AEC Magazine May / June 2024

Openness in AEC

Looking beyond interoperability agreements

XR streaming

Twinview digital twins

Nvidia Omniverse Cloud APIs

NXT BLD / NXT DEV preview

London | 25 / 26 June 2024

Chantal Matar

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Industry news 6

Graphisoft pivots to subscription, AI builds Revit models from plans, fabrication modeller to launch, SketchUp for iPad embraces reality capture, plus lots more

Cover story: towards open systems 14

We explore Autodesk’s new approach to openness and note that, with its recent Nemetschek announcement, things seem a little different

NXT BLD / NXT DEV event preview 18

At AEC Magazine’s annual events in London on 25-26 June you’ll not only see what the future holds for AEC technology but you can have a say in how it unfolds

Skema: BIM workflow compression 28

Skema is one of a handful of new tools from design-oriented start-ups that is engineered to work with existing BIM software to shrink project timescales

Dassault Systèmes (DS) in AEC 32

A market leader in manufacturing, DS is developing a new generation of AEC tools, which aim to cross the chasm between digital design and digital manufacture

Twinview (digital twins) 34

We explore Space Group’s Twinview, one of the most advanced BIM digital twin offerings available today

This entry-level pro viz GPU is a great option for small workstations Building

It’s every construction firm’s biggest nightmare: criminals taking control of their data and holding them to ransom

spreads its wings 38

With new Cloud APIs, Nvidia is extending the reach of Omniverse beyond the core demographic of designers and artists

XR: streaming to a headset near you soon 42

All-in-one XR headsets have proved very popular for AEC design review. But for realism and complexity, 3D models must be processed externally, and pixels streamed in

Scan micro workstation 46

This compact 8-litre workstation might not bring much new to the table in terms of chassis, but it’s hard not to take notice when the price is so aggressive

Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada 48

Graphisoft pivots to subscription with new Archicad Collaborate bundle

raphisoft, Nemetschek’s leading BIM brand and developer of Archicad, has announced that it will gradually phase out perpetual licences in favour of subscription.

Adobe led the way on subscription with Creative Suite transitioning to the monthly Creative Cloud, closely followed by Autodesk, which perfected the subscription model in the AEC space, driving increases in revenue and new licensing options. Pretty much every publicly listed software firm in BIM has now shifted from perpetual to subscription, irrespective of customer sentiment.

Graphisoft describes the move, as ‘part of its strategic shift to a sustainable subscription software delivery model’. New purchases of Archicad perpetual licences will be gradually phased out by the end of 2025 but will not affect the delivery of Software Service Agreement (SSA)/Forward customers – Graphisoft’s first subscription service, which provides customers with access to exclusive tools (network licensing, Twinmotion), training, support, and extra services such as licence key insurance. Archicad perpetual and SSA/Forward licences will still be available for new customers through December 31, 2024, and to existing customers through December 31, 2025.

New subscription licences are branded ‘Archicad Collaborate’, as they come bundled with software and services BIMx Pro, BIMCloud, and Redshift Renderer.

If SSA/Forward subscription customers wish to do so, they can immediately convert to the new Archicad Collaborate subscriptions for the same price as SSA/Forward. This offer is designed to help existing SSA/Forward

subscribers take full advantage of the Archicad Collaborate subscription, which increases access to Graphisoft’s collaboration tools.

A cloud-based subscription extends the inherent desktop perpetual version of Archicad, which has local saves, maintenance subscription and gets a yearly update to a model which provides cloud-based back-up, file history, collaboration, continuous updates and flexible cloud licences. In fact, AEC Magazine sees flexible licensing as the jewel in Graphisoft’s subscription transition. Graphisoft’s subscription products run using modern cloud technology, so licences can be assigned to individuals as “named licences” and can also be assigned to a group of users as a “network licence” pool where users can get a licence on a first-come-first-served basis. Users can also go offline with cloud licences for up to seven days. Floating licence support will come in Q3, 2024 and

will be made available to all Archicad Collaborate subscription customers retrospectively.

Graphisoft recently hot-swapped CEOs, from Huw Roberts to Daniel Csillag. This move to transition from perpetual to subscription comes as Csillag’s first major business impact. “Technology in the AEC industry is evolving at lightning speed,” commented Csillag. “Shifting our product delivery model to subscription allows users to take advantage of agile, responsive, and up-to-date software solutions — as soon as they hit the market,” he explained.

Monitoring the Graphisoft support forum, the reaction has been as expected, with the majority of long-term perpetual customers expressing their angst. Archicad perpetual licences can be used indefinitely and deals for conversion are available for three to six years.

More @ www.tinyurl.com/graph-sub ■ www.graphisoft.com

The Nemetschek Group forms AI Innovation Hub

The Nemetschek Group, which owns several AEC brands including Graphisoft, Vectorworks, Allplan, Solibri and Bluebeam, has formed the AI Innovation Hub.

According to the company, the aim of the hub is to bundle the existing AI activities within the Group and accelerate the adoption of AI in the AEC/O and

media and entertainment industries.

The hub will be led by Charles Sheridan, chief AI and data officer, and Julian Geiger, vice president AI product and transformation, who are joining the Group from Google this month.

According to Nemetschek, the main focus of the AI Innovation Hub is to drive ‘ethical and trustworthy’ AI initiatives across the brand portfolio with partners,

alliances, and customers.

The Group aims to accelerate product development as well as the testing and exploring of deploying AI tools such as AI Visualizer (a new feature in Archicad, Allplan and Vectorworks), 3D Drawings (part of Bluebeam Cloud) and the dTwin platform to help users increase productivity and sustainability in their processes.

■ www.nemetschek.com

New AI plug-in generates Revit models from 2D plans

iseBIM, a French software startup, has launched a new add-in for Revit that uses AI to turn 2D plans into Revit models. The tool is primarily aimed at design offices, architectural firms, construction companies, and heritage managers.

IES extends air quality simulation

I WThe software uses AI to detect elements. According to the company, detection takes a few seconds for a plan of 100m² to approximately two minutes for a plan of 3,000m².

WiseBIM AI for Revit takes 2D architectural plans in vector and raster formats (DWG, DXF, PDF, JPG, TIFF, PNG) and turns them into Revit elements. In this first version, the generated elements are walls, doors, windows, and slabs.

Before initiating the detection process, plans must be scaled. Users must also define several parameters to confirm which elements are to be detected and the default values that should be applied to reconstruct the elements. Parameters must be set for walls, windows, doors, and slabs. ■ www.wisebim.app

Autodesk and Nemetschek in open deal

Autodesk has announced an interoperability agreement with the Nemetschek Group, whose brands include Graphisoft, Vectorworks, Allplan, and Bluebeam. According to Autodesk, the agreement

will enhance existing interoperability between the two companies’ industry cloud and desktop products and improve the fluent exchange of information across solutions. For more on this agreement, read our cover story on page 14.

Autodesk acquires PointFuse’s core IP

A

utodesk has purchased certain PointFuse IP and commercially available offerings and plans to integrate the UK firm’s reality modelling technology into the Autodesk portfolio. Details of the deal were not disclosed. PointFuse technology will be integrated within the Autodesk portfolio, where it will be used to ‘drive forward a future scan-to-BIM workflow’.

PointFuse software converts point cloud data (typically from LiDAR scanners and photogrammetry) into intelligent mesh models, with selectable surfaces, and RGB and intensity textures, classified for BIM. These intelligent mesh models consist of polylines and polygons as well as surfaces, and are said to have a smaller memory footprint than the original data.

■ www.autodesk.com/solutions/pointfuse

ES has signed a strategic partnership with French software company Octopus Lab to bring better indoor air quality simulation to a wider international audience.

Octopus Lab’s Indalo software uses Inca-Indoor, which is claimed to be the world’s only validated indoor air chemistry calculation engine.

IES’ Virtual Environment (VE) software, which is used for building performance analysis, currently simulates the ventilation and impact in terms of internal CO2 concentration, allowing VE users to set external concentration levels, test ventilation strategies and simulate occupants CO2 release to calculate indoor CO2 levels. However, CO2 is not the only chemical that impacts human health and comfort, and occupants are not the only source of chemicals.

The integration of Indalo into IESVE will allow VE users to simulate the concentration of over a thousand pollutants.

■ www.iesve.com

Revit content management

Avail, a specialist in BIM content management software, has released Avail Desktop 4.6 along with new Revit plug-ins.

Avail Desktop 4.6 includes two preview features. Palettes are user-customised lists of content in Avail and can function as a favourites list, as starter content for a specific project, or to drive workflows such as redlining construction details .Revit Application Version Management automatically converts Revit files to newer versions.

■ www.getavail.com

Trimble SketchUp 2024 delivers big graphics boost

SketchUp 2024, the latest release of the push pull modeller commonly used for architectural concept design, has a brand-new graphics engine designed to increase 3D performance, and realism through Ambient Occlusion.

The new graphics engine is reported to allow users to experience both an increase in frames-per-second while orbiting models and better handling and responsiveness.

According to the developers, internal testing has shown that the most common configurations are about 2.4x faster than SketchUp’s ‘classic’ graphics engine, and

for higher-end configurations, there’s an improvement of 8.4x faster, with some cases even higher.

The ‘classic’ SketchUp graphics engine is still available for those with older hardware configurations.

The new graphics engine also supports Ambient Occlusion, a viewing style designed to emphasise edges and faces, adding perceived depth to models, increasing realism in SketchUp viewport.

Users can select pre-built Ambient Occlusion Styles in the Styles panel or tweak the Ambient Occlusion settings sliders and create their own new Styles.

■ www.sketchup.com

SketchUp for iPad embraces reality capture

SketchUp for iPad can now take advantage of the iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner to capture scans of buildings and transform the data into ‘clean, organised 3D geometry’ as a starting point for conceptual design.

The new Scan-to-Design [Labs] feature uses a combination of Canvas scan technology, Apple RoomPlan technology and Trimble technology to capture interior and exterior spaces. Designers simply scan a room as if they were painting the walls, and choose whether to output textured 3D meshes that are created with Canvas scanning technology or create ‘simplified, untextured planes’ using Apple’s RoomPlan technology – or both.

Designers can then use SketchUp for iPad’s modelling tools to quickly visualise

and iterate design options in 3D. For feedback, clients and other collaborators can use Apple Pencil to mark up the model. They can also immerse themselves in the design using AR.

“Designers want to capture complete as-built conditions quickly and easily without having to switch between multiple tools, and they need to share their conceptual designs with clients in a way that builds both excitement and trust,” said Mike Tadros, director of product management at Trimble.

“Scan-to-Design solves those needs by empowering designers to quickly capture a holistic view of a job site and provides a starting point for creating beautiful conceptual designs.”

■ www.sketchup.com/ipad

D5 Render 2.7 launches for real-time viz

5 Render 2.7, the latest release of the AECfocused real-time rendering software, has launched with 35 updates and optimisations, many of which are driven by AI and PCG (Procedural Content Generation).

DD5 Scatter is a new PCG vegetation scatter tool designed to help generate realistic landscapes more easily and quickly.

AI Atmosphere Match, first introduced in D5 Render 2.6 to help designers generate sky, natural lighting, and postproduction effects from reference images, has been further refined to produce more precise matching results for both exterior and interior scenes.

D5 Render 2.7 also includes enhancements to its global illumination (GI) algorithms. According to the company this brings the software one step closer to achieving the quality of offline rendering.

■ www.d5render.com

PIX4Dcatch scanning app embraces AR

Pix4D has launched PIX4Dcatch 2.0, the latest release of its iOS mobile app for terrestrial scanning. Version 2.0 adds ‘professional-grade’ augmented reality (AR) capabilities and extended compatibility with Real-time Kinematic (RTK) positioning devices.

The new AR feature enables users to interact with a construction site in real time. Models can be overlaid and visualised for approval during project design, construction, and post-construction inspections.

■ www.pix4d.com

Kreod gears up for launch of Kidia fabrication modeller ROUND UP

Unifying GIS & BIM

Esri and Autodesk have integrated Esri ArcGIS Basemaps with Autodesk Civil 3D and Autodesk AutoCAD to provide AEC professionals with ‘detailed geospatial data and mapping capabilities’ with a view to ‘further unifying GIS and BIM’

■ www.esri.com

Ideate acquired

AEC software developer Graitec has acquired Ideate Software, a US firm that offers plug-ins for Revit as well as a scripting solution that enables Revit users to run time-intensive Revit tasks in the background

■ www.ideatesoftware.com

Oasys Giraphe

Oasys Giraphe is a new geotechnical graphing software designed to makes it easier for users to create, customise, update, and interpret graphs. It is integrated with Seequent’s OpenGround geotechnical information management solution

■ www.oasys-software.com

Chaos and IES

Chaos has shared more details about its partnership with IES designed to bring real time building performance analysis to its real-time rendering tool Enscape. The public beta of the new Building Performance module will be available in the second half of 2024. The initial release will be available for free to all Enscape users

■ www.enscape3d.com

Eleco acquires VDS

Eleco has acquired Romania-based custom software integration and development provider, Vertical Digital. According to Eleco, the acquisition will enhance its capability to service its customers by connecting systems and technical consulting, as well as augmenting its internal research and development capacity

■ www.eleco.com

Revit design review

Spatial Construx has launched Nception, a design review Revit plug-in that allows users to export their Revit models, along with all parametric data, to a ‘virtual information model’ or VIM that can be viewed in the Nception viewer. The software works with Revit 2020 - 2024

■ www.spatialconstrux.com

Kreod, which presented its approach to building fabrication at NXT BLD last year, is developing a new, from the ground-up, solid-modelling-based fabrication modeller for architects and fabricators.

