Bentley's V8i Launch and a Case Study of HOK

Last week, Bentley Systems hosted a launch event for the next version of its solutions, a glimpse of which had been provided earlier this year at its BE Conference. It was dubbed the Athens version at that time, and has now taken on its final name, V8i. The V8 indicates the continuation of the V8 generation that Bentley had launched in 2002, and subsequent versions were named V8 2004 and V8 XM. The “i” in the new V8i version stands for several things, according to Bentley executives: intuitive, interactive, intrinsic, incredible, and interoperable. AECbytes takes a look at what these terms refer to and what the new V8i portfolio of Bentley solutions brings to the table for its AEC users.

This will be followed by a case study of one of the world's leading architectural firms, HOK. It comes at a time when the deployment of BIM in AEC firms is almost taken for granted, and there is increasing use of newer technologies for tasks such as analysis, project planning, project management, internal and external collaboration, design review and coordination, estimating, visualization, and communication. While many of these technologies and their implementation continue to be presented and discussed by AEC professionals at various conferences, providing the industry with valuable snippets of information, this does seem like a good time to re-visit the issue of technology adoption and study how it is being applied across a firm as a whole. And what better firm to start this with than one of the top ranking architectural firms in the world? The case study looks at the range of technologies that are being implemented by HOK, not just for BIM but also for other design tasks, collaboration, coordination, project management, and knowledge management. It also looks at how the firm plans out its technology adoption, and what the buildingSMART initiative means to HOK.

The Tips and Tricks issue for this month features a tutorial on how to use the revamped Composite Map in 3ds Max Design 2009 to design complex materials more easily, and a tutorial on how to create new view types in Revit's Project Browser in order to customize it for individual use.

Thank you for your interest, and do continue to check out both the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get information about the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > November 2008