AECCafe Voice Archive for the ‘sustainable design’ CategoryAECCafe Editorial Calendar 2019Thursday, November 1st, 2018AECCafe will focus on specific editorial for 2019, so be sure to check in with our Editorial Calendar to find out when might be a good time for your story to be shown. Throughout the year, we provide space for Current Events, as the technology industry is evolving, and we can’t know at the time of this writing just what will be new, groundbreaking and/or disruptive in the coming year.
Going Open and Digital Twin Cloud Services Shape Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2018Thursday, October 25th, 2018The Bentley Year In Infrastructure Conference held in London this year at the Hilton London Metropole attracted over 1,200 attendees, a record number for that location and event. The company advanced its theme of “Going Digital” with the inauguration of Digital Twins and iTwin Services. iTwin Services are digital twin cloud services for infrastructure projects and assets, that can be transparently provisioned within Bentley’s Connected Data Environment (CDE) for ProjectWise and AssetWise users.  Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2018 Awards Ceremony and Dinner Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2018 Conference Features Year in Infrastructure Finalists’ Best Practices, Real-World Implementations, and State-of-the-Art TechnologiesMonday, October 15th, 2018Every year the Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure conference showcases finalists in their Year in Infrastructure competition. The event highlights the company’s prestigious Year in Infrastructure Awards, where finalists in 19 categories present their most innovative projects of the past year and describe how they were able to solve real-world challenges using Bentley applications. The winners will be announced at a special ceremony and gala on Oct. 18.  Image courtesy of CCCC Water Transportation Consultants, Ltd. High Concrete Group Wins Precast Category Tekla BIM Award for Statue of Liberty MuseumFriday, October 5th, 2018Tasked with creating a new museum on Liberty Island to house the valuable artifacts from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island is an honor in and of itself. High Concrete Group, LLC, a family-owned company that has delivered precast concrete structures for nearly 50 years, was named Precast Winner for the Statue of Liberty Museum for the Tekla BIM Awards.
AECCafe Voice Special Report: What Makes for BIM Interoperability?Thursday, September 27th, 2018The 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 and huge models.  ABDCE_disciplines: AECOsim Building Designer, Bentley’s multi-discipline BIM application, provides architectural, structural, electrical, and mechanical tools so you can coordinate your designs better across disciplines with a streamlined workflow. For AEC firms, it is very common to use multiple software products within the same organization, as well as outside the organization. No single BIM software solution or integrated system can fulfill the requirements of the AEC industry. All these products throughout the design process need to be able to communicate with one another. Standards organizations have come forward to suggest that they have the answer to interoperability in the BIM world. But currently what most vendors are able to achieve is perhaps an increase in interoperability. Does anyone offer total interoperability? Some of our respondents define BIM interoperability in this way: “Interoperability is about handing over the right amount of information, to the right people at the right time,” says David Lash, product manager, Trimble, Tekla Structures Division. “It’s about hitting milestones for people who want to stay up to date with the wider project, even on a daily basis.” “Communication, communication, communication,” says Joe Eichenseer, director, Building Lifecycle Solutions, North America IMAGINiT. “Interoperability allows us to communicate better and reduce or eliminate the chance of translation errors between systems.” Vectorworks 2019 Packs a Punch with Increased Design EfficiencyWednesday, September 19th, 2018Last week Vectorworks released the 2019 versions of Vectorworks Architect, Landmark, Spotlight, Fundamentals and Designer, as well as BraceworksTM and Vision. Significant improvements have been made in increased design efficiency through overall performance and quality, plus innovations to greatly improve the 3D and BIM modeling, 2D documentation and presentation workflows for architectural, landscape, interior design and entertainment designers.  Vectorworks 2019 Architect In an interview with Vectorworks CEO Biplab Sarkar, he talked about the importance of the new release, including 3D site model sculpting; the unique ability to have BIM objects display with varying levels of detail in plan, elevation and section drawings; enhanced openBIM interoperability; and a new partnership integration with AutoTURN online for analyzing vehicle swept paths. “We improved and streamlined the creation of drawings from the models,” said Sarkar. “The primary reason BIM models are used is for people to drive presentation drawings from the models. When you have an object, a kitchen sink or an appliance and you want to present in different views: side, front and back view, for example, you really need a simplified presentation depending upon the scale of the drawing. So, what we introduced is 2D from 3D components for hybrid objects. If you look at the object from the top plan, it will give you a simplified top plan view and if you look at it from any other view it will show a 3D presentation of the object.”  Vectorworks Landmark 2019 The 2019 version extends the view from the top plan to other views. You can have a left view, front view, bottom view, and all these views can be stored in the object. You can choose low, high or medium view selection and specify so details can be changed depending on the view. You simplify the view depending on the scale. For very small scale and everything close together, you don’t want to show all the details of the object, and for a large scale you want to display all the details of a complicated object. R&D MOU Drafted Between GRAPHISOFT and Surbana JurongWednesday, September 12th, 2018GRAPHISOFT and Surbana Jurong Consultants, a Singapore-based multi-disciplinary urban, infrastructure and management services consultancy firm, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) effective September 3, 2018, to cooperate and collaborate in BIM, Virtual Design & Construction (VDC), and Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD)-related research and development to combine their different areas of expertise. GRAPHISOFT will focus on BIM and related software technologies, while Surbana Jurong will focus on design and construction domain.