The collaborative Level 400+ tool, called Kreodx Integrated DfMA Intelligent Automation software (or Kidia for short) will launch this September.

Kreod CEO Chung Qing Li explains that in any approach to DfMA all components need to be designed, manufactured and assembled with high precision, adding that Kidia uses sophisticated algorithms to decode this complexity, transforming intricate designs into manageable, step-by-step assembly instructions.

Kidia automates the planning and execution phases of DfMA projects, with a view to reducing the time required to bring projects from conception to completion. The software also optimises material usage and minimises offcuts by ‘precise planning and modelling’.

There are additional plans for detailed planning and virtual testing of assembly processes. The software will support a digital twin outlook, encompassing design, engineering, manufacturing, assembly, through to operation and maintenance.

As Kreod is also an architectural practice, we can be sure the company will be testing and proving the capabilities of Kidia on live projects.

■ www.kreodx.com

London Gatwick builds geospatial hub

London Gatwick has created a new geospatial platform to support multiple operational areas at the airport, including engineering and environmental services.

The system uses Esri’s GIS technology to help make engineering and construction works safer by reducing accidental strikes on buried utilities and enabling better management of the airports biodiversity.

The geospatial platform contains critical infrastructure information spanning the 70-year history of the airport, including BIM, CAD, utilities, environmental, aerial photography and legacy data.

By integrating all spatial data into a

single view, combined with advanced spatial analysis tools, mobile apps and dashboards, the Esri platform is said to provide new insights to support better collaboration and decision-making.

■ www.esri.com

Liquid cooled Threadripper Pro workstation launches

Comino, a specialist in liquid cooled workstations and servers, has updated its Comino Grando ‘hyper performance’ workstation, offering the AMD Threadripper Pro 7000 Series processor with up to 96 cores.

The workstation can be configured with up to four high-end GPUs. This includes traditional graphics-focused boards, such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (48 GB), Nvidia RTX GeForce 4090 (24 GB) and AMD Radeon Pro W7900 (48 GB), plus those designed for AI workflows and high-performance computing (HPC), such as the Nvidia A100 (80 GB), Nvidia H100 (80 GB) and Nvidia L40S (48 GB).

The Comino Grando is different to most desktop workstations in that the CPU,

GPUs and VRM modules on the motherboard are cooled with Comino’s custom liquid cooling technology. According to the company, it makes the workstation significantly quieter and cooler than standard workstations and prolongs the lifespan of the hardware. It also allows Comino to push more power into the AMD Threadripper Pro processor compared to an air-cooled workstation and therefore maintain significantly higher all-core frequencies. According to Alexey Chistov, Comino CTO, the Threadripper Pro 7995WX (96 cores) can reach 4.5GHz @ 900W and the Threadripper Pro 7985WX (64 cores) can reach 5.0GHz @ 900W, compared to 2.53.5GHz for an air-cooled workstation.

■ www.comino.com

Nvidia finally brings RTX to entry-level

vidia has launched the first entry-level pro desktop GPUs to feature RT cores for ray tracing and Tensor cores for AI.

The Nvidia RTX A400 (4 GB) and RTX A1000 (8 GB) are built on the Nvidia Ampere architecture, which was first introduced in 2020, and not the Nvidia Ada architecture used in its most recent Nvidia RTX 2000, 4000, 4500, 5000 and 6000 class professional GPUs. According to Nvidia, the new GPUs have AI processing capabilities that surpass traditional CPU-based solutions, enabling professionals to run AI applications, such as intelligent chatbots

and co-pilots, directly on their desktops. With 72 Tensor cores, the Nvidia RTX A1000 is said to deliver over 3x faster generative AI processing for tools like Stable Diffusion, compared to the previous generation Nvidia T1000, which only had CUDA cores. Stable Diffusion is used for conceptual design in architecture, and also accelerates the new AI Visualizer in BIM software Archicad.

Both GPUs also offer ray tracing capabilities for next generation CAD/BIM software and entry-level viz tools and will likely be predominantly sold in compact workstations like the HP Z2 Mini G9.

■ www.nvidia.com

Lenovo updates ultra portable pro laptop

Lenovo has introduced the ThinkPad P1 Gen 7, the latest version of its ‘ultraportable and highperformance’ mobile workstation. The 16-inch pro laptop features an Intel Core Ultra processor with an integrated neural processing unit (NPU) and a choice of Nvidia RTX Ada Generation GPUs, both of which can be used for AI processing.

According to Lenovo, the integrated NPU is dedicated to handling light, continuous AI tasks, while the Nvidia RTX GPU with Tensor Core technology is meant for more demanding day-to-day AI processing, including AI inferencing and training.

Beyond AI, most architects and engineers will likely use the laptop for CAD, BIM and entrylevel visualisation workflows, taking advantage of the raytracing, and graphics capabilities of the Nvidia RTX GPU.

■ www.lenovo.com

External box to boost GPU performance

Zotac has unveiled a new external GPU Box that plugs into a compact desktop or mobile workstation to boost GPU performance for rendering, real time viz, AI and other workflows.

The ZBox Pro External GPU Box features an embedded workstation-grade MXM 3.1 Type-B form factor Nvidia RTX Ada Generation laptop GPU (2000, 3500 or 5000) that is typically used in mobile workstations. It connects to the workstation via Thunderbolt 3.

■ www.zotac.com

Lenovo ThinkPad P14s

Gen 5 AMD gets AI boost

Lenovo has launched the ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD, a 14-inch mobile workstation powered by the new ‘ultra efficient’ AMD Ryzen Pro 8040 HS-Series processor with significantly.

The new pro laptop does not appear to be that different to the previous Gen 4 edition. The new AMD processor, which has CPU, GPU, and NPU (Neural Processing Unit) built into the same silicon, has almost identical specs to its predecessor, the AMD Ryzen Pro 7040 Series.

For instance, the new laptop’s top-end AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 8840HS processor has the same AMD Radeon 780M GPU with pro graphics driver, plus 8 cores, 16 threads, and a max frequency of 5.1 GHz.

However, it’s a different story when it comes to AI processing, with the NPU said to deliver 39 AI TOPS, almost 3.5x that of the previous generation.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD comes with a range of independent

software vendor (ISV) certifications and, on paper, looks well suited to running CAD and BIM tools such as AutoCAD, Revit, and Solidworks. The laptop also offers ThinkShield security features and, according to Lenovo, passes comprehensive MIL-SPEC testing for durability.

Other primary specs include up to 96 GB DDR5 memory up to 2TB PCIe SSD, and a choice of 14″ 16:10 displays, up to a 2.8K OLED (2,880 x 1,800) anti-glare 400nit IPS panel with 100% DCI-P3, and X-Rite FCC.

Additional features include Wi-Fi 6E and optional 5G WWAN, and a choice of 39.3Whr battery or customer replaceable 52.5Whr battery.

Elsewhere, it looks like Lenovo has shaved a few millimetres off the chassis, with the ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 coming in at 315.9 x 223.7 x 17.7 mm and 1.31 kg compared to 317.7 x 227.36 x 17.9 mm and 1.34 kg for the Gen 4 edition.

■ www.lenovo.com

What we think

On paper, the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD looks to be a great pro laptop for CAD and BIM workflows. It shares the same fundamental processor technology and pro graphics driver as the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD, which has plenty of performance to run CAD tools like Solidworks, as illustrated in AEC Magazine last month.

Also, with this AMD processor, if you run out of GPU memory, you can borrow more from system memory without the performance penalty you’d typically get from the traditional combination of CPU and discrete GPU.

The ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD might not bring much new to the table in terms of primary processing, but the significantly faster NPU should make the laptop more future proofed.

While we’ve yet to see AEC software developers extract real value from NPUs, with many preferring to use processors in the cloud, architects should certainly derive benefits from NPUs when running general local software, such as Microsoft Copilot and Zoom.

Of course, for more intensive AI workflows, such as using Stable Diffusion for architectural concept design, powerful discrete Nvidia RTX GPUs will likely be faster. However, as the ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD has the CPU, GPU and NPU all on the same chip, which can potentially access a whopping 96 GB of memory, far more than you get on a discrete laptop GPU, this could present some interesting workflow opportunities for AI in the future.

Topcon GNSS technology integrated with IoT solutions

Topcon Positioning Systems has announced strategic agreements with Bentley Systems and Worldsensing to integrate its GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) technology into the companies’ software and connectivity solutions.

As part of its agreement with Bentley, the infrastructure engineering software company, Topcon has provided access to its web-based GNSS processing engine.

Bentley has integrated the technology into its iTwin IoT monitoring solution, which can be used to monitor a wide range of infrastructure assets.

“This integration will enable our users to combine cost-effective geospatial monitoring data with the wide range of geotechnical, environmental, and structural sensor data that we already support — providing real-time asset intelligence that can be combined with

engineering data to advance infrastructure digital twins.” Steve Bentley, senior director of Infrastructure IoT for Bentley

Worldsensing, an IoT specialist offering connectivity solutions for geotechnical, structural and environmental monitoring, has integrated the Topcon AGM-1 GNSS receiver with its Thread X3 broadband product.

■ www.topconpositioning.com

Towards open systems

As far as interoperability is concerned, from the get-go, the BIM software sector did not cover itself in glory. If you think about it, that’s bizarre, for an industry which, by its very nature, requires data to flow between fragmented, multidisciplinary project teams.

The problems created by a lack of interoperability were hardly unforeseen. In 1994, the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) was set up by Autodesk to define Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) to aid data exchange. But when it came to conforming to IFC standards, even Autodesk itself didn’t do a great job of achieving that goal for decades.

The 2D world eventually coalesced around Autodesk’s DWG, after Autodesk’s competitors all had to reverse-engineer the CAD format. But the move from drawings to new model-centric, proprietary formats like Revit’s RVT set data exchange back ten years – unless, of course, you were all using the same software.

The net result is an industry where applications support various incarnations of IFC, to various degrees of quality, and customers don’t know what they are doing with it. Customers in some countries, such as the US, have just opted for everyone to use one solution from one vendor, and put RVT as a deliverable in their contracts. This, of course, has been great for Autodesk and its shareholders.

As we shift from BIM 1.0 desktop filebased systems to BIM 2.0 cloud-based apps and databases, the whole competitive landscape is set to change once more. The propensity for the industry to keep breaking compatibility is always there, but this time around, something odd is happening. The main vendors are talking about data openness in a way they have never done before, as if it’s central to the next generation of tools.

Given the industry’s history of using proprietary lock-in as a business advantage, this sets off my spider senses. But facts are facts. Bentley Systems has open-

sourced its next-generation database format iTwin and is available on Github. Market leader Autodesk is also preaching open standards and signing deals with competitors to allow API and APS (Autodesk Platform Services - formerly known as Forge) access. The company has already done technology swaps with PTC, Bentley Systems, Ansys, Cadence and Trimble and is championing and looking to BIM-ify Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD) in collaboration with other industry players.

A proprietary world

The truth is the world of CAD goes through cycles of interoperability. Typically, when a software company creates a new desktop design tool, it would develop a file format, or schema, in which to save the customer’s data for loading, archiving or sharing.

Every software company has its own proprietary file formats and each one is unique to the application. Autodesk has

In light of the major API deal recently signed between Nemetschek and Autodesk, Martyn Day explores this new approach to openness at Autodesk and notes that, this time around, things seem a little different

.DWG and .RVT; McNeel Rhino has .3dm; Graphisoft has .PLN; and Bentley Systems has .DGN – to name but a few. There is nothing wrong with proprietary or native files, as all applications need to store the data in some structured document type.

With incoherence being built in, the early phases of these new generations of software are the Wild West, as developers duke it out to see who will become the market leader by volume in any market segment; the benefit being that, if you have the most users, then your format becomes a de facto standard. More people will feel the need to buy your software over competing products and that will further drive your format’s dominance, as it’s the most basic, reliable form of interoperability.

As total market domination is usually not possible, this leaves competitors with customers demanding the ability to read and write in the de facto format. With some reverse engineering, or by licensing a third-party toolkit, they begin to add sup-

port for the market-leading platform. The best historic case in point is Autodesk’s AutoCAD DWG, which dominated the market and still does. DWG is an essential export of any competitive CAD tool.

The problem with convergence on one company’s proprietary format is that all software programmes work differently, have different capabilities and are built according to different concepts. A firm may well have enabled its competitive application to export or import a DWG, but there is a fair degree of internal mapping and conversion of entity types (layers, polylines, linestyles, dim variables and so on) and this is never 100% operable between software with different origins.

