Autodesk University 2006

Autodesk's annual user conference, Autodesk University (AU), which is typically held every year in late November or early December, continued with its explosive growth in 2006. Held last week at The Venetian in Las Vegas, the event was packed with 7,500 attendees, a dramatic increase from the 5,000 attendees in 2005. The corresponding numbers were 4,400 in 2004 and 3,300 in 2003, showing that the conference has more than doubled in just 3 years. To better manage the huge turn-out, this year's event was broken down into different "campuses" representing the different industries Autodesk caters to: Building, Manufacturing, Plant, Civil Engineering and Geospatial, and Media and Entertainment. In addition, General Design and Education were also created as separate campuses to better target their specific users. While the differentiation into campuses certainly helped, it was still quite a challenge to navigate the crowds and get around the conference venue to the various events and sessions. If AU continues to grow at this rate, Autodesk might eventually have to host separate user conferences for its different industries! Of the 7,500 attendees this year, close to 2,500 came from the Building industry alone.

The dramatic upward trend of attendance in a user conference like AU is an unmistakable sign of the increasing importance of software technology in all the different industries Autodesk caters to, including AEC, manufacturing, and infrastructure. The ongoing move from 2D to 3D in these fields accounts for most of this increased criticality of technology. The efficiencies and benefits to be gained by implementing intelligent, 3D, discipline-specific technologies like BIM in AEC are so significant that more and more firms are being forced to pay more attention to their technology implementations and re-think their business processes and practices. And to its credit, Autodesk has started encouraging this trend by talking less and less about its traditional cash cow, AutoCAD, at AU each year to the point where I barely heard it mentioned in this year's AU at all, at least in the general session and Building Industry sessions. Another continuing trend that was evident this year as well was the shift away from marketing hoopla to more discussion of products and technology as well as implementation stories from customers on how the technology was being used. For a better sense of how AU has evolved over the last few years, see my articles on Autodesk University 2005, Autodesk University 2004, and Autodesk University 2003.

This issue of the AECbytes newsletter captures the highlights of the general and building industry sessions of Autodesk University 2006. An overview of some of the key products on display in the Exhibit Hall will be covered in a separate article to be published next week.

Opening General Session

This year's event was the first AU since Carl Bass took over from Carol Bartz as Autodesk President and CEO, and he presented the keynote address at the opening general session of the conference. Unlike most CEO presentations which typically focus on company revenues, growth rates, and so on that strive to highlight how well the company is doing, Bass chose to focus his presentation primarily on showcasing an array of customer stories that illustrated the use of Autodesk technology in diverse fields, some of which were truly fascinating. They involved building digital prototypes to better understand, visualize, and communicate designs, as well as capturing as-built information for a better understanding of existing conditions and to meaningfully inform future design. It was particularly informative for all the attendees to see implementation examples from fields other than their own.

One example of an amazing technology implementation was demonstrated by GMJ Design, a London- and Paris-based visualization firm that is starting to build detailed city models for use in architecture and planning. It has completed a highly accurate, 36 sq. km., 1:500 scale digital model of central London which includes all visible elements that are more than one meter in size. It was created in 3ds Max using high-resolution aerial photography combined with a ground-level survey. Due to the enormous amount of data, the model previously had to be broken down into a number of files to be viewed, but with the 64-bit version of 3ds Max 9, the project could be captured in a single 1 GB 3ds Max file. GMJ Design demonstrated some stunning animations of the model during their presentation.

Another example of the creation of large scale models was presented by Parsons Brinckerhoff, a leading planning, engineering, and program and construction management organization, that is creating "supermodels" of cities like Seattle and Dubai that integrate geospatial, CAD, visualization, and asset systems for improved decision making and workflow. Not only do these models integrate textures, looking very lifelike (unlike GMJ's London model which doesn't yet include textures), they are also stereoscopic, which means that they can be visualized in 3D when viewed with 3D glasses. All the attendees had access to 3D glasses during this presentation, and we were treated to some amazing stereoscopic views of animations, sections, views, construction sequencing, and so on. Several examples of these can be seen on the Parsons Brinckerhoff website.

