AECbytes.com Blog

Graphisoft’s New White Paper on BIM

Lachmi Khemlani — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:51:15 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Graphisoft, developer of ArchiCAD, released a new white paper called “Get There Faster with ArchiCAD,” which attempts to identify the most important criteria that architects should be looking at when selecting which BIM tools they should work with, as well as clarify the advantages of ArchiCAD over other BIM tools. While Revit is not specifically mentioned, it is obviously the main target of the white paper, being the leading BIM competitor to ArchiCAD. This AECbytes newsletter summarizes the content of the white paper, and analyzes it in the context of the current BIM adoption in the AEC industry.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2012/issue_55.html

HOK’s 2nd Annual BIM Awards

Lachmi Khemlani — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:04:58 +0000

This article takes a look at the projects selected as the finalists in HOK’s 2nd Annual BIM Awards competition. This is an internal competition to evaluate and award projects within HOK that have exhibited exemplary use of BIM technology in one of four major categories; Design, Delivery, Collaboration, and Visualization. I was invited to serve on the jury of the competition and therefore had the opportunity to review all the finalist’s presentations and get an understanding of their projects.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2012/HOK_BIM_Awards.html

Adopting Lean Practices in the Architectural/Engineering Industry

Lachmi Khemlani — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:43:36 +0000

Lean Business Practices have been adopted in many industries such as automotive design and build, aircraft design and build, and ever increasingly by leading construction companies. What are the best practices the Architecture/Engineering (A/E) design industries can adopt and utilize? David Haynes, Director of Consulting for Ideate Inc., sheds more light on these issues in this Viewpoint article.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2012/issue_63.html

AEC Exhibitor Highlights from Autodesk University 2011

Lachmi Khemlani — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:08:47 +0000

This article captures the highlights of those products that were exhibited at the recent Autodesk University which are relevant to the AEC industry, including Revit-integrated applications such as Trelligence Affinity, FM:Interact which now provides mobile access, e-SPECS, CodeBook, an interesting new tool called VIMtrek which allows game-like navigation of a Revit model, ClearEdge3D, which develops software for automatically extracting 3D geometry from point cloud data, IMAGINiT’s new ProductivityNOW portal, and updated hardware solutions from Supermicro, HP, Dell, Contex, and Nvidia.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2011/AU2011_Exhibitors.html

Autodesk University 2011: General Session and Innovation Forums

Lachmi Khemlani — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:10:48 +0000

This article on the recent Autodesk University 2011 captures the highlights of the general session keynote and three “innovation forums” on the topics of the cloud, social networking, and sustainability, along with some AEC industry technology news I was able to glean at the event. This year, Autodesk dispensed with the industry keynotes that it typically schedules following the main general session keynote and instead had several cross-industry innovation forums that were intended to provide a broader view of emerging technologies and issues relevant to all disciplines.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2011/issue_54.html

The AR LAB: A Vision

Lachmi Khemlani — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 06:21:54 +0000

In this Viewpoint article, Paul Seletsky, who is the Digital Design Director at KieranTimberlake Associates, questions the current architectural education approach of providing sophisticated design tools to students, only to have them go on to practice professionally for decades on another level using outmoded means. He envisions another approach, where applied research centers would bring architects, universities, and the public together to advance Building Design using the latest Digital Design tools. Under the imprimatur of the national architectural association and in affiliation with local universities, well-equipped and staffed architecture research labs (AR Labs) would enable students and practitioners to develop design ideas both physically and digitally, build 3D mock-ups, learn new fabrication methods, and perform energy analyses and simulations via BIM.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/viewpoint/2011/issue_62.html

Industry-Wide National BIM Standard: A Progress Report

Lachmi Khemlani — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:08:58 +0000

This article by Chuck Eastman, Manu Venugopal, and Shiva Aram of Georgia Tech describes a demonstration of the initial results of the National Precast BIM Standard that was held at the PCI Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, in Oct 2011. The National Precast BIM Standard is the first domain-wide specification exchange effort in the AEC industry, defined to address all the major exchanges dealing with precast concrete elements throughout the product lifecycle. Five different precast concrete software systems participated in the demonstration; six exchanges were made between these applications using Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) as the neutral data schema; and two other applications were used to visualize the exchanged data.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2011/NBIM-ProgressReport.html

Solibri Model Checker v7

Lachmi Khemlani — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:19:26 +0000

This review looks at the recently released version 7 of Solibri Model Checker, a model-checking tool that allows BIM models to be checked for potential problems, conflicts, or design code violations, with additional capabilities for visualization, walkthrough, interference detection, and model comparison. The enhancements in the new release include significant updates to its already user-friendly interface, new capabilities for the BIM QA/QC (Quality Assurance/Quality Control) process and workflow, as well as improvements in processing power and performance.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/review/2011/SolibriModelCheckerv7.html

iPad Apps for AEC: Project Management and Construction

Lachmi Khemlani — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 01:24:21 +0000

This article is focused on iPad apps that are available for project management and construction in the AEC industry, including the Vela Systems app for field management, Bentley’s iPad apps for its ProjectWise and Navigator applications, Autodesk’s Buzzsaw and Bluestreak apps, Newforma’s new Mobile Punch List app that has just been announced, and additional construction-specific apps including Onsite:AEC and SafetyNet.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2011/iPadApps-Const.html

iPad Apps for AEC: Design and Visualization

Lachmi Khemlani — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:58:37 +0000

Given the increasing number of iPad apps that are now available for the AEC industry, AECbytes will look at these apps in two separate articles, one focused on apps primarily intended for design and visualization, and the second focused on apps that can be used for project management and construction. This article focuses on apps for design and visualization and includes an overview of Graphisoft’s BIMx app for iPad, Autodesk’s new cloud strategy and the Autodesk Design Review app, the iVisit 3D app, and finally, the Inception app from Architactile, a new software developer.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2011/iPadAppsforAEC.html