After several attempts at including DWG export/import in Bentley Systems MicroStation, but still getting complaints from users wanting enhanced conversion, Bentley took the decision to include all the entity types in AutoCAD in MicroStation, so that data would no longer need to be mapped or translated

between the applications. That’s an extreme solution by any measure. The proprietary win in an industry is a very powerful commercial bonus; it means a developer can call the shots and look forward to selling software to supply chains and everywhere its customers touch.

Reverse engineering

Did Autodesk like the reverse engineering and adoption of others of its file format? Not really. In a story that is too long to tell here, a threat arose with the first AutoCAD clone. A CAD application called Intellicad came along, which used DWG as its core format and mimicked AutoCAD’s capabilities.

Autodesk’s reaction was to mimic Coca-Cola’s response to Pepsi, highlighting that only its own products were 100% DWG. Copycats, it argued, simply could not offer ‘the real thing’.

This led to the creation of the Open Design Alliance (ODA), which pooled Autodesk’s competitors’ reverse engineer-

The AEC industry is now seeing more interoperability agreements than ever before

ing knowledge of DWG and provided updated libraries (the ODA went on to develop libraries for DGN, IFC and RVT). It was now increasingly hard to work out where DWGs originated from. Autodesk devised a way to throw a spanner in the works by including a copyrighted phrase in the file. This meant that AutoCAD could be programmed to give a warning when it encountered a non-AutoCADoriginated DWG. Somewhat foolishly, the ODA went ahead and copied this copyrighted phrase and was taken to court, made to pay dearly and had to remove the alert-triggering phrase.

Autodesk’s intention was to warn users that a non-Autodesk DWG could be corrupted, planting a seed of doubt and also helping Autodesk support staff to work out if a problem file was ‘not one of theirs’.

Other CAD firms have gone so far as to encrypt proprietary files, making reverse engineering harder. We encountered this with mechanical CAD (MCAD) software developer PTC when, as an incumbent, it came under extreme pressure from a new upstart called Solidworks. Proprietary formats are a form of leverage, but they contain the full fidelity of the authored data. Pretty much all interoperability standards are lowest common denominator solutions and ‘lossy’.

came BIM and the industry went back to square one, with IFC in its infancy and on a slow trajectory. It wasn’t until 2016, after three years of work, that the ODA released its first RVT libraries. However, Revit changes format with nearly every release, thus always needs reworking.

Developer networks

With customer BIM data held inside proprietary files, developers who want to provide additional solutions to customers and work on that data have needed to become members of the main software firm’s developer networks. For Autodesk, this would be the ADN (Autodesk Developer Network), which allows early access for coming releases, access to APIs and support for desktop products.

‘‘ The big software battle may move from owning the highest volume ‘branded’ monolithic app or suite to having the most resource-rich, connected design cloud. It will be about where you choose to hold your project information –because customers will bring their connected ecosystems ’’

Over time, DWG became the standard file format in 2D CAD-land, and with every competitor providing support for it, data was able to flow. But then along

With a long-term vision in the cloud, Autodesk introduced Forge in 2015, now called APS (Autodesk Platform Services). APS offers a broad range of services that developers and customers can utilise to create new programmes or incorporate services into their products.

For instance, many developers utilise Autodesk’s Model Derivative API for converting file formats (it supports 70-plus of these). While an application may be 95% written by the developer, they can rely on Autodesk’s cloud capabilities to integrate them with Autodesk BIM 360, Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) or to access, open and view a Revit file. Other APS services include the Design Automation API and Reality

Universal Scene Description (USD)

Universal Scene Description (USD) was originally developed and open-sourced by Pixar Animation Studios to help its multidisciplinary teams share complete 3D ‘scene descriptions’ between a mixture of different software applications. It supports a variety of elements such as mesh geometry, materials and animations.

While it currently doesn’t officially support any embedded BIM data, the Alliance for Open

Capture API, which are paid for by Flex tokens based on use. Pricing can be seen at https://aps.autodesk.com/pricing.

In the past, if one of its developers sold to a competitor, that would result in almost immediate ejection from the ADN, which is understandable, since members get early access to the next release. In fact, Autodesk has historically uninvited longstanding, trusted developers from the Autodesk University (AU) event, for offering a new feature that is deemed competitive with one of its own products.

But again, something different is happening now. Firms such as TestFit (which competes with Autodesk Spacemaker) were uninvited in the past, but are now not only being welcomed back to AU, but also being invited to contribute features to Autodesk Forma, the newish cloud version of Spacemaker.

Snaptrude, which is developing an actual head-on Revit competitor, is allowed to use the Model Derivative service to access RVT and was even permitted to take a booth at AU and run a presentation. One of the conditions of use with APS (5.3 in the terms and conditions), states, “No use by competitors — except with Autodesk’s prior written consent. You may not access or use the Services if you are a competitor of Autodesk”. So they could pull your access to the cloud services unless there is prior negotiation.

Open formats

Despite starting IFC and the IAI, Autodesk’s interest in supporting it went kind of missing in the process. With an American-biased view, I can probably understand this, as in the US, Revit is dominant and IFC is hardly required as RVT is the contractual format.

Prior to the release of the open letter to Autodesk (www.tinyurl.com/adesk-letter) , Autodesk had already been negotiating with the ODA about joining to get access to the IFC libraries, which were now the

USD (AOUSD), headed up by Nvidia and Autodesk seeks to expand the format to better accommodate the data needs of the industry (www.aousd.org). USD is owned by Pixar but the plan is to make it an ISO standard.

industry standard. Here, conjecture could be that it was cheaper to license the IFC libraries than develop, or perhaps fidelity was on its mind before the open letter hit.

For the ODA, Autodesk joining was a problem amongst its members. It seems that a special membership status was created to allow Autodesk access to IFC alone, but not the other libraries – for which membership states that firms have to give up all they know about DWG and RVT, which would have been a big ask.

The ODA DWG libraries were also updated by members to support multiple processors and other advances that even Autodesk’s technology didn’t have at the time.

USD is the new format in town and owned and managed by Pixar. Nvidia has based its Omniverse common data environment for AEC users on the format (www.nvidia.com/omniverse)

Essentially, USD is an accurate mesh, with textures and lighting, and lightweight enough to act as a format to bring in large data models and utilise all the cloud GPU power that Nvidia can provide. Autodesk seems to have fallen a bit in love with the format and has been experimenting with it in manufacturing and AEC.

While Nvidia was scraping data from Revit and hiding it inside its USD, Autodesk wanted to force standardisation, so every developer had the same access. The AOUSD (Alliance for Open USD) was born and joined by firms including Apple, Siemens, Ikea, Sony, Trimble and Hexagon. Extensions are being submitted for inclusion to expand USD applicability to hold metadata for various industries and open for all.

Autodesk and Nemetschek

At the end of April, Autodesk and Nemetschek signed a deal, one that was previously announced rather prematurely by Autodesk at AU in November 2023. Nemetschek and Autodesk have agreed

to allow data to flow more easily from each other’s cloud platforms and desktop applications. The interoperability is made possible by connecting Nemetschek’s dTwin, Bluebeam Cloud, BIMcloud and BIMplus industry clouds to Autodesk’s industry clouds—Forma, Fusion, and Flow—as well as design solutions through Autodesk Platform Services (APS). This will enable customers and partners of both firms to connect their data and capabilities across the mixed solutions.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Nemetschek Group and Autodesk will provide mutual access to their APIs and industry clouds, thereby giving developer access to Nemetschek solutions including Allplan, Archicad, Bluebeam, Maxon One and Vectorworks, as well as Nemetschek’s relevant cloud platforms, and similarly to Autodesk solutions including AutoCAD, Revit, 3ds Max and Maya, as well as Autodesk Forma and Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC). This will enable the two companies to improve upon existing data exchanges and open new data-centric multi-disciplinary workflows.

The deal seems very broad, but is also very specific to a range of tools on both sides. The fact that it took so long to negotiate suggests there was a lot of quid pro quo to ensure both parties felt they were getting enough in return for opening access. These are, after all, the number one and two vendors in AEC. Nemetschek has three BIM modellers (Archicad, Vectorworks and Allplan), to Autodesk’s one (Revit). It leads me to wonder whether, if Nemetschek acquired a developer, would it have to add that to this list by negotiation, or is the APS access open to all Nemetschek brands?

More on openness at NXT BLD & NXT DEV

If you are interested in openness and its future in the AEC industry, please join us at our NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre on 25 / 26 June 2024.

You will have the opportunity to learn about new initiatives and take part in discussions on what the industry wants moving forward. See page 18 for more information. www.nxtbld.com | www.nxtdev.build

for open systems, as they are in the RVT ecosystem. It’s Europe and the rest of the world at stake here, perhaps, but I feel that the fundamental driver to this open view lies in the destination for the next design platforms: the cloud.

It might not seem like it right now, but the file-based world will eventually give way to interconnected design clouds from vendors, loaded with customer databases of projects. These will need to be granular, portable or accessible, since customers will demand it. The big software battle may move from owning the highest volume ‘branded’ monolithic app or suite to having the most resourcerich, connected design cloud. It will be about where you choose to hold your project information – because customers will bring their connected ecosystems.

1.0 Primary logo

So what does this all mean? Autodesk is undoubtedly evolving an open strategy in its AEC market play. I am sure that Autodesk will allocate this to listening to its users, but US firms are just not asking

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)

Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), originally created by Autodesk but now managed by BuildingSmart, is closely aligned with the STEP exchange format and now has extensive support for architectural and construction entities (walls, doors, windows and so on).

There are three commonly supported variants; IFC: IFC2X3 (ISO standard since 2006); IFC4; and IFC4x3; with 4x4 in development. Since 2020, major

The primary buildingSMART logo is the International logo. These logo guidelines refer to this logo mark but can also be applied across the full buildingSMART International logo suite. The full logo suite can be viewed on the logo map on page 17 and all logos are available to download on request.

The ‘trap’ may be that, by hosting all project data in Autodesk’s new unified database (which is proprietary), there will be big benefits through AI and automation, with layers and layers of geo-referenced information available for analysis. The only way to ‘get your data out’ of this database would be to slice up the database, reverting content back into its constituent native files, which by then, will feel like a move as regressive as going back to DXF.

work has been put into the restructuring of the core of IFC for IFC 5, in order to expand to accommodate smart buildings, smart cities, digital twins, granular level access, cloud streaming and many other capabilities.

Examples of additional logo

Example of Chapter logo:

Shaping the future of AEC

NXT BLD and NXT DEV are just around the corner and we’re thrilled to invite you to our annual events in London. You’ll not only see what the future holds for AEC technology but have a say in how it unfolds. We want you to join us on this journey.

You’ve mastered the first generation of BIM tools, now it’s time to push the boundaries with new model-based processes to drive better productivity and higher quality outcomes.

Join us on 25 June for NXT BLD and 26 June for NXT DEV at the iconic Queen Elizabeth II Centre. Let’s get inspired, let’s challenge the status quo, and let’s help bring forward the next frontier of AEC technologies and workflows that promise to revolutionise how we design and build our world.

What’s in store at NXT BLD?

This year NXT BLD covers a broad range of technology areas including automa-

tion, generative design, data, openness, XR, GeoBIM, expert systems, design to fabrication, architectural meta-worlds, workstation technology and of course AI and machine learning.

There is a chasm between digital design and fabrication, which is holding back the adoption of modern methods of construction. Several speakers will address the issue from different angles.

Dale Sinclair from WSP is connecting architecture to fabrication, Antoine Morizot of Bouygues Construction has a system that can automate BIM models to BoMs, drawings and cost. Jeremy Tully will explain how modular construction is used to rapidly deploy Intel’s next generation of semiconductor fabs. Marty Rozmanith of Skema will look at technologies which can automate architectural BIM to output designs at Level 400.

As the industry moves from BIM 1.0 to BIM 2.0, there is a danger of unleashing another Tower of Babel on the industry with next gen software. The industry is

fed up of proprietary lock-ins and data wrangling. So how can this be avoided? Thankfully there is a lot of talk about ‘openness’ and adoption of standards between both new and old software houses. Greg Schleusner of HOK will demonstrate new interoperability software currently in development. Autodesk’s Virginia Senf and Sasha Crotty will be laying bare the company’s next generation data strategy. Bentley Systems CTO Julien Moutte will be talking about Bentley’s decision to opensource its data schema. Antonio González Viegas wants to level the BIM playing field with a new opensource BIM modeller.

As the BIM 2.0 story develops, it’s becoming clear that not only will there be new design software to work alongside, or replace existing tools, but there will be new expert systems and applications which will crush existing workflows at multiple points and connect design to fabrication. Openness now seems like a base requirement, rather than an afterthought.

London 25 June 2024

NXT BLD

Tuesday 25 June 2024

Queen Elizabeth II Centre Westminster, London www.nxtbld.com

8:30am - Conference starts 5:30pm - Networking drinks reception 7:00pm - Conference ends

Ticket includes full access to the dual stream conference and exhibition, plus coffee, pastries, quality lunch, and drinks at the networking reception.

NXT DEV (see page 26)

Wednesday 26 June 2024

Queen Elizabeth II Centre Westminster, London www.nxtdev.build

8:30am - Conference starts 5:30pm - Conference ends

Ticket includes full access to the dual stream conference and exhibition, plus coffee, pastries, and quality lunch.

