Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”
In a conversation this week with Bob Mayer, president of IMSI Design, he spoke about the recent release of their TurboCAD 2020 line, including Platinum, Professional, Deluxe and Designer versions for Windows® desktop PCs. The new release sports added functionality for 2D and 3D for all users with over 40 new and improved features.
“This year’s 2020 release, puts a greater emphasis of 3D modeling and manufacturing enhancements,” stated Mayer. “There are powerful enhancements to our Facet Editor, new 3D Covering functionality, 3D Printing improvement, an updated solid modeling engine, and other productivity enhancements. We are particularly pleased with how much faster TurboCAD handles complex objects and files, constraint animation, and with the new support of advanced mechanical CAD file formats in our Platinum edition.”
A webinar featuring Invicara, Cityzenith and Intelligent Buildings entitled “Smart Building Digital Twins – Demystifying the Building Visualization Technology” shed light on Smart Building Digital Twins and what that actually means.
For starters, Invicara’s Digital Twins bring together the critical building information you need to make your properties run smoother, satisfy tenants and lower your operating costs. Offered are a unique mix of consulting, technology and implementation services –
In March, Trimble announced at ConExpo 2020, the Trimble Platform as a Service (TPaaS), an offering giving contractors the ability to purchase select civil construction hardware and software solutions and continually upgrade those solutions with the latest innovations from Trimble. The bundled solutions within the offering include the Trimble Earthworks Grade Control Platform, Trimble Siteworks Positioning Systems, Trimble Correction Services and select office software.
Every hour the situation with the Covid19 virus pandemic is changing. While people are taking the utmost precautions, AEC and visualization firms are going to have to be resilient and make some necessary adjustments, while continuing to provide services.
It is fortunate that technology provides us ways to interact with people other than face to face. However, that technology will be put to the test during this pandemic as more people may need to utilize it and forgo so many face to face meetings. Plus, infrastructure must continue to be constructed and repaired, some of which will be used to support the growing need for specialized facilities.
Pointfuse, a powerful modeling engine that delivers an automatic, precise and flexible way of converting the vast point cloud datasets generated by laser scanners or photogrammetry into segmented mesh models, has launched a new toolkit called Space Creator. Pointfuse Space Creator is designed to facilitate adopting laser scanning within space management, planning and utilization workflows.
Stephan Langella consultant presented a webinar recently entitled: Large Projects using Open BIM and ARCHICAD.
Langella makes his home in Brisbane, Australia and has worked for a number of organizations, including Graphisoft and Woods Bagot. He has worked on numerous large projects delivered in Australia and elsewhere in the world, including the Queen’s Wharf Project in Brisbane. He loves hearing “we can’t do that,” and seeing how things can be done.
In 2019, it came to my attention that there was more specific attention being paid to AEC and GIS integration, specifically two partnerships of AEC companies formed with Esri. Esri’s Kathleen Kewley discussed the resurgence of interest of GIS in the AEC space from an Esri perspective. Kewley also worked at Autodesk at one time. In addition I have included information from a webinar conducted by Autodesk senior technical marketing manager Wes Newman and AEC Solutions engineer from Esri, Rafael Fernandes, about the partnership between Esri and Autodesk.
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
These are most probably the last of our AECCafe Industry Predictions for 2020. Topics in this article include construction as an industry leader, wearable technologies, Building Information Modeling and Geospatial Information Systems, facility management and GIS, prefabrication, big data, and cloud for construction.
