Autodesk University 2021 Virtual General Session Keynote

Andrew Anagnost, President and CEO of Autodesk gave the keynote at the general session of the second Autodesk University 2021 Virtual in October. He spoke of how customers and employees had to experience a decade of change in 18 months that some were not ready for.  “Even before social distancing and remote – platforms were connecting consumers and producers, and mobile devices were bringing everyone together,” said Anagnost. “Sometimes it’s felt like technology has kept us apart. We saw human ingenuity at a greater pace and scale. We face uncertainty. You make things that make tomorrow a better place. Everyone here are innovators and solve big and small problems, and technology is a force multiplier of your ingenuity.

Andrew Anagnost, CEO and President, Autodesk

Today our solutions span many industries, we’re restless to do more, we believe in making progress. We’re going to share our platform vision as a way that fundamentally shifts how we deliver to you.

Rendering of a city and infrastructure illustrating the entire project lifecycle of BIM.

We’re still sharing data in the cloud; it’s not files that are valuable but the data inside them. We can extend the value of the platforms today, extensible data flows in the cloud from the top floor to the shop floor, make information a completely fluent experience, so what outcomes might that enable?”

How Fusion and Revit help you complete your project is most important. The Autodesk Forge platform lets you access design and information in the cloud and create more value. Perhaps the biggest news this year is that Forge unlocks the data for use with non-Autodesk applications. Forge provides the foundation to do so much more, connect capabilities of  the products, collapsing them into common Forge components.

“Instead of dozens of individual products we have one platform that has all those products, project collaborators to work from a single platform, data moves fluidly, “said Anagnost. “Between our solutions, it will shift the way we provide value. You work in one environment with all project partners, connecting everyone to the same project data. Design to operations and beyond. What our industries need now are open solutions, open standards lead to interoperability, security across platforms. This is a multiple vision. It’s a big shift, a shift that warrants looking at how Autodesk works.”

Forge is definitely the platform that Autodesk is promoting to connect capabilities of projects and be able to work fluidly in one environment – one for architecture, one for media and entertainment, and one for manufacturing.

The manufacturing model has been broken, said Anagnost.  Scott Reese, EVPP Product Development and Manufacturing Solutions, described how they had invested in manufacturing ecosystems with open and extensible data flows in the cloud. “Forge will enable data to exchange fluidly with our products and others, free your data from the shackles of data types, regardless of the role or product you’re using,” said Reese. “We’ve made DFMA a more fluid process, you do this work in Inventor in the context of the building you’re designing for, you’ll see that update directly in inventor from Revit coordinating between architecture and designers, engineers, fabricators and installation teams. This data flow between Revit and Inventor removes uncertainty in the construction industry, bringing manufacturing to the front of so many processes.”

There is less waste and more cost savings for building products using Forge, and also Forge allows users to use Fusion’s design and make capabilities and surface them as

ArcGIS GeoBIM

part of an open and extensible data model in the cloud. “This helps us connect with other partners and products also,” said Reese. The Upchain PLM cloud native acquisition is already being integrated with the Fusion environment. Upchain is open and extensive, and integrates natively with Inventor, Solidworks and AutoCAD as well as it integrates with Fusion data. Upchain surfaces project data from all the solutions, for example, such data as cost and supplier data.

“We’re empowering engineers and manufacturers as well as their suppliers and stakeholders to work together collaboratively, focusing on innovation not administrations,” said Reese. “Fusion can automate design and make processes that normally drag teams down. One of the first things we’ve automated is converting mesh data into editable CAD geometry, helping you move from concept to engineering faster than before. The cloud opens new ways of working with mesh data and exploring design concepts.

Our new generative modeling capabilities deliver a new way to model parametrically with generative features. You can work with fast iterations from design concept through manufacturing. All directly from fusion, while insuring affordability and buildability in manufacturing.”

Reese said Autodesk does the same from a cost perspective, that allows customers to pay for just what they need to complete their work. This extensible framework allows partners to do the same with workflows. Ansys are building their electromagnetic simulation capabilities into the Fusion environment, helping engineers and designers obtain insights into the performance of their products early and often in the design process. Insights that cut down and testing certification costs and PCB prototyping. With project data in the cloud, we can leverage AI to automate many of the downstream tasks that get in the way of you shipping your products. AI can automatically generate fully dimensional drawings.

In the past 18 months, some things in AEC hit a breaking point. Construction labor shortage got worse, new projects starts declined, the price of raw materials like lumbar swung dramatically, planning and procurement, contractors and engineers who spent their entire careers in the office had to figure out how to work remotely. As a result, the industry needs solutions that are interoperable, accessible, extensible and open.

Jim Lynch, SVP and GM Autodesk Construction Solutions said in the past year, the industry felt the squeeze of having to do more with less. With everyone working remotely, infrastructure design teams faced extraordinary fragmentation. To compensate, many firms moved from designing from local servers to working together on the cloud. When projects enter the design phase, managing project data becomes more challenging, each trying to deliver quality work on time and within budget.

“Disconnected processes between firms can slow down or prevent collaboration,” said Lynch. “Concerns about permissions allow out of data information to linger in the field. The project data becomes fragmented and meaningful insights are lost in a series of data silos and disconnected data sets.”

Amy Bunszel, EVP Architecture Engineering and Construction Design, continued that thread:

“To design, construct and operate with certainty we have to break these silos down. That’s what we’re doing with Forge. We’re connecting your data within and also between design construction, operations and manufacturing,” said Bunszel. “It’s not just the vision of the future, it’s what we’re working on now, using Forge to create fluent workflows between Revit, and inventor. With Forge we are unlocking the data for use with non-Autodesk applications too. Just like dataflows between Revit and Inventor, Revit data will pass directly to Microsoft Power Automate making BIM data available for a wide variety of projects, making it easier to supply up to date information to partners without having to pass files back and forth. If an object parameter changes in a model a supplier won’t have to look through a huge file to find the change. Instead the designers will be able to create an automation to give the supplier the information they need. You will not be limited to the constraint of a proprietary file format.”

A new product, GeoBIM, will be a combo of GIS and BIM, that can point at a feature in a 2D or 3D scene and automatically bring up the document. This dynamic relationship can be the platform for creating a new class of apps, bringing the AEC community to the GIS community and vice versa. This product will dynamically link ArcGIS features to documents in Autodesk. Designers can visualize architectural and engineering assets in their real world locations, making it possible to design and build in a real world environment. GeoBIM brings together data, people and workflows that have traditionally been separate and Autodesk is also using it in construction.

In an overview of Autodesk’s Civil 3D and Revit in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Pro integration to Civil 3D is a direct read of Autodesk Civil 3D .dwg files in ArcGIS Pro, 2D and 3D, and Object Properties as Attributes.

ArcGIS Pro’s integration with Revit is a direct read of 3D features in Autodesk’s Revit .rvt files in ArcGIS Pro. Revit categories as feature class names by construction disciplines. Object families and types are attributes.

Tools and workflows for Revit include georeferencing support for Revit, BIM to file Geodatabase, Building Filter and Creating Building Scene Layer.

Now there is direct integration of IFC BIM format in ArcGIS Pro.

Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Autodesk Revit, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, engineering, engineers, facilities management, generative design, infrastructure, Open BIM, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, apps, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, Civil 3D, civil information modeling, construction, construction project management, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, geospatial, GIS, IES, IFC, mobile, openBIM, simulation, sustainable design, virtual reality, visualization

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