Exclusive offer for AEC professionals

For readers only from architecture, engineering, or construction firms, academia, or technology startups, we are offering a strictly limited number of discounted two day tickets for NXT BLD and NXT DEV. Simply use the promotional code 20NXTAEC to get 20% off. Tickets include full access to the conference and exhibition, refreshments, lunch and drinks at the networking reception. When they’re gone, they’re gone!

Generative architect, Matar has been on the leading edge of both design and design technology. Having worked at Zaha Hadid Architects and Atelier Des Architectes Associés, she has applied art and mixed-media skills to many projects. Matar will explain her methodology and show the results of blending architectural knowledge with cutting-edge digital processes, such as photogrammetry and NERFS.

Martha Tsigkari, Sherif Tarabishi and Adam Davis, Foster + Partners speaking at NXT BLD last year

www.nxtbld.com

Patrik Schumacher Partner

Zaha Hadid Architects

With the advent of 3D modelling, architects have moved beyond designing physical buildings and now create swathes of valuable digital assets in high definition USD. Treasury is a new registry and data vault, for designed spatial assets, which can be licensed for use in areas such as film and virtual meta worlds. It is co-founded by Zaha Hadid Architects, Spaceform (backed by BIG) and Heatherwicks.

At NXT BLD, Patrik Schumacher and Shajay Bhooshan of Zaha Hadid Architects, together with John Manoochehri of Treasury will discuss the benefits of expanding into the new digital frontier of meta and highlight Treasury’s benefits to creators and builders.

The Liberland Metaverse MasterPlan: a collaboration between Liberland, Zaha Hadid Architects, Mytaverse and ArchAgenda a.o

Julien Moutte CTO

Bentley Systems

Data

With Bentley Systems already having made its next generation file format open source, Moutte will address the Future AEC Specification that launched at NXT DEV last year (see page 26) and expand the concept of open schemas into the infrastructure world. Other topics addressed will include AI and its application areas, as well as autodrawings and digital twins.

Open data

Greg Schleusner Principal/Director of Design Technology // HOK

With the industry trapped in data silos, Schelusner is passionate about the need to lift valuable design data to an open database, outside of any single vendor’s control. The aim is to provide a common framework for open collaboration with granular access. Working with BuildingSmart, IDC (Innovation Design Consortium) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Large Firm Round Table (LFRT) group, Schleusner will demonstrate the prototype software.

Schelusner’s previous NXT BLD talks can be viewed at www.nxtbld.com

Antoine Morizot Technical solution architect Bouygues Construction (Bryck)

Bouygues Construction has been working closely with Dassault Systèmes on an automated expert system which takes in BIM models, rationalises them to components which best optimise Bouygues’ fabrication facilities, creates Level 400 fabrication models, BoMs, drawings and delivers cost estimates in minutes. The system, called Bryck, has impressed the company so much that it’s just signed up for seven more years of development.

Bruce Bell Founder // Facit Homes

With modular fabrication factories shutting quicker than we can think of a witty metaphor, construction’s chances of delivering on the country’s housing needs look bleak. Bell has a successful business building one off homes, fabricating on site. He has been exploring how to scale this up to estates and more.

London 25 June 2024

Meta verse

Patrik Schumacher, Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects will explore how to protect the world’s most valuable spatial assets, in the era of spatial computing and generative AI

Antonio Gonzalez Viegas CEO

That Open Company

Open BIM

The need to innovate in BIM tools has been apparent for some time. While there is a new batch in development, Viagas, the genius behind IFC.JS, has started ‘That Open Company’, which is working on delivering a free, open (IFC-based), collaborative, cloudbased BIM tool for the industry to utilise in any way it deems fit.

Virginia Senf / Sasha Crotty AEC design data team lead // Autodesk

The industry is moving away from files and monolithic desktop applications to centralised cloud-databases to aid collaboration and create BIM 2.0 workflows. As the market leader in BIM 1.0, Autodesk will give us a glimpse of the database strategies it will deploy to connect the file-based world with the database-centric universe.

Jeremy Tully Senior director of digital transformation for the fab construction enterprise Intel Corporation

In a highly competitive tech sector with huge and growing demand, and with global politics forcing some silicon firms to rethink where they build next, Tully will explain how the compressed and complex construction roadmap has forced Intel to look for ways to improve productivity and drive efficiency with so many mega projects underway simultaneously. The company has sought to modularise, use digital twins and apply AI to its construction execution.

of new Intel chip factory in Licking County, Ohio

Marc Goldman Director - AEC Industry Solutions Esri

The convergence between BIM, GIS, laser scanning, photogrammetry and the metaverse continues. Now AI developments are coming to market to process captured ‘dumb data’ and intelligent GIS tools. Goldman will highlight this year’s converging technologies, offering benefits to all stakeholders in the built environment.

Geo BIM Modular

Construction

Dale Sinclair Head of innovation

WSP

While at AECOM, as director of innovation, Sinclair pioneered the move to architects using MCAD tools such as Autodesk Inventor, alongside traditional BIM with Revit, to better communicate with fabricators and to model at 1:1 levels of detail. Now at WSP, he has substantially matured that approach and developed and deployed applications within new workflows, to bring a manufacturing mindset into the early design phase of process, optimising the building design, management and computational delivery of varied, large-scale projects.

Sean Young Nvidia

It feels like the use of AI is about to explode across all areas of AEC. Young will explore Al solutions for conceptual design, design compliance, and construction, covering everything from Al training, fine tuning, RAG, inference, generative Al, data science, and NeRF into the use of a digital twin for aggregating Al data, training synthetic data, and simulating projects before deployment in the real world.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru CEO and co-founder // Numena

The AEC XR market has moved beyond the hype and there are now multiple professional grade applications and headsets which are being used by leading firms in all stages of the design process. Ion Cojocaru from award winning developer, Numena, returns to NXT BLD to display new creative design tools which enable architectural design in VR and on-site AR experiences.

Clifton Harness CEO // Testfit

Testfit is a very fast simultaneous solver for conceptual complex sites. The tool is for property developers but also has useful time saving features for architects. Harness was a practicing architect when he decided to automate his most boring tasks. He has sharp opinions on why architects need to adopt automation tools to be prepared for what’s coming next.

With such a dramatic shift across the AEC industry in the use of realtime visualisation, traditional 3D CAD, high-performance computing, and generative AI, there is no one cap fits all when it comes to workstations. Trying to balance IT power increases, tighter deadlines and overall budget cuts means investing in the right technology, for the right users, at the right time has never been more important. Learn how to best to equip your organisation for success, from getting started, to hybrid working, generative AI, and larger global deployments.

Workstations

Ingenious engineering by WSP has put the tallest City of London tower on the road to net zero

Mike Leach Lenovo

NXT BLD: the show floor

NXT BLD also plays host to a vibrant exhibition to allow delegates to gets hands-on with the latest technologies for AEC. Here’s a round up of what to expect

Lenovo

Lenovo has some of the most innovative workstations out there, from slimline laptops to multi GPU desktops, that can also be rack mounted for remote access.

Bentley Systems

Bentley Systems has a strong foundation in infrastructure software. The company is now looking to deploy AI, digital twins and more across the AEC sector.

Esri

Esri GIS technology is playing an increasingly important role in AEC, uncovering new possibilities when combined with IoT, AI, realitycapture, CAD, BIM and more.

SpaceForm

SpaceForm is a real-time platform built for design and architectural story-telling. It’s pitched as a multiuser 3D design collaboration hub and virtual marketing suite.

Graphisoft

Graphisoft develops Archicad, a leading BIM authoring tool for Mac and PC. The software now uses Gen AI for early stage design inspiration and is tightly integrated with MEP.

Kenesto

Kenesto’s platform allows engineers and designers to store, share, view, update versions, and collaborate with CAD and other documents on the cloud.

Nvidia

Nvidia built its business on GPUs, but the company is now an AI juggernaut with groundbreaking tech stacks driving innovation in many areas of AEC.

Oasys

Oasys (Ove Arup Systems) develops a suite of digital solutions covering geotechnical engineering, structural engineering, and pedestrian simulation.

Chaos

Chaos is one of the biggest forces in arch viz with tools including V-Ray and Enscape. New story-telling and building performance analysis tools are currently under development.

Atvero

Atvero is a document, drawing and email management system built on Microsoft 365 specifically for the AEC industry, with a foundation rooted in the principles of BIM.

Snaptrude

Snaptrude is a browser-based BIM tool with an optimised workflow with Revit and an emphasis on realtime collaboration among team members, consultants, and clients.

Xinaps

Xinaps develops Verifi3D, a modelchecking solution with a rule-based engine that automates clash, geometric and parametric checks, streamlining the validation process.

Intel

Intel’s powerful Core and Xeon processors at the heart of Lenovo ThinkStation and ThinkPad workstations accelerate the most demanding workflows in AEC.

IMSCAD

IMSCAD is a specialist in remote workstations for AEC — on-premise or in the cloud — harnessing Nvidia GPUs, Lenovo rackable workstations and other tech.

Nomitech

Nomitech is a specialist in cost estimating, cost modelling, and benchmarking solutions. Products include CostOS and BIMCT, a BIM toolkit for rendering.

mervisoft & CADSOMA

German firm mervisoft provides customised solutions for the AEC industry. CADSOMA.com is an App Store focused specifically on AEC, BIM and CAD tools.

Arkio

Arkio is a collaborative design tool that enables designers to work together on buildings, interiors and urban plans using VR, AR, PCs, tablets and phones.

www.nxtbld.com/sponsors-2024

NXT DEV 2024

NXT DEV is where designers, developers, financiers and design IT directors discuss the software needs of our industry, to better shape next gen tools. Your insights and expertise are invaluable. We can’t wait to hear your voice

NXT DEV is a unique experence. For one day we bring together the design IT managers and experts of leading practices with venture capitalists, enterprise investors and emerging and established software developers. The idea is to explore current tech stacks, pain points and industry needs and better understand where the development opportunities lie. Last year NXT DEV saw the launch of the Open Letter Group’s Future AEC specification, a guide for all developers (www.future-aec-software-specification.com), which has had significant impact across the BIM software world.

The design side of the AEC software industry has felt like a desert for the last ten years, with little new blood taking on the incumbent 800 pound gorillas, with scant focus from venture capitalists on the architecture side of the equation, opting instead to spend substantial sums on con -

struction software - and even then, mainly on construction management. This has all changed, as the BIM industry has matured and leading customers are looking for next generation tools to provide increases in productivity and more choice.

BIM 2.0 has produced a number of viable alternative modelling tools, including Snaptrude, Qonic and Arcol, with many still to come out of stealth. They will need a few years of ‘hard baking’ to catch up with today’s all-encompassing BIM tools, but we have seen some early signs of AI letting its presence be known.

This year, we’ve seen a trend in the development of automation tools, which are just as applicable to BIM 1.0, as they will be to BIM 2.0. Conceptual tools which enable easy massing, and site analysis, enabling detailed model creation at the touch of a button, saving huge amounts of time and minimising errors. Complex auto routing utilities and

auto-drawings offer the possibility of further productivity gains, crushing the current workflows from months to weeks or days. Even if the early versions of auto-drawings applications automate 50% of all drawings, this will be a significant boon to the industry.

Elsewhere, ‘Openness’, open file formats and Open Access are all important themes within the AEC industry today. There is undoubtedly a lot of lip service being paid to meet the needs and expectations of mature customers. Even firms like Autodesk are preaching from the same hymn book. There are industry initiatives to create new standards, augment existing standards like USD, and agreements between firms to share and open API access.

Please join us for a full day of presentations, debates, software demos and frank discussions on how the AEC industry digitises.

‘BIM

2.0’ - defining the future of AEC software

At NXT DEV last year, Aaron Perry of AHMM Architects, talking on behalf of a collective of medium-to-large AEC firms, gave a masterful presentation on the ‘Future Design Software Specification’.

The specification document lays out what the AEC industry wants from its future design tools, covering everything from data framework, context and scale, responsible design, and modular construction, to

user experience, modelling capabilities, automation, intelligence, deliverables and more. You can watch Perry’s presentation at www. nxtdev.build/nxt-dev-2023-videos.

At NXT DEV this year, Andy Watts, director of design technology at Grimshaw, will give an update on the specification and then hand over to Allister Lewis, ADDD, to talk about benchmarking software against the specification. We can’t wait.

Automation in AEC - from drawings to design

Startup demos

NXT DEV will showcase several new talented firms with innovative early-stage technologies. It’s a great opportunity to get feedback from experts at advanced firms and possibly get the attention of VCs or enterprise investors. There will be no shortage of advice, with plenty of hallway conversations.

Openness

Proprietary file formats have encumbered the AEC industry for too long. As we move from desktop to cloud, we don’t want a new generation of tools speaking a new generation of languages. There seems to be a general consensus that openness is beneficial to the whole AEC industry. We will discuss the routes available, their applicability and how they might change workflows in the coming years.

