Conferences Galore: BE, AIA-TAP, and the AIA National Convention

May is a busy month with no less than three major conferences relevant to AEC technology. It starts off with Bentley's annual user conference, BE 2005, taking place in Baltimore from May 8 to 12. The focus then shifts in the following week to Las Vegas, where the technology-focused annual AIA-TAP conference is being held on May 17 and 18. This is followed immediately by the AIA 2005 National Convention and Expo at the same location, running through till May 21. AECbytes will bring you the highlights of all three events.

With some days to go, though, before we hit the road, it is a good time to review the new version of Autodesk Architectural Desktop, closely following on the review of AutoCAD 2006 on which it is based. ADT continues to benefit greatly from the overall modernization of AutoCAD, with dynamic input, overhaul of annotation, improvements in selection and zooming, and dynamic blocks. In addition, ADT 2006 has several improvements and new features of its own, including a critical new project standards feature useful for establishing, maintaining and synchronizing standards across all the drawings in a project; the ability to isolate objects and edit them in plan, section, or elevation; the ability to create color-filled thematic displays with the accompanying legends by creating display themes that incorporate non-graphic data; and improved integration with VIZ Render, which allows high-quality photorealistic renderings and animations to be created from an ADT model. ADT remains a good way for AutoCAD's vast user base to begin to explore object-based CAD without a major disruption in workflow, and firms who can resist the temptation of falling back to using ADT like AutoCAD can chalk up some critical experience which will prove invaluable in full-scale BIM implementation further down the road.

Thank you
Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > May 2005