Autodesk University Virtual 2020 Focuses on Virtual Creation and Data

The first Autodesk University Virtual attracted 99,000 attendees worldwide and offered 750+ classes, live Q&As and meetings.

Autodesk Tandem – Reviewing asset details for more informed operational decision making

This was also the first year that nearly everyone is working remotely and normal as we know it, was irreversibly changed.

Andrew Anagnost, CEO of Autodesk talked about how important resilience is in these times, how we are dealing with fragile economies, ecosystems and supply chains. The idea is to achieve a new possible. “Our opportunity and future is going to be bigger on the other side of the crisis,” he said.

The theme of the conference, “Reimagine Possible,” takes into account how people have had to reimagine and customize to meet shifting demands and needs.

Along with this, Autodesk is putting a lot of attention on virtual creation, not just in the entertainment industry, but beyond the construction industry, in the factory floor and production studio.

“In AEC, it used to be when a building project moved to construction rich information was lost just when it was most needed,” said Anagnost. “Look how much it has changed in last year. Healthcare and infrastructure have skyrocketed, shifted more than you can ever imagine. Social distancing keeping more people in more controlled environments, slowed down, digitalization of construction was happening already but not quickly enough. Construction will be permanently digitized when we get to the other side of this.”

Besides the AEC aspect, manufacturing saw a drop from phones to cars. Supply chains got reconfigured, and now supply chains will be more distributed, and businesses became more resilient.

Exterior view of the Autodesk Technology Center in Toronto, Canada. As a center for emerging technologies, Autodesk Toronto is creating, developing, and evaluating the potential to push technologies into new realms shaping the future of making things. Multi-disciplinary teams in this space are exploring everything from virtual reality and generative design that will impact the future of concept design and storytelling to technologies like the internet of things, AI and machine learning that will help our customers magine, design, and create a better world.

Because so many people are staying home now, the demand for entertainment exploded. There is a need for more stories for broader and bigger audiences. Now entertainment has grown from just the physical world to a blend of physical and digital worlds. The line between physical and digital are being redrawn in all ecosystems, according to Anagnost.

The need to digitalize for coordinating workflows and teams increased as well as the need to coordinate work from anywhere. “Data will need to flow from design to construction and directly into the digital twin, back cycle from into hands of architects, owners from the entire lifecycle of the asset, so how do we get there? The falloff in manufacturing, and factory closures broke fragile supply chains.

Last year we announced Autodesk Construction Cloud, that promised greater depth, breadth, not just a collection of disparate tools, a truly connected construction experience. We are proud to announce Construction Cloud takes a big step forward with a new generation of solutions. Autodesk Build is a new project cost solution that leverages the best of BIM 360 and the Plan Grid for integration, all built on Autodesk Docs, for the entire lifecycle of a project. It is more open and available, IFC 4 compliant, works with non-Autodesk tools, and will support BIM 360.

Autodesk Quantify for 2D and 3D integrated quantification, Autodesk Coordinate model coordination and design collaboration brought together and all built on Autodesk Docs, a shared data environment that enables powerful insights for the entire lifecycle of projects.

An area that Autodesk has been slow to embrace – non-Autodesk product integration, seems to have been afforded a bigger role this year. Data is more interoperable and available, open, IFC 4 compliant, and enables workflows with non-Autodesk tools. By January, BIM 360 Docs will support ISO 19650 compliant workflows and Autodesk Docs will soon follow. Early next year the AEC collection subscription subscribers will have access to Autodesk Docs, allowing you to share data and collaborate in over 50 file formats.”

According to Anagnost, BIM is at the center of the digital transformation sweeping the industry and it is more important today than ever, so design tools are being built to make BIM more scalable, and more automated in both building design and infrastructure design. Autodesk’s new grading optimization extension creates an optimized site plan that will lay a foundation for project success. Automation like that can help save time and generate better solutions.

Generative Design

Generative design is another of those late bloomer technologies at Autodesk and elsewhere. This year, Autodesk has been working hard to make it more accessible. The ticket seems to be linking it up with BIM. Revit 2021 includes technology that is bringing the power of generative design tools directly into Revit with no coding required. “You can define key design requirements and instead of just documenting your decisions, Revit produces design optimizations customized to your criteria,” said Anagnost. “We’re investing in a solution that allows you to customize designs on demand and make the rich BIM data you create more interoperable, accessible and open. When you bring BIM data into rich data environments it fuels better discussions, and better decisions. Everyone knows that. Building owners have awoken to the value to BIM, and are asking for digital handover.”

Autodesk Tandem uses Autodesk Forge to aggregate all types of data from BIM to Information of Things (IoT) and beyond. It empowers owners to take control of their assets and decisions. Designers and contractors deliver more value to their projects and can deliver real time collaboration between owners, architects, engineers and contractors throughout the entire lifecycle of a project.