Traditional design BIM workflows start with conceptual massing and end with PDF drawings. With monolithic BIM tools this is a long, drawn out, manual process. Several software developers are now targeting specific pain points in the workflow, to offer one click results, possibly delivering huge productivity benefits - accelerating massing to detail model and detail model to drawings. In the next two years expect drawings to take-up less labour and time.

Pricing / licensing and business models

While many users have been unimpressed with the speed of historic software development, the rate at which software firms have evolved their licensing and business models has left customers breathless and exacerbated at the consequences. As each software developer learns off each other to increase revenue per user, business model metastasis has frustrated the industry. What licence strategies, pricing and business models do customers hate and what can be done about it?

VC panel

For software start-ups and industry experts with an entrepreneurial outlook, we will have a number of experienced venture capitalists and enterprise investors who can be quizzed on the details of today’s market. VCs can express their views on trends and give advice to better use any time in an engagement when seeking funding.

BIM workflow compression with Skema

Looking at the latest batch of design-oriented start-ups, it’s easy to think of these new BIM applications as shiny new replacements for their older, more monolithic predecessors –

but in fact, many of the newcomers are engineered to work with existing BIM tools to shrink project timescales, writes Martyn Day

We are living at a time in which the software gods have finally deemed it appropriate to rejuvenate the design tools available to the AEC industry. For many, it feels like it took eons to move from 2D drawings to 2D CAD and millennia to move from 2D CAD to BIM. But fundamentally, the end goal of the process is the same: a 2D drawing. If you are model-centric and a BIM techie, by now you will have come up with workarounds and tricks to deal with the limitations presented by the current generation of BIM tools. At the same time, it’s likely you’ll still be longing for productivity benefits and ways to speed up the process.

Startup companies such as Snaptrude (www.aecmag.com/tag/Snaptrude), Arcol (www.aecmag.com/tag/Arcol) and Qonic (www.aecmag.com/tag/Qonic) ultimately aim to compete head-on with the Revits of the world, but it will undoubtedly take time for them to achieve feature-by-feature equivalence. Snaptrude and Qonic are now commercially available; Arcol is still in beta.

However, other tools are emerging that aim to deliver time-compression benefits within traditional workflows and these may be easier to digest. The main goal is productivity in areas such as massing, detail modelling and drawings creation, using automation technologies to leapfrog phases of traditional BIM processes. If this is of interest to you, then we will be discussing this in-depth at our NXT

DEV conference in London on 26 June (www.nxtdev.build).

One such firm is Skema, headed up by Marty Rozmanith and Richard Harpham, who were both early Revit employees and subsequently Autodesk alumni.

Skema’s promise to users is to help them ‘get BIM in minutes’. In other words, it’s about moving rapidly from schematics to detailed BIM models that adhere to corporate design standards.

This is a big claim. If proven valid, it could deliver huge productivity benefits.

Skema starts off with a consultation phase, examining your workflows, your standards and your building styles. You then create smart detail assemblies, called ‘catalogues’, so that when you move from masses to detailed models, you are actually ‘modelling’, in the sense that you are replacing dumb masses with highly detailed auto-generating assemblies.

This removes a lot of detail design work. For standard buildings, this can drastically reduce the detail design phase. The way Skema is written, it can be used in Revit, Archicad or even SketchUp. AEC Magazine recently sat down with Marty Rozmanith to discuss the technology.

AEC Magazine: What can you tell us, Marty, about the thinking behind Skema?

Marty Rozmanith: The manufacturing industry has compressed times, lowered costs and also increased quality at the

same time. The fallacy in the construction world is that you can only achieve two out of three of those goals at any one time. Cars today are relatively cheaper, higher quality and produced faster than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. This was achieved through process optimisation of the system of production. However, in construction, we still have a craft-based business.

There are certain very time-driven buildings that are already doing this [process optimisation] before everyone else. Data centres are a great example. Everybody industrialises chunks of a data centre to be delivered in a much faster, much higher quality and much more predictable way. And they’re doing that at LoD 400. This is now happening in multifamily modular and residential in the US, and other building types like student housing.

The big problem with trying to make that transition, as [strategy firm] McKinsey has stated, is that everything about construction delivery gets faster, but design gets slower, because now designers have to think about the way the building is produced and design that in. What we’re trying to do at Skema is make something where design doesn’t get slower and designers don’t have to think about all that stuff, because we give them a bunch of puzzle pieces that can naturally be executed in a modular or panelised fashion. Architects just think about it the way that we would have once done this on tracing paper - but now they do it on a web browser.

‘‘

It’s not like we’re trying to compete against Autodesk Forma or SketchUp, or any of those things. We’re trying to compete against tracing paper

Marty Rozmanith, Skema ’’

AEC Magazine: You are focussed on accelerating early-stage design to detail modelling. Why start with massing?

Marty Rozmanith: The reason that we’re doing it at early stage design is that this is where people who are the partners in the firm make those decisions. It’s not like we’re trying to compete against Autodesk Forma or SketchUp, or any of those things. We’re trying to compete against tracing paper. We have gotten into projects where people may have used SketchUp once or twice, but mostly, they do things on tracing paper. After a couple of hours of work, they can generate a Revit model at the press of a button, two minutes later. As I said, they have zero idea how to use Revit. They just get a well-structured Revit model from Skema.

We hold workshops before the customer has even bought. It’s not a big lift for us to give them their assembly pieces. We take their ingredients, so that when we produce the Revit model, they see their typical wall assembly and floor assemblies, their furniture, fixtures, equipment, casework, all that stuff. They want to see the ingredients their firm uses and their standards in the Revit data that we produce. That’s what the system pushes out. We just sort of rationalise the parts in between

Skema is a fast-forward button for architects, using a BIM system. We have one customer who told us that their design development phase is usually 24 to 28 weeks. Now, with Skema, it’s never going

to be that long anymore. It’s going to be significantly shorter, because we can solve it much faster using our workflow.

AEC Magazine: These are big promises. In an industry based on billable hours, how do you see this playing out?

Marty Rozmanith: Our argument is that your model is based on charging for delivery to a certain scope. Your goal is to deliver that scope, so that the owner can get their permit and get the thing built. You should charge that fee, for that value. And if you can do it in half the time, then you can figure out how to spend the extra time or pocket the fee, because the owner is happier to get it faster and at higher quality.

AEC Magazine: It’s a different way of thinking – almost systems-based, where a room is a system – as opposed to manually modelling and editing walls, windows and doors. Does that sound right?

Marty Rozmanith: Our whole ethos is trying to do it so the designers don’t notice that they’re dealing with larger chunks of ‘stuff’. When designing a healthcare facility, performance is usually driven by patient rooms or surgery suites. In early design, designers think about things as, ‘Here’s a surgery suite’’, or, ‘Here’s a nursing station’. That way, they have to take whatever they laid out on tracing paper and manually draw all those things, one by one, in Revit.

The AEC industry has been behind in 3D modelling compared to the manufacturing industries. Because that whole Catia 747 digital virtual prototype, I saw that at Stanford in 1994, well before Revit was ever even an idea. That was being modelled in chunks and assemblies at that time, because in those industries, you have a parts bin to work out of. In many of those assemblies, you’re only going to do 10% custom edits to fit it in your product.

Prefabricating Architecture, which came out around the time as Revit in the late nineties. You can almost think of Skema as a direct implementation of the ideas in Prefabricating Architecture, which is basically designing things in chunks and having those chunks already pre-engineered, so that when you actually make the building, you just ‘interface’ it together.

When we were designing Revit, my firm belief was that whatever’s easiest in the software is what people are going to use. So if we want them to do a certain thing, that’d better be the easiest thing. This is why I’m saying we’re trying to compete with tracing paper, we have to be easier than tracing paper. This is actually hard!

AEC Magazine: There is always the issue that modelling skills are poor and nobody trusts each other’s models, so will redo the work. We guess automated modelling offers a higher degree of certainty?

Marty Rozmanith: People don’t realise this point about the variance introduced by a parametric system like Revit. If you are working on a hospital, and in one of the surgery rooms, you move a wall, now the dimensions of that surgery suite are different from all the other ones. So now you have a problem, because you wouldn’t be able to prefab that surgery suite, because it is now an exception.

‘‘ You can almost think of Skema as a direct implementation of the ideas in [the book] Prefabricating Architecture, which is basically designing things in chunks and having those chunks already pre-engineered, so that when you actually make the building, you just ‘interface’ it together ’’

When you use a parametric system, and you’ve got dimensions that drive object layout, Revit tries to keep things coordinated, so it will shift things based on user interaction. This is great at the beginning, when you’re trying to coordinate things and rapidly evolve the design, but as you try and lock things down, you can get that behaviour working against you, in that things might move. The net result is that the people building don’t trust the model, because they realise variants have been introduced that are hard to find.

have to explicitly decide to do that. In that situation, we actually generate the different puzzle piece, so that you can easily see when the data goes into Revit. There’s a lot of confidence that whatever I do in the conceptual environment will work when I generate the Revit model, because the two are identical. When we have partners that have a design firm in front of an owner, their confidence increases, knowing these numbers are right. It’s a material change, being able to project confidence to the owner, knowing that they don’t have to have a whole BIM team look at the model for two or three months.

AEC Magazine: Not only do you handle substitution massing to detail modelling, but also you have a solver. What can you tell us about that?

Marty Rozmanith: Usually, the solve is based on the brief for the building. We have solvers for multi-family, which is popular in America, and we can solve based on percentage unit mix — how many single or double bedroom apartments in a given design. We will move on to solving for multiple conditions, automated solves and dealing with graphs of graphs.

AEC Magazine: How do you deal with design variance in predefined rooms?

Marty Rozmanith: We take a chunk of building and we understand the edge conditions and the graph inside of it, which is not dissimilar to how Testfit (www.aecmag. com/tag/testfit) or Finch3D (www.tinyurl.com/ AEC-finch) handle this. But what we do is pull the data out of Revit and we inherit some of the constraints and analyse the layout logic. These become catalogue assemblies for use in design. You can stretch the design and Skema morphs the entire graph of the space and tries to preserve the layout logic.

Conclusion

For now, Skema is not applicable to all building types. But the more repeatable and prescriptive a brief, the more likely it is that Skema can be usefully applied to accelerating massing to detail.

That whole idea of having a parts bin and working with chunks of buildings was actually described in a book by Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake,

One of the things about Skema’s way of doing it is that all the puzzle pieces are the same. And when you want to force something into a different layout, you

We know Skema has lots of additional technologies in the pipeline and also aims to assist in taking designs to digital fabrication. Come to NXT BLD (www.nxtbld.com) and NXT DEV (www.nxtdev.build) in London 25/26 June to meet Marty Rozmanith and Richard Harpham to find out more.

■ www.skema.ai

Enscape 4.0 for Everyone

Enscape 4.0 transcends platform boundaries and offers one Enscape for everyone. The latest version lets macOS users work with the ease and speed of a complete design and visualization workflow, just like their Windows counterparts. In addition to a unified experience across platforms, Enscape 4.0 includes:

Mac

New people & animated vegetation assets

New

Enscape for Windows is available for: Revit, SketchUp, Rhinoceros, Archicad, and Vectorworks

Enscape for

is available for: SketchUp, Rhinoceros, Archicad, and Vectorworks

Dassault Systèmes in AEC

A market leader in the manufacturing space, with brands including Solidworks and Catia, Dassault Systèmes is developing a new generation of AEC tools, which aim to cross the chasm between digital design and digital manufacture. We talked to Jonathan Asher, the DS executive in charge of the company’s AEC business development

Dassault Systèmes’ flagship brand Catia was originally released in 1977, back when the company was a manufacturer of aircraft called Avions Marcel Dassault. Its name derives from the French abbreviation ‘CATI’, which stands for ‘conception assistée tridimensionnelle interactive’ (or in English, interactive three-dimensional aided design).

The software was spun off into its own division in 1981, where it became Catia and went on to provide multi-platform software for MCAD, CAE and PLM (product lifecycle management), initially targeting the aerospace and automotive industries.

While Dassault Systèmes (DS) focused on its work as a software development house, sales and service was supported by IBM via a long-standing partnership, which turbocharged the company’s global reach. From 2014 onwards, the company added 3DExperience to its brand as the integrated platform that brings together all of the company’s software solutions.

Historically in AEC, DS has had a casual relationship with AEC, with some leading architects using Catia on large engineering projects. For example, ZHA, SHoP and Frank Gehry are all well known users of the software.

In this way, a tool that enables aerospace and automotive firms to design and fabricate complex surfaced products has also proved exceptionally useful on complex buildings. Recently, during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, DS and Bouygues Construction collaborated on designing a Catia-based system to automate and optimise construction bidding and fabrication from 3D design inputs, generating fabrication drawings and estimating costs. At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD conference in London on 25 June, Antoine Morizot of Bouygues will speak specifically about this development (www.nxtbld.com)

DS has been interested in exploring the mainstream AEC market since 2012, but

has yet to pull all of its software together to directly take on the traditional BIM players. As AEC and manufacturing converge around digital fabrication, the benefits of a Catia-based platform start to make more sense in the industry. We spoke with Jonathan Asher, architect, software developer and now head of the business development of DS’s AEC business.

AEC Magazine: How did you get into Dassault Systémes and Catia?

