Ghafari Associates, a full-service architecture, engineering, and consulting firm headquartered in Michigan, USA, shares its perspective on AEC technology in this Firm Profile.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/profile/2014/FirmProfile-GhafariAssociates.html
James Vandezande, director of the buildingSMART program at HOK, shares his perspective on AEC technology in this Profile.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/profile/2014/PeopleProfile-JamesVanderzande.html
Paul Teicholz, Professor (Research) Emeritus, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, shares his perspective on AEC technology in this Profile.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/profile/2014/PeopleProfile-PaulTeicholz.html
This product review takes a detailed look at the new version of Graphisoft’s popular BIM application, ArchiCAD, which features dramatically improved built-in visualization with a brand new rendering engine, CineRender from Maxon. It also looks the additional improvements for modeling, documentation, collaboration, and interoperability in ArchiCAD 18, including multi-element editing, automated revision management, improved handling of PDF files, expanded IFC capabilities for better interoperability, and full BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) support.
It is often said that experience is the best teacher, but what happens if the teacher is absent? How will the rising generation of construction professionals apply the insight of veteran practitioners, in an industry where recent economic turmoil has driven them to retire in droves? This is the motivation of the design coordination research led by Dr. Fernanda Leite at the University of Texas at Austin, described in this Viewpoint article. It is focused on investigating how to capture the tacit experiential knowledge of veteran practitioners in design coordination to train novice designers more effectively.
Now that BIM has conquered the building industry and is here to stay, this article explores the application of the same “information modeling” concept to infrastructure, where all the individual components making up a city’s infrastructure are represented by intelligent data-rich 3D models that carry information about themselves and their relationship to other components. It also looks at Autodesk’s infrastructure modeling products, in particular at AutoCAD Civil 3D and the newer InfraWorks, a conceptual urban modeling tool that has the potential to create intelligent city models that can support analysis and evaluation of different urban design criteria.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2014/BIMforInfrastructure.html
In this article, Karen Kensek, Assistant Professor in USC’s School of Architecture, advocates the writing and use of macros in AEC firms to improve the efficiency of BIM, which “out of the box” is not synchronized with the way firms work. Just as CAD was customized to capture decades of accumulated wisdom of workflows that made firms profitable and effective, BIM can also be customized to obtain similar benefits. Although the programming language and implementation may be different, the technical skills and work efficiencies that firms gained from scripts/macros in CAD carry over to BIM.
This article looks at the new field management apps in Newforma’s Mobile Apps suite for accessing and enhancing project information through smartphones and tablets, as well as the enhancements to Newforma Project Cloud, the web-based construction management and collaboration software for connecting project team members across all disciplines. These developments are the latest in a roadmap of extended improvements to the overall Newforma solution for project information management, intended to ensure that team members are always working with current project information, whether they’re in the field, in the office, or in the job trailer.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2014/Newforma_Apps_Cloud.html
This article provides an overview of what’s new with the just-released 2015 Autodesk portfolio of products for building design and construction. The improvements include expanding the capabilities of FormIt and Dynamo, which Autodesk now refers to as “conceptual BIM” and “computational BIM” respectively; extending the scope and scale of Revit, including the ability to connect the design with fabrication and construction; enhancing the point cloud capabilities across all of Autodesk’s modeling products; providing better support for preconstruction; tighter integration with Autodesk cloud services; and improved analysis and simulation using the building model.
This article explores the functionality of Graphisoft’s new BIMcloud service, which was launched towards the end of last month in Tokyo, Japan. It looks at how BIMcloud is different from the BIM Server technology that was introduced in 2009 in ArchiCAD 13 to better support model-based collaboration, the problems it was developed to solve, how it can support collaboration by the extended design team and through mobile devices in addition to traditional computers, its deployment options, and additional capabilities.
URL: http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2014/Graphisoft_BIMcloud.html
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