The first public beta of Autodesk Tandem will be available soon.

Acquisition of Spacemaker

Amy Bunszel, SVP AEC Design Autodesk, spoke about the morning’s announcement of Autodesk’s agreement to acquire Spacemaker, which builds AI powered software for AEC. Spacemaker’s algorithm-based solution accelerates Autodesk’s vision for the future and will generate more insights and vision across the Autodesk portfolio. Spacemaker is created by architects for architects.

In keeping with Autodesk’s commitment to Artificial Intelligence, Spacemaker allows you to quickly create and evaluate options for building and urban design. “This is critical in the world to house rapidly growing populations and better manage urban denseness,” said Bunszel. “Spacemaker technology is generative design for urban design. It lets you analyze dozens of criteria and how they may play out in your design, all in real time and in the cloud. It’s powerful AI technology will help you see what’s possible with any design project. How many units could you build on the site? What kind of sight lines could you have? How does daylight, noise or wind affect your design? You can then test the feasibility of various design ideas and pick the most optimal one. Spacemaker helps you make data driven design decisions to ensure the best outcomes for your projects.”

Anagnost talked about working to connect all parts of AEC, to enable the industry to collaborate in near real-time with agility and productivity. An example of real-time collaboration is the project executed by Building Design Partnership for Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

RePurposing an Exhibition Center as a Covid-19 Hospital

James Hepburn, engineering principal at Building Design Partnership (BDP), recalled one night in early March he was brainstorming with the chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London – to find ways to meet the city’s expected need for intensive care beds. Covid-19 cases were growing and there wasn’t time to build anything new. They needed to rehab and repurpose an existing space.

“One night in early March, I was with the chief executive of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Brainstorming ways to meet the city’s expected need for intensive care beds,” said Hepburn. “Covid-19 cases were growing, there wasn’t time to build something new. We needed to reshape and repurpose an existing space. So we asked ourselves, what about an exhibition center? What about London’s ExCel center? Could a 45,000 square meter convention space become an emergency hospital?”

BDP explored the feasibility of the project and prepared a technical paper for the National Health Service (NHS). The army supported the concept and the government green-lighted what would eventually become the first NHS Nightingale Hospital.

“We joined the team at the ExCel center with a brief to deliver 500 ICU beds within a week, and 3,500 more in the weeks to come,” explained Hepburn. “Nothing had been done on this scale before, but we knew we could do it if we focused on being as agile and productive as possible.

We coordinated our workflows in Revit to design quick layouts, repurposing Revit families from previous healthcare projects to speed the design. A team of BDP architects and engineers collaborated with other fantastic consultants, designers, specialists, and contractors. We printed our initial designs, iterated rapidly, and got sign off from the client.

Within a day we had a plan in place. There were huge numbers of people involved from dozens of organizations, including experts from the NHS, contractors from every conceivable field, and even the army. A leadership team guided by the military convene twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. And when the teams leads presented and worked through design and construction challenges in real time, it was clear from the outset that to hit that deadline, we would need to design and build in parallel. We needed a design that was modular, repeatable, and it could be customized and built on demand. Our design decisions were based primarily on the availability of materials. The team needed to procure 4,000 lights, 116,000 meters of cable, 8,000 oxygen terminals, and 20 kilometers of medical copper gas tube, as well as the hospital beds and ventilators. Everyone onsite pushed hard, working, 15, 16 hour days in a fast changing landscape. Revit’s ability to change one design detail and have it propagate across all systems saved us a lot of time. And while the team were focused on fitting out the hospital quickly, we also had to keep in mind that with any luck we would need to disassemble everything.”

Hepburn said hopefully at some point soon the ExCel center will be able to return to its former state. But for now the team is relying on virtual creations of the space to understand patients’ flow through the Nightingale Hospital.

“We would design in a place where sick people would come to be cared for, so we needed to make sure every part of the patient treatment was accounted for,” Hepburn said. “The team taped a to-scale plan of the center onto the floor and consulted doctors and nurses with every step of a patient’s journey.

This is a brilliant solution, but difficult to replicate nationally. Other teams from across the UK were hard at work on other hospital locations. We wanted to pass on what we’d learned at the ExCel Center to help our colleagues be even more agile and productive. We created the Nightingale manual, which digitized everything we’d learned. While we may have worked largely on paper, the Revit model was always our source of the truth at NHS Nightingale, and the other hospitals as well.” At other sites, project teams used BIM 360 and PlanGrid to track progress, share drawings of markups, work through installation problems and ensure quality. Ultimately, the NHS Nightingale team delivered the first 500 hospital beds in nine days, and 3,500 more in the following weeks.

“We proved that when we work together, even in the face of extraordinary challenges, anything is possible. As builders and designers, we learned that sometimes the right solution is not to build something new, it’s to refit and reshape what’s already there to meet the needs of the moment.”