Jonathan Asher: I’m an architect by training and spent many years in the industry as an architect. I started using Catia V5 when I was at Coop Himmelb(l)au (Austria) in 2009 as a part of its first real BIM team. There I used Catia as an archi-

Jonathan Asher: I joined Dassault Systèmes to lead our Catia software development efforts for AEC. After more than seven years in R&D, I switched roles last year, moving into a sales position. I’m not a ‘salesman’, but I oversee our global sales strategy for Catia in the AEC industries, as well as go-to-market strategy, market awareness and user adoption worldwide.

I’m happy to do this, because I’m convinced that we have the best software for these industries. I’ve been around long enough to have seen the competition, to have used the competition, and there really is no competition. When you look at it, Catia is like a Ferrari and our competitors are offering Toyotas. No disrespect to a flagship Catia customer, but

engineering software, but I use it for design, and at this point, I couldn’t imagine using any other software for design. What is more, the applications in the software now compared to what we were using in V5 are pretty incredible.

AEC Magazine: You were in AEC software development but then you changed your role?

and model assemblies. Picking midrange tools from their product bundles seems logical, but aren’t there limitations to mid-range tools?

Jonathan Asher: Absolutely. There’s a scalability wall or ceiling that you hit in mid-range desktop modellers, where you simply can’t go any further. Moreover, with file-based modelling applications,

file size is a major issue that impacts collaboration and performance. On the other hand, Catia scales with the size and detail of the project; even in huge complex assemblies, you can visualise the nuts and bolts. In addition, the Catia V6 architecture is no longer file-based; we are integrated into the 3DExperience platform, which hosts a database on the cloud, making collaboration and performance much better.

AEC Magazine: Dassault Systemès has not only been developing for architects but also for construction. What can you tell us about that?

Jonathan Asher: Four years ago, we signed a partnership with Bouygues Construction and, since then, we have dedicated a number of resources specifically to construction. With Bouygues, we are focused heavily on integrating construction processes into our tools, to streamline the creation of generative 3D construction models (that we call Brycks), link these to design models coming from their architects/engineers, and drive their site and logistics systems. We call this approach ‘productisation’ and it’s gone very well. The team at Bouygues Construction has been super involved and we continue to ramp up our engagement every year.

AEC Magazine: There are many workflow enhancements in development in the industry. Automated drawings will make a big impact on AEC, removing a lot of manual work. We know Catia for modelling – but what about drawings?

Jonathan Asher: Every conversation with every architecture office inevitably gets to the topic of drawings. They recognise Catia’s modelling capabilities, but in the end, they all need to produce drawings, drawings, and more drawings! Most architects spend too much time in

2D working on individual views, jumping from view to view, trying to coordinate geometry in their head and representing that in their drawings. This process is obviously time-consuming and errorprone. For automotive, aerospace and other traditional Catia customers, they use the 3D master approach to document the model; in this way, the drawings are extracted from annotated and dimensioned sliced views of the 3D model. If there is ever a doubt about what you see in the drawing, you open the 3D Catia model, navigate to the annotated view and check the 3D. Of course, the drawings are only as good as the 3D model, but the geometry is always coordinated between views.

At this point, drafting is a short-term problem. It won’t be automated tomorrow, but we’re looking at somewhere in the one to three year timeframe, certainly by the end of this decade.

[Editor’s note: Graebert’s autodrawings will find its way first into DraftSight, DS’s DWG drafting tool (www.draftsight.com)]

AEC Magazine: AI and automation seem to be hot topics in the software we are seeing developed. How do you believe they will impact the industry?

Jonathan Asher: In the next five to ten years, AI will first impact engineering, where things are more rule-based and data-driven. Eventually, most building design will be automated, as will the manufacturing. However, design is subjective. Yes, computers will design – but in the end, will people ever let go completely?

Right now, the design-to-manufacturing component can already be automated to a large extent, and this is what our customers in the AEC space are doing. They take a design model as an input and automate everything downstream through to manufacturing. This is already happening. The promise of AI is that it will get even easier, faster and more performative,

with less user input and decision-making. Today, it’s limited by dataset training models and hardware constraints, but in the future, AI will be better, faster and more experienced than any human.

A clue as to what the future might look like is already available in Catia – not yet for AEC, but it will come. We call this our ModSim approach, where we model and simulate at the same time. The simulation informs the design in an iterative loop to find the optimal design solution.

AEC Magazine: There have not as yet been any big announcements of applications from DS for architects, but are these coming?

Jonathan Asher: Dassault Systemès’ strategic path for AEC has been years in the making. We have so many things going on, so many incredible applications that already exist, we haven’t made any big announcements – but that’s not to say we don’t already have an incredible solution. That said, we have some really exciting things in the works. Automated drawing generation is one example, but there’s a lot more to come. Because we are on the 3DExperience platform, and our data model supports granularity, we can deliver solutions that offer scalability, control of complexity and ease of collaboration. There just aren’t any other technologies like ours, many of these competitive tools are still monolithic point solutions.

■ www.3ds.com

London Catia buildings user day With NXT BLD and NXT DEV running consecutively on 25 and 26 June, Dassault Systèmes is taking our lead and carrying on the innovation theme by putting together a Catia Buildings User Day on 27 June at its Hammersmith offices in London. If you would like to attend to learn more about Catia for AEC and meet Jonathan Asher and his team, you can sign up here:

■ https://events.3ds.com/catia-buildings-user-day

Twinview (digital twins) Software

Space Group is not only an architecture firm, but also a hotbed of AEC-related software development. The company’s technology portfolio includes Twinview, one of the most advanced BIM digital twin offerings available, as Martyn Day reports

It’s been a few years since we last looked at Twinview, the digital twin software from Space Group, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Over the intervening period, the term ‘digital twin’ has become increasingly prevalent in the industry, with big software firms like Autodesk dedicating considerable resources to creating new applications for what is expected to be a big market.

Space Group, headed by Rob Charlton and group CTO Adam Ward, is actually a collection of companies. Its activities include a functioning architectural practice, but it is also a hotbed of software development. The technology developed at Space Group was initially created to service the firm’s own needs, but it has since expanded its activities to provide bespoke BIM solutions for key industry players, as well as commercial software for the general market.

Space Group caught the BIM bug early on in Revit’s development. The company then ran with the idea, creating along the way the Bimstore for software components, BIM.Technologies for consultancy services, and an annual conference (BIM

Show Live). Thanks to its efforts, the UK’s North East has become a centre for advanced BIM skills.

The twin conundrum

Before launching into the subject of Space Group’s Twinview software, I must first address the elephant in the room. That elephant, of course, is the term ‘digital twin’, which has become somewhat divisive.

The whole concept of digital twins has been overhyped, leading to the emergence of two distinct camps. The first camp is populated by those who live, sleep, eat and breathe digital twins, seeing the technology as a natural expansion of BIM. For that reason, they are convinced it will be huge.

The second camp is populated by those who roll their eyes at the term, seeing it as yet another case of ‘the Emperor’s New Clothes’, in an industry particularly prone to that affliction.

In my view, the digital twin is a great concept in theory — but there are commercial practicalities to consider. In short, the utopians have to come to terms

with the reality of its niche appeal, which means limited market demand.

All that said, Twinview is one of the digital twin products that has been in the market the longest. That’s given Charlton the experience to admit that the concept has not necessarily found a home in the plethora of use cases predicted.

For instance, digital twins are not an easy replacement for, or update to, traditional computer aided facilities management (CAFM) software and associated workflows. Instead, the concept has seen more traction in London, where firms with extensive buildings portfolios need to ensure efficient running of these properties, in order for them to qualify as green investments when used as assets in investment property funds.

So while there are certainly digital twin customers out there, they have to be hunted down. In most cases, there is a very specific problem that needs solving. Securing sales is not, as many in the industry would like to believe, like shooting fish in a barrel.

As Charlton puts it, “People don’t buy things because they are clever bits of technology. You’ve got to have a value proposition.” A lot of BIM people may suddenly be styling themselves as digital twin experts, he continues, but the truth is that there are not many real digital twins in the world.

That said, Twinview has customers located in many different nations, he continues. “We’ve got live projects all over the world: South Africa, Abu Dhabi. And basically, they’re using Twinview for lots of things. It’s a place to bring everything together. It could be your single digital model. It could be to improve your tenant experience. And it’s fantastic for golden thread. It does all of that. One of the big things is understanding the building — IoT sensors telling you how much energy you are using, where it is being used, how it is being used. Clients are using it that way to optimise their buildings.”

It’s a five-year project, he says, and Space Group is still very much an early

adopter. “We’re still testing the use cases. We’re still trying to find examples. We’ve got over 300 buildings, over 2.5 million tracked assets, from a school in the UK, to an 85-floor tower in the Middle East, to the National Archive in New Zealand.”

The company is also doing some work with the NHS around compliance, as well as other firms concerned about asset management. Other customers need metrics for their annual environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports. The best adopters, he says, own their own estates and operate their own buildings.

Spotlight on Twinview

Through the various phases of design, build and operate, Twinview is an application that aims to create a ‘digital thread’ to manage data throughout the lifecycle of a building. It collates data from multiple inputs, supports content collaboration and assists in creating documentation during construction for operations. It also connects to IoT sensors, runs predictive maintenance analysis, replaces CAFM and delivers personal tenant experiences via custom mobile apps.

With four years experience and feedback from users giving Space Group a better understanding of the multiple value cases that firms use to cost-justify ‘twin’ technology, Twinview has expanded, become more flexible and now has a highly modular approach.

This enables Twinview to integrate with BACnet and Modbus building management communications protocols, as well as other third-party systems. Using this highly configurable plug-and-play interface, users can set up all manner of realtime data streaming connections and rules.

One of the known limitations of many web-based twin applications is that linking groups of IoT sensors through webbased protocols can generate so much web traffic that legitimate traffic flows may be misdiagnosed by service providers as denial of service attacks. To get round this problem, some commercial digital twin applications limit the frequency with which sensor data can be reported, resulting in measurements taken at intervals of minutes, rather than seconds. Twinview, by contrast, can pull data at very high frequency rates and run real-time monitoring. Using the Node Assistant, data can be transformed, viewed and used to set off other actions via logic, generating notifications or automated building functions, based on real data.

‘‘ With four years experience and feedback from users giving Space Group a better understanding of the multiple value cases that firms use to cost-justify ‘twin’ technology, Twinview has expanded, become more flexible and now has a highly modular approach ’’

It’s no longer an all-or-nothing solution, nor solely reliant on a BIM model as its starting point. It’s just as happy providing a 2D experience, or operating without any graphical elements and acting as a conduit to IoT sensor data. This enables the product to better align with customer needs and budgets and to also address buildings that do not have a BIM twin and may only ‘exist’ in design terms as scanned documents.

The IoT connection in Twinview has had a refresh. As Ward explains, a more interchangeable way to integrate real-time data into Twinview was needed. In response, the company has introduced Node Assistant, which is based on the IBM Node-RED flow-based, low-code development tool for visual programming. In this way, says Ward, “we decouple the data ingestion layer from the application.”

Twinview now has a bunch of tools intended for use in the construction phase. Ward highlights that traditional digital twin workflows have been viewed as something to put in place at the end of construction, prior to hand off.

Twinview’s O&M (Operation and Maintenance) Builder enables the user to define the O&M template to create manuals. They define their requirements in Twinview and then basically allow the design team to upload during construction.

In this module, ‘funnels’ can be set up for project participants to populate relevant folders with files for assets found in the building. This is a smart way to collate all the relevant documents required for record-keeping and downstream use. By assigning the upload of documents to individuals, the system automatically sends out alerts and monitors progress on the number of documents expected to be handed over at delivery.

There are whole document submittal workflows built into the system and everything is centrally and securely stored. O&M Builder can auto-generate O&M manuals from these files. If files change,

O&M Builder saves copies with each amendment, keeping a history of revision. This process can be carried out in parallel with construction and saves the ingestion of huge amounts of documents all in one go at the end of a project.

Working in 2D mode

One of the more surprising additions to Twinview is support for 2D, which uses CAD drawings and even supports scans. All asset information can be associated with 2D elements, with associated dashboard reports, and all the 3D features are available in 2D use.

This aligns Twinview with more traditional CAFM workflows, where assets can be searched for and automatically displayed. Ward suggests that, in onboarding with a 2D approach, building a digital twin is harder, because CAD data is “more dumb” when compared to BIM data with all its rich metadata. However, many buildings simply don’t have a BIM model.

“In Twinview, we can bulk upload 2D,” Ward explains. “Every project has an asset register, dictating which assets belong in which rooms. Data inherently has a hierarchy and structure. Assets are usually blocks, which we can identify. Every room typically has a polyline around, which defines the extents of the room and the architect would use this to work out the floor area. We just hook into what already exists.”

“The beauty of Twinview,” Charlton adds, “is that, if you mature down the line, you can still use Twinview and add BIM, IoT, create dashboards and build O&M manuals.”

Value points

The journey of Twinview, and the capabilities that have been developed, tell the story of what happens to digital twin technology when it meets reality.

Customers have many value points which start them on a twinning journey. There is no one holistic ‘digital twin’ religion driving customers. It’s all about need.

