The need for temporary housing has arisen in recent years for various reasons. For one, there have been more natural disasters in the world, and/or other situations that require finding temporary housing for large numbers of people very quickly. There are also creations such as described in the article, How Burning Man is Built, a temporary city that evolves in the desert from scratch for a massive festival, attracting people from all over the globe. Each year, a team of 21 surveyors spend seven days laying the lines and waypoints of a 5.62-mile plan, creating the largest and most iconic art installation at Burning Man – the city itself.
Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
In an interview with former CEO of SolidWorks, John McEleny, co-founder of the new company OnShape, we discussed the new paradigm shift in the CAD industry that OnShape represents.
Vancouver, British Columbia is the venue for the 45th SIGGRAPH 2018 conference, this week, August 12-16, where technology vendors and aficionados gather to view the latest and greatest in virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), computer graphics and interactive techniques.
The built environment is increasingly more digitized, relying heavily on large building models to hold all aspects of a building project. Thus, the need for BIM Interoperability is greater as the necessity grows for stakeholders to be able to access the information inside these complex models.
Bay Bridge East Span Seismic Safety Project To prove the project was viable, the California Department of Transportation shared detailed 3D designs with potential contracting firms.
The Architecture 2030 Challenge, adopted by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), offers a path to reducing the building sector’s negative impacts and reaches for carbon neutral design as standard practice by the year 2030. The building sector is the single largest consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Designed to provide continuing education credits, the AIA+2030 Online Seriesprovides courses in high performance design, building a comprehensive understanding with each class in the series. The series will teach and inspire architects to meet the 2030 Challenge through design strategies, efficient technologies and systems, and the application of renewable energy resources.
Cosential is a CRM market leader and proposal automation software for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms, that recently closed a deal of a $34 million strategic growth investment from JMI Equity, a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software companies. The funding will be used to accelerate market development, expand corporate infrastructure and continue fueling the company’s rapid pace of product innovation. Dan Cornish, CEO of the company Cosential, spoke with AECCafe recently about Cosential and its role in the AEC industry.
Cornish began Cosential in 1999, as a way to help large AEC firms win large projects. What he realized was that a crucial problem people had was pulling data together.
How did you start out building Cosential?
I started building online systems early on and then started building Cosential and over the years I sort of bootstrapped it from there to get to this point today, where we have the biggest market share for CRM in the AEC industry. So many people want so much from our tool, it made sense for me to bring on a financial partner who would help me grow and realize the financial vision I’ve had all these years, because I want to help customers have better businesses. It’s such an old-fashioned industry and people have been managing with spreadsheets. The tools that are out there are either very old, not industry specific or they require an enormous amount of customization that they never get quite right and so we build a purpose-built tool for this industry and it solves a lot of problems.
3D Repo, digital construction technology provider, has announced Clash Detection functionality has been added to their 3D Diff, software that identifies clashes in construction plans by analyzing 3D models that have been submitted by project partners and contractors.
Searching, finding, collaboration and versioning of documents is a constant challenge for AEC organizations. How to organize and visualize documents and data has resulted in the development of some interesting engineering document management solutions. The following three document management solutions take a different approach to managing, visualizing and collaborating with AEC documents and data that further users’ ability to organize projects digitally.
Bluebeam, Inc., of Pasadena, California, part of the Nemetschek Group, announced recently that it has substantially acquired all of the assets of privately held Project Atlas, LLC.
Construction industry veterans Todd Wynne and Joe Williams founded Project Atlas in 2017. They created a digital mapping engine that uses geo-location instead of traditional folder structures to organize and visualize 2D plans and construction data. According to company materials, this location-based orientation allows design and construction professionals to create and search a seamless digital map of their project that contains plans, people, material, site photos and drone imagery, all within highly detailed, zoomable layers.
“Bluebeam was founded on the idea that powerful AEC solutions should also be easy to use, capable of delivering the right information at the right time while improving the ability of all project partners to collaborate throughout the lifecycle of an entire project,” says Bluebeam CEO Jon Elliott. “We are incredibly excited to add Project Atlas to our portfolio of solutions to continue delivering on this promise. Project Atlas provides users an entirely new way to visually organize and unify location-based documents and data. This location-based methodology dramatically reduces the time it takes to find critical plans and information, empowering owners, architects, engineers, contractors and specialty contractors to access data in an immediately understandable way that will be especially beneficial in the field.”
Bluebeam looks forward to demonstrating workflows incorporating Project Atlas at the Bluebeam Extreme Conference, taking place 17–19 September in Austin, Texas (USA).
Bluebeam’s markup and collaboration solutions are intuitive to those in the AEC industry who manage and collaborate on projects digitally.
eQuorum’s ImageSite Engineering CAD Drawing Markup Software is a product that provides markup capabilities in real time, so that multiple users can collaborate on drawing files and documents at the same time along with workflows. Videos and photos can be included. Drawings can be redlined and used in the office, field or production site. (more…)