Connecting Construction with the Construction Cloud, Autodesk Tandem and Forge Cloud Data Service

Anagnost noted that digitizing the design process, creating standards and templates, and facilitating near real time collaboration throughout design, and construction is critical now.  Autodesk is investing in design authoring, connecting construction with the Construction Cloud, and empowering building owners and operators with Autodesk Tandem.

So how might Autodesk take a similar approach to the teams who worked on Project Nightingale, and help all disciplines make better decisions for product design and engineering, in near real-time, together? “Just as we’re helping coordinate how data flows between different phases of building projects, and coordinating all the different disciplines involved, we’re doing the same in product design and manufacturing,” said Anagnost. “We’re using Forge to build a unified platform that brings disciplines closer together. Today you can collaborate in Fusion simultaneously and concurrently, and now in core Fusion.

No matter how distributed your teams are, you can all be exploring the same design. The Forge cloud data service means that your designers can be working on generating new ideas. At the same time, your engineers can be validating each design’s performance, tooling can be planned and prototypes produced, all from the same model. We are expanding the range of design challenges that you can explore in Fusion.”

Generative design was traditionally focused on the exploration of structural forces. But now engineers can also explore fluid characteristics, like whether a valve will perform with a certain flow rate or certain pressure.

Not only does Forge enable concurrency, it fuels extensibility. Autodesk announced Forge for Manufacturing, which can help streamline design processes. It provides open access to not only Fusion’s data, but data from other applications and processes as well.

This opens the door for partners to access Fusion data more easily and develop more seamless workflows between the products of Autodesk’s partners and their own.

The digital twin for AEC is now moving closer to manufacturing, with machine simulation being released for Fusion, enabling users to run simulations of a digital representation of the physical machines on the shop floor.

The Entertainment Industry

The Entertainment industry is charged with seeking bigger stories and more compelling experiences, with so many people wanting those experiences in their own homes. No industry is more distributed than entertainment. Each film, TV show and game is put together by many different companies. Studios, artists and visual effects houses are all working together across the world to create a single product.  “That’s why we’re investing in moving production to the cloud by building pipelines around open data standards that connect distributed teams,” said Anagnost.

“With Shotgun, our solution for creative project management, we are digitalizing connecting the entire production process. We’re building streamlined cloud workflows that make sure each member of the team is working on the right thing, and has the information they need to bring a creative vision to life, throughout all stages of the production process. Just like in AEC and manufacturing, data is what links all phases of the project lifecycle. So we’re enabling the integration of on-set and editorial data. This brings the story into Shotgun from the very first moment on set and will solve some of the most difficult challenges in production. We are bringing the concept of Generative Design to scheduling. You can now quickly generate and evaluate a range of scheduling scenarios, optimized for your production needs. For producers and production management teams, this will make a largely manual and somewhat tedious process less reactive and more predictive.”

Anagnost went on to explain: “And while we’re connecting processes in 3ds Max and automating them in Shotgun, we’re also giving you the ability to shape and customize processes in Maya. We’re releasing the next iteration of Bifrost, a powerful tool that makes the customization of complex visual effects more accessible.

From snowstorms and volumetric clouds to lightning and explosions, this visual programming environment is now even more deeply integrated with Maya, and helps you build your own tools to use and share with other teams and other artists. Open standards are fundamental for all of the connecting and customizing processes within our products but also connecting them with other solutions in your ecosystem. One example of this is our partnership with Nvidia. Nvidia Omniverse is built on USD and connects our solutions, including Maya, 3ds Max, and Revit, to third party offerings you rely on like Esri, Unreal, Unity, SketchUp and Rhino. Omniverse enables synchronous collaboration, allowing professionals using different tools to contribute to a product, while observing their collective effort in a single view. “

Autodesk has for many years proposed bringing entire ecosystems closer together in order to blur the lines between disciplines and industries. By connecting entire production processes in the cloud and by automating and customizing those processes, perhaps this will now happen.

The Overarching Role of Data

“Once we’re on the other side of this pandemic, construction will be permanently digitized,” said Anagnost. “It’s the agility that comes with working digitally that makes building at scale and speed possible. This is what helped BDP respond to a fast changing landscape. I believe that kind of agility is vital for all of you, whatever industry you work in because all of your landscapes are changing fast. That’s why we’re investing in seamless data initiatives that connect your teams and your data. It was data that allowed the Nightingale teams to move from first layout to final fit out in just nine days. And the creation of a virtual model that embodied all they’d learned in this time enabled other field hospitals to be continuously reshaped as their needs evolved.

Which is why we want to help steer this important technology that will lead to consistency, security, and interoperability across all industries, and all platforms.

What we’re all making is being reshaped by data, and so too are the ecosystems we all work in.”

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk University, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, covid-19, engineering, engineers, generative design, infrastructure, mobile, point clouds, reality capture, Revit, visualization

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