The 3D nature of BIM-driven CAFM does not really add that much value. It’s still all about assets, data, spaces and performance.

The idea that a digital twin can start with a scanned drawing, a DWG or a DGN is just as relevant — and probably more common — than the software industry would like to admit. This experience, along with customer feedback, has shaped the Twinview experience as it stands today. And that’s why this product is so incredibly adaptable.

■ www.twinview.com

Cyberattacks: safeguarding contractors

It’s every construction firm’s biggest nightmare: criminals taking control of their data and holding them to ransom. Ben Wallbank, Trimble, shares some best practices to mitigate cyberattacks

Cybersecurity and cybercrime often conjure up images of hackers in dark hoodies, sneaking in the digital back door. In reality, nearly 90% of corporate cybercrime, such as phishing or ransomware attacks, is a result of employee error.

The UK construction industry is no exception and could be an even greater target than other industries. Protecting massive amounts of data, including warranty and latent defect remediation periods, makes contractors attractive to cyber criminals. Cybersecurity is so crucial to construction that the National Cyber Security Centre produced a construction industry-specific guide, along with the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) (www.tinyurl.com/cyber-construct)

Cybercriminals who target the construction industry usually do so by accessing, copying and sharing data illegally or by installing malware on a company’s computers and network, taking control of files and holding them for ransom. It’s called ransomware, and it’s probably the most common and one of the most debilitating types of cybersecurity breaches in the construction world.

Each year, we hear of new cyberattacks, taking critical infrastructure offline and crippling construction businesses worldwide, including many here in Europe. These attacks cost billions of pounds a year and can cause whole cities, businesses and services to grind to a halt.

UK contractors should follow these best practices to safeguard against cyberattacks and improve outcomes in case of an attack.

Create a business continuity plan

Preparing for the worst puts your business in the best position moving forward because you can act quickly and have more control of the outcome. A solid cyber security disaster plan can get quite detailed. It should be consistently reviewed, practised and updated to net the best results in case of an incident. At a minimum, a business continuity plan should include the following:

• Name of a leader to act as a central resource to manage disaster recovery across multiple departments.

• A communication plan for sharing key messages and managing crises with employees, clients and additional project stakeholders.

• A maintenance plan for a continually updated (and backed up) list of employee contact information and asset inventory.

Backup all data

A crucial aspect of any good cyber security plan is to make sure that everything is backed up, preferably on the cloud or physically on an offsite server that’s not on your network. Backups should be frequent and automated, so ask your IT provider to set them up so that they either happen in real time (if you’re backing up to the cloud) or that they run daily after everyone has left the office.

Secure mobile devices

Mobile devices are more challenging to secure than other data systems, but just as critical. Utilising an enterprise management platform, such as Cisco Meraki, allows you to maintain enterprise-level control over all of your devices. These kinds of platforms ensure that individual devices are still managed centrally, and contractors can limit software installation, track devices using GPS, disable devices and more.

Protect software and servers

When it comes to software and security risks in construction, contractors should choose platforms and software providers that take security seriously. Granular permissions, user-friendly management systems and multi-factor authentication, for instance, are all must-haves in any construction software.

By using cloud-based, connected construction software, contractors shift the responsibility of maintaining servers, ensuring SOC 2 Type II compliance, and

data backup and storage. Project and business data backups happen automatically, providing daily protection, with costs often included or rolled into users’ subscription costs. New software features and security functionality are also rolled out automatically.

By coupling the backups with cybersecurity protections, cloud vendors use the latest technologies to thwart cybercriminals and provide an extra level of protection not otherwise achieved through inhouse backups. When shopping for business software, make security one of your first discussion points.

Additionally, your web and email servers need to be properly protected to avoid online attacks. Physical network servers need to be secured, and you need to ensure that any cloud-based solutions you’re using also implement rigorous security protocols.

Assure employee buy-in

Cybersecurity protection in construction requires every employee at every level to be fully engaged and actively vigilant. There are several steps to take to make that happen:

• Ensure all employees receive regular cybersecurity training, especially if online workflows or procedures change.

• Welcome feedback from team members and update cybersecurity policies and processes as needed.

• Counsel employees on everyday things to look for before opening email, like spelling and grammar errors, verifying sender’s email address, and never opening unexpected attachments.

Take the first step: get started

The most important step is the first one. The UK government offers two certifications – Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus – that are crash courses in the basics to keep businesses safer from cybercrime. While they don’t replace a cybersecurity risk assessment, they will show you how to do one and how to select the security measures your business needs.

Anywhere your data is stored or used is a potential entry point into your company’s digital existence. It only takes one slip to allow malicious code or ransomware in, and once it’s there, it can cause millions of pounds worth of damage.

About the author

Ben Wallbank is a BIM strategy and partnerships manager for Trimble

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Nvidia Omniverse spreads its wings

When Nvidia first launched Omniverse, it was presented as a collaborative hub for users of CAD, BIM and viz software. With new Cloud APIs, the company is now extending the reach of Omniverse beyond the core demographic of designers and artists, writes Greg Corke

In AEC, an industry that continues to face significant challenges when it comes to data interoperability, some firms are using the Nvidia Omniverse platform as a key enabler for collaboration.

In Omniverse, everything centres on OpenUSD, an open-source 3D scene description that was originally developed by Pixar for 3D content creation and interoperability between tools.

Global architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) uses Omniverse USD Composer to seamlessly share data in real time between its key authoring tools — Rhino, Revit, Grasshoppper, and Unreal Engine. In short, it breaks down silos.

Omniverse is not just for collaboration, however. It provides a powerful environment for visualisation. Powered by Nvidia RTX GPUs on desktop or in the cloud, AEC firms have ready access to technologies including real time ray tracing for photorealistic rendering, and one click VR/AR for presenting projects to clients.

In a recent presentation at Nvidia’s GTC conference, KPF’s Andy Christoforou, applied research: project innovation man-

ager, and Joe Brennan, senior computational designer, explained how Omniverse has made it much easier for KPF to evaluate massing options for its architectural projects. Rather than producing separate visualisations, the team brings together data from multiple sources inside the visually rich Omniverse environment. 3D concept models are combined with wind simulation data from Simscale, and contextual 3D city data from geospatial data platform Cesium, all in real time.

The cloud attraction

In AEC, most of the major software developers have a long-term strategy to move their customers to their respective cloud platforms. Autodesk has Forma, Bentley Systems has iTwin, Hexagon has Reality Cloud Studio. There are several others.

Each platform is not just about centralising data; it’s about building optimised collaborative workflows around that data and, in the future, using AI to obtain valuable

insights from that data.

Of course, software developers ideally want customers to remain in their platform as long as possible. Furthermore, AEC firms don’t necessarily want to build workflows around multiple platforms.

To some extent, Omniverse pushes against this. It also has a key focus on users of CAD, BIM and viz software; less so on the many other people involved within a typical AEC project.

In order for Nvidia to play a bigger role as these AEC cloud platforms grow in stature, the company recently released a series of Omniverse Cloud APIs, coming first to Microsoft Azure.

Rather than making Omniverse the centre of everything, Nvidia is enabling software developers to integrate key Omniverse technologies into their respective platforms. It means their users can continue to work in a familiar environment, workflows remain the same, and data is stored in one central repository.

Omniverse has made it much easier for KPF to evaluate massing options, combining 3D concept models with wind simulation and contextual 3D data

In its simplest form, software developers can embed Omniverse-powered viewports into their platforms, delivering ‘instant’ real-time physically based rendering –processed on GPUs in the cloud with pixels streamed to a client device. Software developers can also use the APIs to connect Generative AI tools into their existing apps, as well as a range of workflow tools for OpenUSD data.

Several software developers have alrready come on board with Omniverse Cloud APIs, including Ansys, Cadence, Dassault Systèmes, Hexagon, Microsoft, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and Trimble. Some Omniverse API developments are at a more advanced stage than others, and details are still thin on the ground. AEC Magazine caught up with Hexagon and Siemens to find out more.

The new reality

Hexagon is in a relatively unique position in the world of design and engineering software in that it serves both AEC and manufacturing sectors.

In AEC, the focus for Omniverse is on Reality Cloud Studio, based on Hexagon’s HxDR platform. Reality Cloud Studio brings together reality capture data from multiple sources — point clouds, photogrammetry and reality meshes — for visualisation and collaboration.

Reality Cloud Studio already places a big emphasis on visualisation, but Hexagon is using Omniverse to take this to new levels. As Frank Suykens, senior VP visual computing at Hexagon told AEC Magazine, Hexagon will use Omniverse to bring ‘emotion’ into projects, adding digital humans to presentations to help convince stakeholders.

BIM models from tools like Autodesk Revit can also be brought in and placed in the context of a city model. Omniverse can then do the photorealistic rendering.

Work that would typically take days in a product like blender or Maya will now be ‘automated’ with Omniverse, he said.

For standard visualisation built into the core of Reality Cloud Studio, processing is done on the client device — desktop, laptop or tablet — but there is a limit to how realistic you can make things if you don’t have a powerful workstation.

With Omniverse Cloud APIs, all the rendering is done in the cloud, using Nvidia GPUs, with pixels streamed to the client device. HxDR currently runs in AWS but

for Omniverse Cloud services, Hexagon will either use Nvidia’s hosted version in Azure or it will be deployed in AWS.

Of course, this means that every time someone wants to do an Omniverse visualisation, they have to pay for GPU cloud hours. According to Suykens, this would be bundled into a subscription with usagebased pricing.

Scan-to-BIM

Hexagon’s collaboration with Nvidia goes beyond visualisation. Suykens told AEC Magazine that the plan is to bring AI and semantics into Reality Cloud Studio to transform scans into BIM models, using Nvidia GPUs for the AI computation.

Reality Cloud Studio can already do automatic classification, recognising patterns in a point cloud or mesh and classifying the data to say ‘this is a table, this is a window, these are the walls.’

The next step is true scan-to-BIM, turning reality models into BIM objects, delivered in IFC format or possibly OpenUSD.

“We’re first looking at walls, but then, in time, we want to create a semantic model from the scan, fully automated,” said Suykens.

For AI training, Hexagon is using a combination of real-world data from the HxDR platform and synthetic datasets generated using Omniverse.

Suykens explains that synthetic datasets can be extremely powerful because

the classification for the point cloud or image data that is generated is already known. With real world data the classification needs to be done manually, which can be very labour intensive.

Making visualisation pervasive

Siemens, a major player in the manufacturing software industry, is starting to dip its toes in AEC (www.aecmag.com/bim/ siemens-nx-aec) . However, it’s the way in which the company is adopting Omniverse Cloud APIs that’s most interesting, potentially offering a glimpse into what could be coming from AEC software developers.

Siemens is starting with Teamcenter X, its cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, offering Omniverse RTX rendering directly inside the software, so users can visualise massive engineering datasets, interactively and photorealistically with real time ray tracing.

At Nvidia GTC, the company gave a demonstration of a colossal 7-million-part ship model from HD Hyundai, visualised in real time, powered by GPUs in the cloud. The demo also showed the use of Generative AI, using text prompts, such as ‘atlantic ocean waves, remote photography, ocean, sea, morning sky’ to generate 3D objects or HDRi backgrounds to visualise the model in context.

The interesting takeaway here is that PLM software, just like AEC data man -

Omniverse RTX rendering is available directly inside Siemens Teamcenter X, the cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, so massive engineering datasets can be visualised interactively and photorealistically with real time ray tracing

agement / collaboration software, needs to be used by all different types of users. Providing a beautifully rendered viewport with buckets of GPU acceleration from the cloud, on-demand, instantly makes 3D model data accessible to everyone and not just those with powerful local workstations.

With Omniverse RTX rendering, you also get the ability to create beautiful visualisations relatively easily. In theory, this could mean marketing departments can create their own visuals, rather than having to rely on a designer or engineer powering up Siemens NX, the 3D CAD software, and NX Ray Traced Studio, the visualisation tool.

Siemens has plans to extend Omniverse APIs into other tools, including Siemens NX which was recently made available as a cloud service (Siemens NX X). Siemens NX X can be deployed in two ways: on the desktop, where it uses local CPU and GPU processing, and in the cloud where it runs on cloud workstations and pixels are streamed to the local device.

re-architect the software using modern graphics APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, which is a huge undertaking.

We wonder if AEC software developers could be doing something similar, although it’s unlikely to be Autodesk as the company is currently developing a new viewport system based on Hydra and USD.

Getting connected?

Trimble was among the names of AEC software firms adopting Omniverse Cloud APIs, but is currently holding its cards close to its chest. The company has simply stated that it is enabling interac-

enhance interoperability between its popular push / pull modelling tool and Nvidia Omniverse, as well as other tools such as Epic Games Twinmotion.

The cloud future

With Omniverse Cloud APIs, Nvidia is extending the reach of its Omniverse platform, putting RTX visualisation into the hands of many more users, especially those that previously would have been excluded because of underpowered local hardware. The emphasis is on photorealism, but with powerful GPUs in the cloud, far outpacing those in your average desktop, laptop or tablet, Omniverse Cloud APIs could also help all different types of users view larger, more complex 3D models in general.