Computer Graphics Goes Back to the Future at SIGGRAPH 2018Thursday, August 16th, 2018Vancouver, 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. AECCafe BIM Interoperability QuestionnaireFriday, August 10th, 2018The 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 Have a Finger on the Pulse: New System Integration Platform from IMAGINiTFriday, June 8th, 2018IMAGINiT Technologies’ new Pulse Platform, available now, is designed to allow engineers and architects to share data between independent software on-premise or cloud products beginning with Autodesk Vault and Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle. Other integrations with other products are forthcoming, according to Matt Mason, software development team manager for IMAGINiT. “It’s an initial release and a big new area for us,” said Mason. “We’ve always done system integration work, and the work tends to be custom and one-off. This is our attempt to build a platform to make the process of system integration easier, more packaged and less custom.” Mason adds that previously system integration was primarily 90% custom and required high level software developer or consultant. “We want to see 85% -95% of system integration work as a part of the package. The rest would be what a midlevel consultant could do, set up relationships between systems, map one to the other, etc.” IMAGINiT Pulse benefits include (according to company materials):
Mason said that the connectors were built to do the heavy lifting of system integration, for working with specific products and getting data in or out of those products and doing updates. “What’s left in the middle are workflow, rules and data mapping, and that’s modest, but doesn’t require the same level of development expertise that the actual deep integration to each system takes,” said Mason. “We’re trying to build something where we can have these pre-built connectors that do the hardest part of the work and separate the business logic and business rules into a separate part of the product.” The first three connectors are built for Autodesk products currently since IMAGINiT’s consulting work largely revolves around those products. The fourth one was a non-Autodesk product called BuildingLink. “We actually had a chance to build a product that made use of BIM 360 operations product with the BuildingLink product,” said Mason. “We expect to do more connectors over time, building our catalog of connectors. We’re expecting to do Bentley ProjectWise and other common integrations that we’ve done in the past such as Microsoft SharePoint. People using the connectors need to be familiar with the workflows for the products involved. What is in the middle between the two is defining those workflows and some scripting is necessary, such as Microsoft.net scripting, as one product may refer to a part and another may refer to it as an item, etc. An example, Mason said, are two Autodesk products that don’t communicate very well together such as Autodesk Vault to Fusion Lifecycle. They each have a separate language for how they describe parts and items and both are heavily customized for each customer to define the pieces of information they have. Someone has to build out the script of how to map data from this side to that side. To date, people have set up custom properties on their systems. “We’re trying to build the connector out so it is visible to the user but not necessarily end user,” said Mason. “The person responsible for the integration wants to see what’s going on and see how integration flows from one side to the other. When you’re doing each one of these as a custom job, there wasn’t much time for polish. We wanted to invest more in the polish and see information flowing back and forth and have a way to visualize and trace. Since we were building it as a platform we could invest more than we could in a typical one off minimalist consulting project.” In most cases IMAGINiT’s customers have already had their systems custom built for them. “We’re using the expertise of all the integrations we’ve done over the years and tried to build something so the next year’s integration will be much easier.” Customers just want integration and want it to work, not cost too much. The Pulse Platform offers them “a nicer system that is less risk and less cost than something more custom, because so much of it is packaged,” said Mason. Pulse will be separate from ongoing development, support and consulting, with annual use fee, including automatic updates for connectors for each company. There will be one cost for the platform itself, and if you want two systems to connect, get a connector for each system, as each connector has a different amount of and specific complexity.
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|||||
