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Autodesk 2016 releases Autodesk’s product portfolio of desktop and cloud services continues to grow. Martyn Day visited the company’s forthcoming new headquarters to find out what we can expect
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utodesk recently held an AEC summit in the AEC division’s home town of Boston. The purpose was to launch the new 2016 range of products, go through some of the developments taking place within the division, to take a look at the industry as a whole and identify trends. Autodesk has long since removed itself from the big yearly release cycle by delivering in-stream improvements. However, a yearly release still provides an opportunity to go through the new features delivered and announce to its customers product news; and there is always lots of new products.
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mention these days. Infraworks is undoubtedly a very cool application that seems to devour large data sets and allow interactions at game-like frame rates. We saw a demonstration on how in under ten minutes, the application could import and geo-reference huge and disparate data sets to combine and provide city-scale, spatial databases, which could be used for a variety of purposes, in addition to transport, traffic and drainage. This year’s release sees tighter integration with Autodesk’s other products, plus better DGN and IFC support.
Autodesk will soon provide a suite of powerful tools to give architect’s real insight into the performance of their buildings
Revit 2016
At the core of the Autodesk AEC offering sits Revit, which forms the basis of the company’s Architectural, Structural and Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing (MEP) Building Information Modelling (BIM) offerings. As Revit has moved to Suites and subscription, its core development appears to have slowed as Autodesk adjusts to the ‘portion’ sizing of subscription releases. The team has managed to find a lot more capacity to improve the core performance of the graphics, as well as opening files, viewing, printing and rendering. By implementing changes to the graphics pipeline, Revit 2016 can now make some use of multi-core processing and, for the first time, can better harness the power of the GPU to provide some dramatic speed increases. We understand another element of the 14
performance benefit has come from stopping Revit from constantly checking if there have been model updates when only view manipulation has been done. This has lessened the load on the CPU and makes old models that may have previously pushed the limit of your hardware appear to be like the proverbial hot knife through butter. There is a new physical-realistic rendering engine, which is really quick and replaces the old mental ray app for static images. Revit continues to use the Nvidia
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mental ray engine for functions such as walkthrough export, FBX export, and previews. IFCs can now be lined, and now use a reference geometry for snapping and reference. Structural and Steel detailing has been improved and MEP gets better links to fabrication. It is possible to use LOD 400 content from Autodesk Fabrication products (CADmep, ESTmep, and CAMduct) in Revit to create a more co-ordinated models.
Infraworks Autodesk’s ‘go to’ product for infrastructure design continues to steal all the limelight from Civil 3D, which rarely gets a
FormIt and Dynamo
Autodesk has been wrestling with the conceptual design part of the equation for a long time. SketchUp is still out there and, despite its basic nature, is one of the industry’s most popular tools. Autodesk’s answer, FormIt, is a slick application for desktop and mobile but was, until now, still embryonic in development. Autodesk has now linked FormIt with Dynamo, the company’s computational design application to rival McNeel Grasshopper and Bentley System’s GC (formerly called Generative Components). The company did not stop there, by hooking these up with the cloud, you get FormIt 360 Pro, which can use Revit components and adds in solar analysis and model collaboration. This not only links conceptual with BIM, but driven by generative design and guided by analysis, we can actually have the computer ‘aid’ the design process as opposed to just document it. www.AECmag.com
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