people can see a lot more easily than ever possible. You don’t need a whole team of visualization specialists manually doing this work — it’s now a much simpler workflow.”

Unity3D is located down the street from Autodesk in San Francisco, and the company has a broad collaboration across 3ds Max, VRED, Shotgun, and Revit. Customers can now spend more time, creating projects and not fighting with file formats and metadata.

Everyone who can learn Revit can learn Unity as well. Unity is priced at $1500 year and the PiXYZ plug is $1150.

The Revit data is brought into Unity with BIM, and when you point iPad at the plan, it pulls up a 3D model that you can inspect for part models, and other parts of the model.  Once your data is in Unity, you can run the data on anything, 35 different devices. In the video the iPad can be taken to  the street corner where a building was to be built, the iPad recognizes the location and places the building on the site at scale. Site lines, trees, and neighboring buildings are all taken into account. Customers can actually see what the building will look like when completed in relation to the surrounding location. They report that they can look at it in AR or in a VR walkthrough and finally visualize in human scale as opposed to a fraction of human scale so it’s more realistic representation.

A Unity client was creating a design of Brisbane Airport. They did all the design visualization and data visualization using VR and to let their security find blind spots, according to McDonough. They realize they wouldn’t have been able to find these blind spots until they were in construction. And the cost of those fixes would’ve been astronomically higher. But because they were able to walk through the building in human scale just in VR they were able to lower the cost of the process.

Tags: 3D printing, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, infrastructure, site planning, sustainable design, virtual reality, visualization, wearable devices

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