BIM 2022
by: Eric Wing
Trending Technologies: BIM 360 Design
T
o be honest I can’t stand the term Trending. Especially when my brand of technology is wrapped into it. I tend to avoid the topic. I’m more comfortable with the term reliable technologies. Yeah, that’s not a real term but I assume you know where I’m going with this. It’s been a while since I’ve actually felt there was a technology we were using that didn’t have scary gaps where it’s only a matter of time when all our stuff gets broken. To me trending means, it’s what the cool kids are doing, so you should too. Sure, day-to-day devices such as iPhones, and the fact that we are actually finally away from physically having to own a blue ray player and a tilting stack of movies is great. The thing is; however, those technologies are actually pretty old and most of the bugs have been systematically worked out. Our industry is a tad different though isn’t it? Also, our industry is now being dragged through the “I should be able to work from home” trend. The trend that seems to have emptied out offices where people would actually plug into a network because they knew doing that was the best way to open and sync a huge Revit. How on earth do we keep people productive on the technology side when someone is working from their couch, using God knows what for an internet connection. Well, luckily the BIM 360 workflow wasn’t really a technology trend until the “I can no longer work in
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AUGIWorld Magazine | February 2022
an office” trend hit. Brought to us by COVID. It has actually been around and a lot of the bugs have been painfully worked through.
WHERE DID IT START?
BIM 360 started off as Collaborate for Revit (C4R). It was just for Revit. Nobody else, outside of Revit users got to play in the cloud. Just like during COVID it was there at exactly the right time. About 6 years ago, my firm had just won a huge airport project where we were working with multiple firms. We were not using C4R. It was going terribly. First of all, between our Syracuse office and Orlando office, synchronizing the models was awful when it worked… but most of the time syncs were simply failing. Of course, when we needed to see an update to the other firms models we had to do the ugly process of overwriting their models. Even worse, to solve that, we were mapping our C drives to other firm’s servers. Yikes. Luckily for me (and all of 200+ users on the project) the decision was made to use the new cloud solution C4R. Not too many projects were on it nationally but hey, it couldn’t be worse. Once we moved over it was like a weight was lifted. Awesome. Figure 1: The inaugural BIM 360 icon in the Places panel within Revit
Because it was so brand new, there were no bells OR whistles. augi.com
