This article provides an overview of the recent Vectorworks Design Summit, an annual event for Vectorworks to showcase its products, upcoming features, and overall vision to existing and prospective users of its products. The Summit also included a fascinating keynote by Eva Franch i Gilabert, current director of the organization, Storefront for Art and Architecture, which is committed to furthering innovative ideas in architecture, art and design.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2016/VectorworksDesignSummit.html

Autodesk has just released the 2017 version of many of its products, and this article looks at the highlights of its 2017 AEC product family, including Revit, InfraWorks 360, AutoCAD Civil 3D, Navisworks, and Advance Steel. It also asks why we don’t have a free version of Revit for the public at large, and what it takes for Autodesk to create an InfraWorks-like application for building design.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2016/issue_80.html

On March 31, 2016, the AEC industry lost one of the world’s leading architects, Zaha Hadid. In memoriam, AECbytes is publishing this excerpt from its 2010 BIM Evaluation Study Report, which explored the implementation of BIM applications at various firms, one of which was Zaha Hadid Architects.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2016/ZahaHadidArchitects(Excerpt)

While BIM has proven its value as the next generation AEC technology for buildings primarily intended for the upper half of society, can it also help in designing low-cost housing that is direly needed for the millions of people who live below the poverty line in so many parts of the world, as well as temporary housing for accommodating large congregations of people when needed? This article provides an overview of a design proposal for low-cost and temporary housing in India that is facilitated by BIM and explores additional work being done in this area.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2016/BIM-LowCostHousing.html

This article summarizes the key developments in AEC technology that happened in 2015 and looks ahead at what 2016 might bring.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2016/issue_79.html

This article provides an overview of several third-party AEC technology solutions that were on display in the Exhibit Hall at Autodesk University last month, including the versatile visualization and analysis tool, Fuzor; energy analysis tools such as Sefaira, IESVE, and ElumTools; the powerful stand-alone visualization tool, Twinmotion; design applications and plug-ins from Transoft and Ideate; the virtualization technology of Frame and how it applies to AEC; new construction offerings including Newforma LeanPlanner and Assemble Insight; the laser scanning company Skycatch, which makes drones as well as laser scanning software and has attracted a strategic investment from Autodesk; and finally, the latest in computers, printers, and graphics cards from Dell, Lenovo, Epson, HP, and AMD.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2016/AU2015_Exhibitors.html

This article captures the highlights of the recently concluded Autodesk University 2015, whose theme of “The Future of Making Things” translated into many more developments for the Manufacturing industry compared to AEC and Media and Entertainment, and showed several cutting-edge manufacturing projects including a 3D printed airplane partition for Airbus designed using generative design and the development of bionic devices for missing limbs that can even surpass their normal capabilities. It also looks at the extension of manufacturing into construction, and a new application for cloud-based document management, BIM 360 Docs, which was the biggest news from Autodesk on the AEC front at this year’s event.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2015/issue_78.html

In this article Christian Ehl, who most recently set up the OpenBIM platform, bim+, within the Nemetschek Group, paints a fascinating vision of a future world in which robots are commonplace in society and bring their unlimited computing power to the building industry as well. He posits that “BuildingBots,” small software and later hardware robots, will play a major role in creating the buildings of the future, from planning and construction to operations and management. The change will be gradual but definite: in 2016, the first bots will evolve and make sure that all building data is available with 100% accuracy; in 2020, we will see the first self-optimizing buildings; and in 2025, the first self-building buildings will evolve. Software and robots are already reshaping the world completely, and they will do so for the construction industry as well.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2015/BuildingBots.html

This article describes the technology updates shared by Bentley at its recent Year in Infrastructure (YII) conference, including several new products such as LumenRT, a real-time animation and visualization application for infrastructure design; ContextCapture, a reality modeling application that can create detailed city models from 3D meshes captured with photographs rather than point clouds; OpenRoads ConceptStation, a tool specifically for conceptual infrastructure design; ProjectWise Scenario Services, which can compare and contrast different design scenarios; Structural Insights, which provides key at-a-glance indicators summarizing the performance of a structure; EADOC, which enables cloud-based construction management; and many others. Bentley also showed the updated features of the new CONNECT editions of its products, which continue to be extensively used by leading design and construction projects for a vast range of infrastructure projects around the globe.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/newsletter/2015/issue_77.html

This article looks at why the process of getting building approvals from regulatory agencies remains very much a 2D process, with the building drawings still being checked manually for code compliance, when much of it could have been automated if a BIM model was being used. It explores the various automated code-checking efforts that have been initiated so far like CORENET e-PlanCheck, SMARTcodes, and AutoCodes and their current status, as well as the technologies that are needed to actually automate the code-checking process.

URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2015/AutomatingCodeCompliance.html