releases

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

Autodesk recently held an AEC performance benefit has come from stop- mention these days. summit in the AEC division’s ping Revit from constantly checking if Infraworks is undoubtedly a very cool home town of Boston. The pur- there have been model updates when only application that seems to devour large data pose was to launch the new view manipulation has been done. This sets and allow interactions at game-like 2016 range of products, go through some has lessened the load on the CPU and frame rates. We saw a demonstration on of the developments taking place within makes old models that may have previous- how in under ten minutes, the application the division, to take a look at the industry ly pushed the limit of your hardware could import and geo-reference huge and as a whole and identify trends. appear to be like the proverbial hot knife disparate data sets to combine and provide

Autodesk has long since removed itself through butter. city-scale, spatial databases, which could from the big yearly release cycle by deliv- There is a new physical-realistic render- be used for a variety of purposes, in addiering in-stream improvements. However, ing engine, which is really quick and tion to transport, traffic and drainage. This a yearly release still provides an opportu- replaces the old mental ray app for static year’s release sees tighter integration with nity to go through the new features deliv- images. Revit continues to use the Nvidia Autodesk’s other products, plus better ered and announce to its customers DGN and IFC support. product news; and there is always lots of new products. ‘‘ Autodesk will soon provide a suite FormIt and Dynamo Autodesk has been wrestling with Revit 2016 At the core of the Autodesk AEC offering sits Revit, which forms the of powerful tools to give architect’s real insight into the performance of the conceptual design part of the equation for a long time. SketchUp is still out there and, despite its basis of the company’s their buildings basic nature, is one of the industry’s Architectural, Structural and most popular tools. Autodesk’s Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing (MEP) Building Information ’’ answer, FormIt, is a slick application for desktop and mobile but Modelling (BIM) offerings. As Revit has mental ray engine for functions such as was, until now, still embryonic in developmoved to Suites and subscription, its core walkthrough export, FBX export, and pre- ment. development appears to have slowed as views. IFCs can now be lined, and now use Autodesk has now linked FormIt with Autodesk adjusts to the ‘portion’ sizing of a reference geometry for snapping and ref- Dynamo, the company’s computational subscription releases. erence. Structural and Steel detailing has design application to rival McNeel

The team has managed to find a lot more been improved and MEP gets better links Grasshopper and Bentley System’s GC capacity to improve the core performance to fabrication. (formerly called Generative Components). of the graphics, as well as opening files, It is possible to use LOD 400 content The company did not stop there, by viewing, printing and rendering. from Autodesk Fabrication products hooking these up with the cloud, you get

By implementing changes to the graph- (CADmep, ESTmep, and CAMduct) in FormIt 360 Pro, which can use Revit comics pipeline, Revit 2016 can now make Revit to create a more co-ordinated models. ponents and adds in solar analysis and some use of multi-core processing and, for model collaboration. This not only links the first time, can better harness the power Infraworks conceptual with BIM, but driven by generof the GPU to provide some dramatic Autodesk’s ‘go to’ product for infrastruc- ative design and guided by analysis, we can speed increases. ture design continues to steal all the lime- actually have the computer ‘aid’ the design

We understand another element of the light from Civil 3D, which rarely gets a process as opposed to just document it.

BIM 360 Autodesk is laser focused on bringing cloud services to the AEC design environment. Every year there are more ‘360’ solutions, which means they are, in some part or wholly, online services. So they are available everywhere — from the drawing office to onsite, on desktops and via mobile devices.

This year’s additions include BIM 360 Plan for scheduling, BIM 360 Docs and BIM 360 Enterprise Insight.

BIM 360 Plan is based on lean construction principles and provides an easy to use front end to collate construction plans across multiple teams and disciplines, displaying commitments, deadlines and hand offs. The software tracks performance metrics by phase, trade or location.

BIM 360 Docs will be available soon and enables project information to be available anywhere in the field.

BIM 360 Enterprise insight is pretty much a company-wide view of projects with dashboards for analysis. There are many serious players in this part of the construction market already and it will be interesting to see how Autodesk fairs.

We also saw a new application called Autodesk Building Ops, which oddly does not have a 360 in the title. This may be because it is a mobile application that feeds data back to operations?

Building Ops is Autodesk’s first foray into the sleepy world of Facilities Management (FM). It is a mobile-first building maintenance app aimed at contractors for snag list management and for building managers operations to manage day to day asset, maintenance and operations tasks. It has a fairly simple interface, and offers a basic job ticketing system, with reminders for upcoming, overdue, awaiting parts and completed. Project Akaba Autodesk gave a brief demo of another up and coming cloud-based technology called ‘Akaba’. Here, instead of using the computer to draw the geometry, the aim is to tell the computer what the end goal should be and let it come up with a number of solutions.