Yet another example of the creation of city models was the IMOUT application developed by the Autodesk Government group for use in the military. We saw how a 3D model of Baghdad, complete with buildings that were modeled in Revit, was being used for combat planning, making it easier to navigate routes, check for lines of sight, and so on. The focus of the modeling process here is functionality rather than photorealism, so the model understandably looked less jazzy compared to the examples from GMJ Design and Parsons Brinckerhoff.

The next few customer stories came from the infrastructure, plant, automotive, and industrial design fields. Patriot Mechanical, an engineering and product supplier for mechanical handling solutions, showed how they use a mobile location service, developed by Autodesk in partnership with Nextel, to efficiently track and communicate with employees throughout the day. Hanna Strategies, a software developer specializing in CAD and PLM tools and applications, showed how they use Autodesk Inventor and Revit to create the complete digital mockup of a plant, which makes it easy to locate parts and get detailed information about specific content. The models are shared with clients using Project Freewheel, a "zero client" DWF viewer available as a "technology preview" from Autodesk ("zero client" means no software needs to be installed to use the viewer). We also saw a fascinating example of the use of Alias AutoStudio in the design of a DaimlerChrysler car—the application includes built-in symmetry and allows 3D models to be quickly generated from 2D sketches. A highly photorealistic animation of the car design was also demonstrated in Autodesk Showcase, a sophisticated visualization application targeted for the automotive design industry. A customer story from the industrial design field came from Kone, who showed how they were using Autodesk Inventor to create smart objects in their designs which understand their material characteristics, parameters, and design features. Thus, if you created a part and designated it as plastic, it would automatically have the correct features and attributes, so that, for example, if a Split tool was applied to it, the correct lip geometry would be automatically created for the split.

The next two examples were from the building industry and were intended to highlight the use of BIM for creating sustainable design, which is emerging as one of the key focus areas for Autodesk in AEC. The first of these customer presentations came from BNIM Architects, a firm that focuses on sustainable design. But the presentation was somewhat disappointing, as it only talked about how the firm was using Autodesk Impression (a 2D illustration tool that was briefly described in my article on the AIA 2006 National Convention and Expo) to create and apply presentation styles easily to drawings. There was no mention at all of how they were using Autodesk technology to design more energy efficient buildings. The situation was somewhat redeemed by the next presentation, which came from LivingHomes, a company that builds prefabricated homes based on green principles designed by leading architects such as Ray Kappe. LivingHomes has the distinction of developing the first and only residential project in the country that has achieved platinum LEED certification. The company has developed an integrated system based on Revit Building for its modular designs, and also uses Revit Systems for the MEP engineering. For energy analysis, which is such a critical element of the design, LivingHomes relies on the integration between Revit Systems and IES, an advanced building performance assessment solution. This lets LivingHomes easily perform a room by room energy analysis, determine the heating and cooling loads, and design the MEP system accordingly. More about the integration of Revit Systems and IES was shared at the Building Industry session, which will described in the next section.

Rounding off the customer showcase was a presentation from Cresendo Design, an architectural firm that has started using the popular online environment, Second Life, to present their designs to clients. Second Life is an online 3D virtual world, where users, in the form of avatars, can explore, build, socialize, and participate in their own economy. Users pay real-world money to own land in Second Life for building, displaying, and storing their virtual creations, as well as host events and businesses. Second Life opened to the public in 2003, and is today inhabited by close to 2 million people from around the world. Cresendo Design uses its virtual land in Second Life to build virtual models of its design concepts by importing electronic drawings and models of its design files and redesigning the virtual site so that it is similar to the actual site. It then lets clients access this virtual model in Second Life and spend as much time in it as they want, get a sense of the design, and provide their feedback. Meetings can also be conducted in virtual "real time" where both the architect and client meet at the virtual site and tour it together. Cresendo Design is even setting up a virtual office in Second Life for conducting its business. While the graphics in Second Life are still quite rudimentary and do not convey a very real-world feel, there's no doubt that it can prove to be a very powerful and exciting new medium for design review as well as for collaboration in the not-too-distant future.

