Ahmad's Findings: BIM

Showing posts with label BIM. Show all posts

2012-11-19

The early days in Revit

One of the fascinating views in business is a startup that succeeds, Revit was one of these companies that established itself out of nowhere, if you are after the BIM industry from the early 2000s, you will be surprised how Revit passed the established market leaders of that time and became one of the leading companies in the industry.

This article talks about one of the conferences for Autodesk Revit, check it here in the AEC Bytes magazine.

I'll highlight 2 parts that are very inspiring for any startup:

Conant showed an early photo of the Revit team in the summer of 1999—of the 12 to 13 people in it at that time, about half of them are still around at Autodesk, working on Revit.

It was interesting to learn more about the early days of Revit, especially a "behind the scenes" look that we don't otherwise get a chance to hear about. I recall the public launch of Revit in the summer of 2000, when it was a very brash, in-your-face upstart that was seriously challenging far more established players like Autodesk, Bentley, and Graphisoft. In particular, it showed up at trade shows such as the AIA National Convention with a booth larger than Autodesk! What we didn't know at that time was that it actually had only 12 paying customers then and spent a sizable portion ($20,000) of its early revenue for a professionally produced video. Luckily for the start-up, Autodesk recognized its potential and acquired it in 2002. The rest, as they say, is history! An interesting fact to note is that most of those first paying customers are using still Revit.

2010-05-10

The new trend of CIM

In the last few years we have seen the trend of BIM (Building Information Modeling) where a building is represented using real-world entities instead of a bunch of lines.
This trend is now making a shift in the way architects present their ideas and interact with their models (using software like Autodesk Revit, ArchiCAD and Vectorworks instead of AutoCAD and Bentley Microstation).

BIM would be a great answer for Architects.

But more recently a new term was coined, CIM or the City Information model, which aims to transform the urban planners way of handling their plans just like architects.
Some little known applications has started to explore the concept of modeling the whole urban environment and how much information can we extract from such model, in essence how the model would reveal relationships previously little known to the planner or very complex to map such relationships.

CityCAD
CityCAD from the British Holistic City Software aims to become the city planners main tool (where they previously relied on GIS systems, AutoCAD drawings or even paper maps and census tables).

See CityCAD Software: Stop Masterplanning! (from The Pop-Up City) and Visualizing and Analyzing Plans with CityCAD (from Planetizen).
CityCAD as a software is more into the space and green planning paradigm, and is currently less into the social, socioeconomic and demographic aspects of the city, but quite frankly these are very complex subjects that need much more research on how to model them and how to turn such issues into solvable questions that a model (and the dataset that we feed into that model) can answer.

CityEngine
CityEngine from Procedural is more into visualizing the 3D city than assisting in the city planning tasks, but a city-optimized visualization tool is very beneficial to urban planners and would bring the city planners some part of the technology that they always wanted, that to visualize the city's current state to better understand it visually, and to visualize the post-plan state that represents their work (to analyze the plan visually).

See New York City In 2259 (from The Pop-Up City).
Some very irrelative point I like about CityEngine is that it uses the Eclipse RCP Platform (which I like but have nothing to do with the software itself).

Other attempts
Maybe one of the older attempts is the The Open Planning Project, it tries to use the Open Source model to create a community of contributers to create an open solution for city planning.

But this list is very incomplete and doesn't touch on the positive aspects of using a systematic way on handling city planning tasks verses the negative impacts using a limited mindset system to solve a very open-ended problem, and the subject needs many more posts other than this one.

[First Image from Wikimedia Commons]

2009-09-18

Vectorworks 2010 Released

The latest release of VectorWorks has been released earlier this week, it contains many productivity enhancements, most notably:

The fantastic new 3D snapping environment, adding the the world class 2D snapping that was introduced in 2009 (which was a good addition into an originally very good snapping system in earlier versions), it gives VectorWorks more 3D drafting capacity.
The enhanced utilization of the Parasolid engine to enable many new features like the unified 2D/3D, wall sculpting,improved wall holes and the new powerful stair tool.
The inclusion of the D-Cubed 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager for parametric modeling and improved management of the walls network in the building model.
Improvements in the Hardcape tool, the DTM object, the Grade calculator, and the new symbols content and plants imagery.
The inclusion of VBvisual plants in RenderWorks.
Various minor changes in the drafting, editing, dimensions management and importing/exporting experience.
Various additions to the Machine Design and Spotlight editions of VectorWorks.

This is great news for VectorWorks, it builds on last year decision to use the Parasolid engine to allow for a more robust 3D environment that is much more intuitive and allows for a better 3D drafting package (which is much need in the market right now), in addition to NNA tradition of adding real world improvements and enhancements to its software every release.

2009-08-18

Geomtry Kernels in AEC/BIM field

A geometry kernel is the core of any modeling software, it is simply the part of the program that understands geometry and the relationships of the various entities the program allows you to draw (let it be a 2D line, rectangle, polygon, or a 3D cube, 3D polygon, face, mesh or that cool NURBS object you had been creating for 3 days).

The geometry kernel is an indicator of the robustness of the modeling software.

Some of the kernels used by key players in the CAD/AEC/BIM and MCAD field: