IMAGINiT Clarity and Autodesk Dynamo a Winning Combination

Recently, AECCafe Voice conducted interviews with Peter Costanza, director Facilities Management, Carl Storms, senior applications expert, and Matt Mason, director of Software Solutions from IMAGINiT about the latest developments for their company and what was talked about at Autodesk University 2019.

APEX – client: Biomed Realty Trust Inc., architect: Perkins and Will

The technologies IMAGINiT carries into the New Year are already making a profound difference to the AEC industry going forward. In 2019, Autodesk University logged 700 hours of sessions for attendees to watch over the next year, more than ever before.

Carl Storms received an award as Top Rated AU speaker, based upon sessions recorded the previous year and the traffic received by those who viewed his session up until the current conference.

“IMAGINiT had a bigger booth this year, one of the things that came out was our latest version of Clarity,” said Storms.

Autodesk Dynamo garnered some excitement as Storms delivered the Dynamo lab twice. The release

of the Autodesk Construction Cloud was the major announcement of the conference this year.

Last year’s big announcement was the PlanGrid acquisition, so the Construction Cloud now puts all these platforms in one place. Those platforms are: BIM 360 platform, PlanGrid platform, Assemble platform, and ConnectConstruct platform in one spot. Users can get information and use all four products was significant news. Autodesk acquired all the platforms last year and have since brought those products into the Autodesk family.

“There’s a lot more interest in Dynamo, Autodesk’s computational BIM design program,” said Storms. “There is interest in programming at the AEC level, computational design, awareness of being able to do some coding, not necessarily being a full stack developer, understanding APIs and knowing enough coding language like Python for quick fixes.”

Dynamo and computational design has taken off, according to Storms, while it was quite slow for awhile. Project Refinery (sits on top of Dynamo) in beta stage can access Dynamo to create a thousand options for building design.  “We’re also tasked with reviewing a thousand options,” said Storms. “Refinery allows us to put rules and guidelines in place, and in the cloud create options then go through the rules. Not only are we letting the software crunch through the numbers of designs, we are teaching it to review the designs and find the best fit and narrowing down to the ones that are realistic. We want to focus on what humans are good at. We aren’t going to lose our jobs because of generative designs, rather, the mundane tasks will go away.”

Costanza said, “If you have a facility that has data in CAD and Revit, it has to touch other areas. There is going to be a wave of integrations with different IT systems in facilities over the next few years which will be huge. All our FM customers have wireless networks. You can now buy sensors to put in places with proximity sensors to test use cases of mobile assets. But they’re going to be – your car has a check engine light – and your facilities have hundreds of thousands of assets and they don’t have check engine lights on things. The check engine lights are starting to show up.”

Data integration that IT has been doing for years, has finally caught up with facilities. As this comes together in the Revit and 3D world, with ties to mapping it provides a new network that you can start to do other analysis with, according to Costanza.

Matt Mason said that Autodesk University was bigger than before. He noted that they spent most of their time this year on IMAGINiT Clarity, with its focus on task automation, the manual repetitive tasks that occur week in and week out.

“They occupy people’s time, and there’s no reason for that,” said Mason. “Once you define how a particular task process is to be done for a project, there’s no reason why a robot can’t do this for you. Send Revit files out or receive Revit files back from partners. We can make those happen automatically in the background. The focal point is the batch task automation of things. We’ve expanded that into automating model health, that has been a big topic over the past couple of years. People want to stay on top of what’s going on in Revit models, as the number of people involved in the team gets bigger. Are people using Revit in the way the firm wants to use Revit? With model health automation, we can be scanning the model and looking for the kinds of issues the firm cares about, and making sure the people involved know what’s acceptable and unacceptable without having to be in Revit; it happens in the background. You get alerts telling you the model has crossed over from being in the straight and narrow, into a caution kind of area. Those are two big areas within Clarity we’ve been focusing on this year. More of our customers are using BIM 360 for where their projects live. Clarity works with BIM 360 and retrieves models from BIM 360 in order to put them through their paces. So you can check the model health even if the models live in BIM 360.”

Mason said that model health is somewhat like CAD standards checking of old. As it is specifically BIM or Revit oriented, it’s more about the firm’s best practices for how Revit gets used. “We check about 60 different metrics, measurement in the model and how the people are using Revit in the model,” said Mason. “The firms that work with us can choose from those 60 we collected which ones to focus on. They pick 6-10 they’d like to work with in those areas, and we’ve got dashboards to be able to give people visibility to how those metrics are trending over time.”

Global architecture and design firm Perkins & Will has now deployed the Clarity solution across 20+ offices, for task automation. It tracks the amount of time saved by being able to complete a task on demand now rather than taking 20-30 minutes longer.

“If the robot is doing it for you in the back room that’s saved you time over the course of the project,” said Mason. “Across our entire customer base, for a project that runs for a year, the average savings is over 200 hours every year on every project, more than a month of person time saved that would’ve been spent doing repetitive things. Hopefully those people can be freed up and spending their time on something other than mechanical tasks.”

Perkins and Will decided to purchase IMAGINiT Clarity for a one-year pilot program of automating PDF printing because:

■■ The company could evaluate Clarity software as well as IMAGINiT

Technologies before selecting a long-term solution

■■ Clarity can be used by any team member, even those who don’t

use Revit software

■■ Clarity is easy to implement and learn, so teams could focus more

of their time on design

■■ The company could measure savings to determine next steps and

use for leadership buy-in of a larger purchase, if needed

This pilot program led to enterprise wide adoption of Clarity.

Tags: 3D, 3D printing, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk University, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineers, generative design, infrastructure, mobile, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, apps, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, construction project management, engineering, file sharing, IMAGINiT, infrastructure, project management, reality capture, simulation, sustainable design, virtual reality, visualization

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 6th, 2020 at 6:17 pm. 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.