By inputting a range of rules and constraints, like the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, energy usage, amount of light per room, minimum square footage of each room, site boundaries etc, which all compete, Akaba will generate the geometry and arrangements that solve the brief. The designer is able to select the one which is most appealing and then iterate again or detail or massage the design.

Autodesk Revit is becoming an increasingly powerful at concrete and reinforcement detailing

Autodesk BIM360 Plan brings Autodesk into the world of construction planning and management

The new look Autodesk Formit, combines analysis with Dynamo to provide a fresh look at conceptual modelling

Project Akaba allows designers to tell the computer the design goal and it comes up with a number of solutions

Project Akaba has a very clean interface with an entry point for Goals, and Project criteria, using sliders. The main display shows an array of solutions organised by score of meeting the initial design goal. This really is exciting stuff. Autodesk has similar plans for Urban-level city planning tools. Conclusion Looking at the real innovation coming out of Autodesk’s AEC team at the moment, indicates that a lot of the work being done in trying to solve the conceptual conundrum. While CAD has been great for documentation, conceptual products have typically not offered that much improvement over pen and paper and yet it is here at the early stages that most of the bad decisions are made. With Dynamo and FormIt Autodesk is tackling the geometry of conceptual design and while it is taking a while to get there, the addition of analysis means the company will soon provide a suite of powerful tools to give architect’s real insight into the performance of their buildings. Add Project Akaba into the mix and computers will finally amplify a designer’s talent.

Developments would also indicate that Autodesk is keen to drive further into the construction and post operation side of the business, although here Autodesk will be operating in markets that already have many large players offering mature point solutions. It still baffles me how Autodesk does not really have an industrial strength document management system to pull all of this together.

Revit has seen some good software architecture improvements this revision, which is bound to be a big crowd pleaser, although core architectural functionality has only seen minor updates. Steel, Concrete and Fabrication see the best enhancements.

Looking at Autodesk’s Manufacturing division with new products like Fusion, which reside in the cloud and are clearly meant as a replacement for Inventor, I can not clearly see what the AEC team is going to do when it comes to getting Revit on the cloud, or coming up with a new code stream that leverages contemporary computer programming and computer architectures. The AEC sector is notoriously slow moving when it comes to technology change so perhaps the company does not feel the pressure to refresh, and for the majority of the market this is probably fine.

I just can not help thinking what second generation BIM tools will look like and I regularly meet advanced users who are pushing today’s software beyond to their maximum capabilities.

Harbour views

Autodesk’s AEC division showed off its new office space during its 2016 product update. The as-yet complete design will be housed in a disused buildings, with soaring ceilings and imposing columns, it will undoubtedly be hugely impressive.

Autodesk is moving to downtown Boston in the harbour area and will have an advanced workshop for hands on fabrication

New offices Autodesk’s AEC team is currently centered in Waltham which is on the outskirts of Boston, in a fairly typical office building. With the changes at Autodesk HQ in San Francisco, which had an entire Pier of fabrication and workshops added for employees and local customers, the AEC division has decided to relocate to downtown Boston and have its own workshops.

Located in the North End area Autodesk’s new building looks out onto the inner harbour, and is due to open next year. The AEC summit was held in one of the as-yet untouched spaces, which, while being just a shell, will be a really impressive space once completed.

The main problem for Autodesk here is, as it is the AEC division moving in, there are many ex-architects turned employees that will want to have their say on the refit and layout! Janet Echelman Autodesk took us to see an art installation at Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. The work by Janet Echelman, called ‘As if it were Already Here’ is handmade from over 100 miles of tensioned, coloured rope, tied together with over half a million knots, suspended between three downtown skyscrapers. The net forms three voids, which represent the three hills that were raised to create Boston Harbour.

Echelman first came in contact with Autodesk while giving a lecture on her work. Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and CTO Jeff Kowalski were in the audience and, when she mentioned how hard it was to model the elastic motion of her work, they offered to help develop a tool to model her designs. Using Maya, Autodesk wrote a plug-in which enables her to more easily explore net densities, shape, and scale, and simulate the effects of gravity and wind.

bldgs = data

New York-based building information consultants, Case, held a one day conference to examine how data can impact positive change in the building industry. AEC magazine looks at how two location services — Foursquare and iBeacon — are being used to improve user experience, interior and exterior building design

by Martyn Day

In our Internet-enabled, mobilephone owning world, data is geolocated, has relevance, is social, and can indicate how buildings and cities are used or see how people live their lives. Buildings can also produce a lot of data. Embed them with sensors and you can get data from motion, temperature, video, etc. Not only are buildings defined by design data, they can now create data when being used and are even starting to react in real-time to the information they gather. Geolocation Mobile app search and discovery service Foursquare has been at the forefront of geolocation services since 2009 and is now experimenting with in-store location services as well.