Building Industry Presentation

The Building Industry main stage session at AU was devoted to a more detailed discussion of Autodesk's solutions for AEC, and it was presented by senior BSD (Building Solutions Division) executives including Jay Bhatt, Phil Bernstein, and Jim Lynch. They shared some interesting implementation statistics about BSD products such as: the number of installed seats of Autodesk Architectural Desktop (ADT) is 475,000, making it the third largest product in the Autodesk portfolio; the Revit platform is rapidly gaining momentum with a 94% year/year growth in seat revenue; and Revit's installed base is now 125,000 seats, of which 18,000 were shipped in the last quarter. It was not disclosed if the installed base of ADT is growing like Revit's or if it is in decline. Autodesk is continuing to differentiate between the two product lines by referring to the Revit platform as a "custom-built BIM solution," in contrast to ADT and Autodesk Building Systems (ABS) which are labeled as "AutoCAD-based design and documentation productivity tools" for architects and MEP engineers respectively. While the BSD executives continued to emphasize the importance of both types of solutions and pledged to continue supporting and enhancing ADT and ABS, it is clear that Revit forms the centerpiece of Autodesk's BIM vision. The company has focused on building Revit as a complete platform for architectural, structural, and MEP design and now that all the corresponding discipline-specific applications—Revit Building, Revit Structure, and Revit Systems applications respectively—have been released, it is working on integrating them with analysis tools. No similar effort to integrate analysis tools is underway for ADT or ABS. Once the building industry moves to embrace BIM more fully and make analysis mandatory rather than optional, it is difficult to see how applications like ADT or ABS can continue to be useful and relevant. But this could take several years, and until then, it remains in Autodesk's interest to continue to support these applications, given that the use of AutoCAD is so deep-rooted in the building industry.

Similar to last year's conference, few new product details were disclosed apart from a few sneak peeks of product enhancements. We saw a demonstration of the upcoming "Drawing Compare" feature in ADT, which graphically displays geometric as well as non-geometric changes between two versions of a drawing. While this seemed similar to that provided by Graphisoft's new Change Manager application that I reviewed earlier this year, the ADT utility has the additional facility of being integrated with DWF, so that the changes can be output to DWF and marked up with stamps such as Approved or Rejected. Another demonstration showed the closer integration between Revit and 3ds Max, where views and materials from the Revit model can be directly brought into Max for advanced photorealistic rendering, without the need to re-create this information. We were shown how Revit Structure can link bi-directionally to leading structural analysis tools such as RISA Floor for gravity analysis, ETABS for lateral analysis, and ROBOT Millennium for isolated analysis of a part of a structure such as a truss (see my recent review of Revit Structure 4 for more details on how it works).

Sustainable design was again brought into focus by demonstrating the integration of the IES application with Revit Systems for building performance analysis, showing how a building design could be checked to see if it satisfies LEED lighting and thermal criteria. IES can also produce the report that is required for LEED submission. I was surprised to find the link to IES being made through Revit Systems rather than Revit Building—after all, doesn't energy-conscious design need to start with the architect? Apparently, Revit Building can be linked to IES through the use of the gbXML format which is also used by Green Building Studio (see my recent article on the AIA CBSP Symposium on BIM for Building Envelope Design and Performance, which included a session on Green Building Studio). But it was not clear how well this would work compared to the tight integration of IES with Revit Systems that is built using the Revit API. I did get a chance to learn more about IES by visiting their booth in the Exhibit Hall, and will write about it in the next article.

There were some notable omissions in the BSD presentations. For one, not much was said about Autodesk's in-house design collaboration solution, Buzzsaw, or Constructware, the contractor-focused collaboration solution which it acquired earlier this year. In contrast to the late 1990s and early 2000s when the buzz in the AEC industry was all about project collaboration solutions, also know as the AEC dot-coms, the focus is now on BIM to such an extent that project collaboration seems to be falling on the wayside. The challenge before solutions such as Buzzsaw and Constructware—which were really designed on the basis of drawing-based design and construction processes—is how to integrate with BIM solutions and processes as they go forward. Even with the use of BIM, projects still have to managed and AEC professionals still have to come together to collaborate on design and construction, so we are definitely going to need BIM-based management and collaboration solutions. It will be interesting to see how Buzzsaw and Constructware—or perhaps an integrated version of the two in the future—shape up to the task.

We also did not hear much about Autodesk's plans for developing solutions for contractors. In response to a question from the audience, the BSD executives categorically stated that Autodesk is not developing any specific Revit-based construction solution at the moment (such as Graphisoft's Virtual Construction solutions developed for contractors, that were described in AECbytes Newsletter #15). Autodesk's take on this so far has been that a separate application for construction is not needed as Revit Building is being used by contractors for phasing and 4D scheduling right off the box. It will continue to make Revit Building more suitable for contractors with features such as the Material Take-off in Revit Building 9 and by supporting third-party efforts such as Innovaya's Visual Estimating. At last year's event, Autodesk had demonstrated two prototype DWF-based tools, one for quantity take-off and the other for asset management. There was no mention of these tools again, indicating that they hadn't worked out. However, Autodesk does have a dedicated facilities management tool, FMDesktop, which it acquired from Applied Spatial Technologies earlier this year, which can now read DWFs published from Revit and automatically interpret space and room data.

Other Conference Highlights

In addition to the general session and industry-specific presentations, Autodesk University hosted over 500 classes and hands-on labs for attendees, as well as several networking and entertainment events. There was also a Partner Technology Preview event in which Microsoft and HP, two of Autodesk's key partners and the "platinum sponsors" of Autodesk University, were given the chance to show new and upcoming products. For Microsoft, this included showing some features of Windows Vista, integration of Revit with the upcoming version of Microsoft Project, Microsoft's Virtual Earth technology that competes with Google Earth, its upcoming XPS specification that was developed as a competitor to Adobe's PDF, and a DWF-X file format that integrates DWF and XPS and can be used for viewing and searching through graphics files without requiring any software installation. HP, in turm, talked about its new workstations with multi-core capability that would have much faster performance, and the ability to access them remotely and collaborate using its Remote Graphics Software (described in this AU 2005 article). The Exhibit Hall featured over 100 exhibitors showing hardware and software solutions that work with Autodesk products. Of these, some of the key products relevant to AEC users will be described in detail in a separate article next week.

This year's AU broke the tradition of having an external speaker deliver the keynote address, in contrast to AU 2005 which featured Tom McCann of Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), and AU 2004 which had Dean Kamen, the well-known entrepreneur and inventor of the Segwey. While it was always informative as well as entertaining to have these outside perspectives, the absence of such a keynote address this year did serve to further tone down the traditional marketing feel of the event. Overall, the shift in emphasis from style to more substance that started last year was more pronounced this year. While some attendees may have been disappointed at not hearing more about future product plans and strategies, the spotlight on customer stories was successful in making the event a lot more meaningful. It also fitted in well with the theme of the conference, which was "Agents of Change"—the idea being that AU attendees are the forward thinkers and early adopters of technology who will go back to their respective firms and spearhead the move towards newer and better technologies. It was certainly the right time for such a theme, given that so many of Autodesk's target industries, including AEC, are at the cusp of the radical change from drawing-based to model-based processes.

Stay tuned for the highlights from the Exhibit Floor at Autodesk University 2006, to be published next week.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.