The app uses geolocation and members’ reviews to make recommendations of the places to go to around a given location. Users can get recommendations from others and, with spin-off app, Swarm, can see friends’ locations in real time and arrange to meet up.

The company now boasts a database with over 60,000,000 places of interest and as of January 2014 had 45 million registered users.

Foursquare’s Head of Data Science, Blake Shaw gave a fascinating insight into the company’s ‘Project Gotham’ research, which looks at how, by tracking their New York-based customers they can identify trends and monitor reactions to big events, such as the recent flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy in Manhattan.

Foursquare analysis revealed that, despite well-organised evacuation procedures ahead of Hurricane Sandy, tens of thousands of people were still in lower Manhattan, trapped by the failed power grid. Over the next few days the company’s maps exposed a network of informal social interactions — crashing on couches, uptown oases of hot showers and where to find live power outlets.

In the future this kind of data collection could be used by emergency services to better plan disaster response or be fed into a live feed of people in need. Real time Foursquare gathers all its data in real time and has incredible insight into human behaviour within a city. This has huge potential for urban planners and retailers interested in learning which areas are popular, overcrowded or underutilised.

Shop owners could use it to explore where they should set up the next store or restaurant, or to research what happens when a certain brand, or competitor, moves into an area. Its data can inform businesses of the likelihood of success in an area.

Mapping real world places to social media data, it is also possible for Foursquare to see how word spreads throughout social networks and identify key influencers or ‘experts’ in various categories. Building profiling Foursquare can determine a unique radio frequency profile for every building that its customers use. It does this by mapping variations in signal strength from floor to floor, due to factors such as building materials and proximity to a signal tower. Mr Shaw showcased the 3D signal of various buildings in New York.

Using this information, mobile networks could better plan their urban coverage, which would impact mast placement.

Building owners could also be made aware of how their building negatively impacts coverage and may want to improve this for their customers.

Foursquare is also using the data to create markers, which it calls, ‘venue polygons’, for each business or place, and can be used to create markers for ‘geofences’ that will be used to identify when its customers have entered a specific location, without draining the batteries of smartphones, as Foursquare can use its own signal strength map. From macro to micro Foursquare is experimenting with tracking shopper’s interactions down to product level. This will enable stores to ‘push’ location-based (down to the aisle) messaging to

shoppers with offers. By moving products around the store and monitoring browsing trends, Foursquare can advise retailers on optimum layout and product placement.

Digging deeper into this geolocation monitoring, Case’s Andy Payne and Steve Sanderson talked about their collaborative project with Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology looking at post occupancy usage.

Case deployed Apple iBeacon tracking within their own office to understand how workers move and interact. Many buildings are designed with an assumption of usage, yet fail to live up to their utilitarian ideals.

Using Case’s single floor office as a test bed, Mr Payne and Mr Sanderson placed a number of iBeacons around the office and, with their permission, monitored employees’ movements over a six-week period, generating over seven million data entries.

The results were surprising. Employees were multi-tasking, moving, meeting a lot more than they actually thought they were during the day. It turned out that Case only used one third of the office space effectively and areas that the team thought would be popular, such as the kitchen area, were little used. What is more, the majority of meetings did not necessarily happen in designated meeting rooms. Case is now revaluating the layout of its office.

Post-occupancy usage data could be transformational for businesses that need to maximise the number of people using a space, such as coffee shops and restaurants. Retailers could use it to see if parts of a site are underutilised in order to create a design that improves usage figures and, ultimately, sales. Conclusion The sheer amount of data gathering that is already going on in the world really is mind-boggling, much of which could be relevant and useful to office and retail developers. While the link between social media and buildings may appear skin deep, the collected data can be put to great use.

But the world of big data requires new skills. ‘Data wrangling’ is an art form and the industry needs to upskill to get the benefits of accessing, overlaying and correlating these different data types to assist core design and operation decisions.

The talks were videoed, and are being added to Case’s Vimeo website. We will try and convince Case to bring the event to London and will look forward to tracking everyone’s movements and interactions!

Standard deviation

Bldgs=data was held at the impressively cool Standard Hotel, which sits astride the wonderful High Line, a 1.45 mile park that is built on an elevated section of disused railroad in New York.

Attendees were organised by table and half-way would swap to another pre-designated table, which helped everyone get to know each other for coffee breaks, lunch and end of day drinks.

There were 12 speakers in total, who talked across a range of data-centric projects using data capture and processing to benefit the design and construction businesses.

While we don’t have enough room to cover all the speakers here, some of the videos are available online at vimeo.com/casebim