‘‘ Hexagon’s collaboration with Nvidia goes beyond visualisation. [Hexagon VP] Suykens told AEC Magazine that the plan is to bring AI and semantics into Reality Cloud Studio to transform scans into BIM models, using Nvidia GPUs for the AI computation

Siemens is currently working with Omniverse Cloud APIs to put an Nvidia RTX-powered viewport directly into Siemens NX X, delivering real time ray tracing on-demand, powered by cloud GPUs. The RTX viewport will co-exist alongside the current OpenGL viewport, so Siemens will not have to completely

tive Nvidia Omniverse RTX viewers with Trimble model data. Reading between the lines, this sounds like Trimble could have plans for Trimble Connect, its AECfocused collaboration tool, which is available for Windows desktop, browser, and mobile (iOS and Android).

Trimble is certainly buying into USD for AEC collaboration. It recently joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) and improved import and export for USDZ files in Trimble SketchUp 2024 to

Of course, cloud processing doesn’t come cheap and AEC software firms will need to pass on costs to customers. If demand is there, however, paying for GPUs on demand could be a more cost-effective way of extending the reach of valuable 3D assets, the alternative being providing everyone with powerful workstations, which may be underutilised a lot of the time.

For Nvidia it looks like a win, win. More use of Omniverse, a gateway into the broader Omniverse platform, and more use of GPUs, wherever they might be.

■ www.nvidia.com/omniverse

Reality Cloud Studio already places a big emphasis on visualisation (pictured), but Hexagon is using Omniverse to take this to new levels

Enterprise XR streaming to a headset near you soon

All-in-one XR headsets have proved very popular for AEC design review. But to add realism and complexity, 3D models must be processed externally, and pixels streamed in. Greg Corke reports on a growing number of XR technologies that do just that, from cloud services to local appliances

The first wave of VR headsets - the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive - were tethered, so all the graphics processing was done on a workstation with a powerful GPU. But cables can be restrictive, and external processing can add complexity and cost, which is why allin-one headsets like the Meta Quest have proved so popular in architecture, engineering, and construction with tools like Arkio, Resolve, The Wild, and Autodesk Workshop XR.

But relying on a headset to process 3D graphics has its limitations - in terms of the size and complexity of models it can handle and, especially, the realism it can convey.

In AEC, this hasn’t proved such an issue for BIM-centric design/review, where simply rendered geometry is adequate for ironing out clashes and issues before breaking ground. But when more realism is required, perhaps to get a true feel for a space, refine materials and lighting, or simply to wow a client, visual fidelity and model scale and complexity are considerably more important. The ultimate goal of XR is to make the virtual indistinguishable from the real.

pany introduced a new technology that allows developers to beam their applications and datasets with full RTX real-time physically based rendering directly into Apple Vision Pro with just an internet connection. It uses Nvidia Omniverse Clouds APIs (see page 38) to channel the data through the Nvidia Graphics Delivery Network (GDN), a global network of graphics-optimised data centres.

“We’re sending USD 3D data into the cloud, and we’re getting pixels back that stream into the Vision Pro,” explains Rev Lebaredian, vice president, Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia. “And working with Apple’s APIs on the Vision Pro itself, we adjust for the latency,

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enterprise streaming platform for spatial computing. It can run on public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise.

The platform supports a variety of headsets - Magic Leap, HoloLens, Meta Quest 3, Lenovo ThinkReality VRX, as well as iOS tablets and Windows for desktop apps. For streaming, Hololight Hub can use Nvidia CloudXR or the bespoke Hololight Stream technology, which also supports AMD and Intel GPUs. To address latency from the cloud, Hololight has developed several mechanisms including ‘frame skipping and reprojection algorithms’.

The company recently launched an integration with Nvidia Omniverse and OpenUSD, which provides an environment for real-time 3D collaboration.

Relying on a headset to process 3D graphics has its limitations, both in terms of the size and complexity of models it can handle, and the realism it can convey

Graphics processing on XR headsets has been steadily improving over the years. The new Apple Vision Pro has a tonne of compute on the device, but it’s still not enough to handle huge models with millions of polygons.

The answer, according to Nvidia, is to offload the processing to a powerful workstation or datacentre GPU and stream the pixels to the headset. In March, the com-

because there’s a time between when we ask for the pixels, and it comes back.

“In order to have a really great immersive experience you need to have those pixels react to all of your movements, locally. If you turn your head, the image has to change immediately. You can’t wait for the network, so we compensate for that.”

Nvidia is one of many firms streaming XR content from the cloud for use by AEC and manufacturing firms. Hololight offers a range of services based around Hololight Hub, which it describes as an

Innoactive is another specialist that offers XR streaming from the cloud. Through its Innoactive Portal, it works with a range of tools including Twinmotion, Enscape, VREX and Bentley iTwin (beta), as well as apps built on Unreal Engine and Unity.

More recently, the company combined its Innoactive Portal with Omniverse and Cesium, allowing users to combine Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) projects of buildings with contextual geospatial data and visualise both in real time.

OpenUSD projects can be streamed to a standalone VR headset, such as Meta Quest, HTC Vive XR Elite, Pico 4E or Lenovo ThinkReality VRX, or to a webbrowser on an office PC. Innoactive Portal is available through AWS and can also be self-hosted.

Technology

Extending the reach of XR

Thanks to cloud technology, BMW Group has dramatically extended the reach of XR within the automotive firm. With a bespoke platform hosted on AWS, using Nvidia GPUs for acceleration, and Nvidia CloudXR for streaming, over 200 BMW Group departments across the world, from design, engineering and production to sales and marketing, can now get near instant access to XR. BMW is using the platform for CAD visualisation, collaborative design review, and factory training.

BMW’s solution, the ‘3D AppStore’, provides easy access to content through a user-friendly web-based portal. Users simply select the headset they want to use (Meta Quest or Vive Focus), click the application and dataset, and it starts an GPU-accelerated instance on AWS.

Local delivery

Of course, streaming doesn’t have to be from the cloud. AEC firms can use local workstations or servers equipped with one or more pro GPUs, such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (48 GB), which are typically more powerful than those available in the public cloud. What’s more, keeping everything local has additional benefits. The closer the headset is to the compute, the lower the latency, which can dramatically improve the XR experience.

At Nvidia’s recent GTC event, Nvidia gave a mixed reality demonstration where a realistic model of a BAC Mono road-legal sports car rendered in Autodesk VRED could be viewed alongside the same physical car.

The Autodesk VRED model was being

rendered on a local HP Z Workstation and streamed to an Nvidia CloudXR application running on an Android tablet with passthrough enabled.

Nvidia also showed the potential for natural language interfaces for immersive experiences, controlling certain elements of Autodesk VRED through voice commands via its API.

(Above) Lenovo’s Spatial Computing Appliance enables multiple users to collaborate on the same scene, at the same time, using a single workstation (Below) The Meta Quest is hugely popular in AEC but lacks the onboard processing to render large hyper-realistic 3D models

“VRED doesn’t have anything special that was built into it to support large language models, but it does have a Python interface,” explains Dave Weinstein, senior director of XR at Nvidia.

“Using large language mod els, using some research code that we’ve devel oped, we’re able to simply talk to the application. The large language model translates that into commands that VRED speaks and through the Python interface, then issues those commands.”

Nvidia’s natural language research project is not tied to XR and could be used in other domains including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), where the language model could be trained to know everything about the car, and present information. One could query a product, pull up a list of parts, etc. The same approach could also be applied to construction projects. It seems likely the technology will make its way into Nvidia Omniverse at some point.

The collaborative package

Practical applications of this technology include a car configurator, where a customer could visualise the precise vehicle they want to buy in their own drivewaychanging paint colours, trim and wheels, etc. Also in collaborative design review, voice control could give non-skilled users the ability to interact with the car and ask questions about it, hands free, when wearing an immersive VR headset.

Lenovo has an interesting take on collaborative XR for design review with its new Spatial Computing Appliance. The desktop or rack-mounted solution enables up to four users to collaborate on the same scene, at the same time, using a single workstation, streaming pixels with Nvidia CloudXR over a WiFi 6E network.

The ‘fully validated’ reference architecture comprises a Lenovo ThinkStation PX workstation, four Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Gen GPUs, and four Lenovo ThinkReality VRX headsets. It supports Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, Autodesk VRED, and other XR applications and workflows.

Lenovo’s Spatial Computing Appliance works by carving up the workstation into

multiple Virtual Machines (VMs), each with its own dedicated GPU. Lenovo uses Proxmox, an open-source hypervisor, but will work with other hypervisors as well, such as VMware ESXi.

Four users is standard, but the appliance can support up to eight users when configured with eight single slot Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation GPUs.

The Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada is nowhere near as powerful as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada and has less memory (20 GB vs 48 GB), so it won’t be able to handle the largest models at the highest visual fidelity.

However, it’s still very powerful compared to a lot of the GPUs offered in public cloud. BMW, for example, uses the equivalent of an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti in its AWS G5 instances, which on paper is a fair bit slower than the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada.

headset largely earns its enterprise credentials because it works with Lenovo’s ThinkReality MDM (mobile device management) software.

It means IT managers can manage the headsets in much the same way they do fleets of ThinkPad laptops. The headsets can be remotely updated with security, services and software, and their location tracked. The appliance will work with other VR headsets, but they won’t be compatible with the

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ments using Nvidia CloudXR. At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD event (www.nxtbld.com) in London on 25 June the company will be giving demonstrations of streaming VR from a ThinkStation PX to multiple users running tools including Enscape, Omniverse, and Bentley iTwin.

Physical attraction

Streaming doesn’t have to be from the cloud. AEC firms can use local workstations or servers equipped with one or more pro GPUs, such as the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada, which are typically more powerful than those available in the public cloud

Lenovo ThinkReality MDM software.

Despite big advances in streaming technology, for the ultimate XR experience, headsets still need to be tethered. To deliver its hyper-realistic ‘human eye’ resolution experience the Varjo XR-4 must maintain stable and fast data transfer rates. This can only be achieved when physically connected to a workstation with USB C and DisplayPort cables.

With eight VMs, firms may find they need more bandwidth to feed in data from a central server, Omniverse Nucleus, or data management system. To support this, a 25Gb Ethernet card can be added to the workstation’s ninth PCIe slot.

The Lenovo ThinkReality VRX is an enterprise-level all-in-one headset, offering 2,280 x 2,280 resolution per eye. The

Of course, these days IT can be flexible. No firm needs access to XR technology 24/7, so the ThinkStation PX can be reconfigured in many different ways - for rendering, AI training, simulation and more.

To help deploy the Spatial Computing Appliance , Lenovo is working with partners, including Innoactive. The XR streaming specialist is using the Lenovo technology for on-premise XR deploy-

For rendering you need an exceedingly powerful GPU like the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada or Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, which can help deliver photorealism through real time ray tracing.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll always need cables. “We’re still working on that on Varjo,” said Greg Jones, director of XR business development at Nvidia, at Nvidia GTC recently.

Using GPUs in the cloud, Nvidia can stream advanced 3D experiences to Apple Vision Pro, rather than relying solely on the headset’s compute

Discover

Learn

Scan GWP-CAD A124R Micro workstation

Compared to the major OEMs, this compact 8-litre workstation might not bring much new to the table in terms of chassis, but it’s hard not to take notice when the price is so aggressive, writes Greg Corke

Bolton-based Scan is renowned for its quality desktop workstations, but most of the machines we’ve reviewed over the years have been built around sizable towers.

That’s to be expected for high-end workstations, aimed at visualisation, simulation, AI, or other demanding workflows. After all, high core count CPUs, multiple dual slot GPUs and buckets of memory need plenty of space for housing and cooling. But for CAD/BIM workflows, where the computational demands are much lower, the components have often looked a little lost inside Scan’s spacious chassis.

Product spec

■ AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 processor (3.7 GHz, 5.4 GHz boost) (12-cores, 24 threads)

■ Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation GPU (16 GB)

■ 32GB (2x 16GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5,200MHz memory

■ 1TB Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD

■ Asus Pro A620MC-CSM motherboard

■ 300W CWT, 80PLUS Bronze PSU

■ Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

■ 3 Years – 1st Year Onsite, 2nd and 3rd Year RTB (Parts and Labour) warranty

Considering the proliferation of small form factor (SFF) and ultra-compact workstations from major workstation OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, plus the trend towards smaller offices and home working, it’s surprising that it’s taken Scan so long to shake up its workstation portfolio.

■ £1,292 (Ex VAT)

■ www.tinyurl.com/ scan-micro

Last year, the company added a small form factor (SFF) micro-ATX workstation to its line-up, specifically designed for CAD users. The 95 x 327 x 266mm chassis has a volume of just 8 litres, versus 60 litres for a typical mid tower, or 150 litres for a full tower, the type that Scan uses for its high-end AMD Threadripper Pro workstations.

Compared to the competition, it’s more like an HP Z2 SFF, than the smaller HP Z2 Mini or Dell Precision 3280, which can be VESA mounted on the back of a display.

As small workstations have grown in popularity, manufacturers have had to deal with significantly bigger power demands from processors, which has presented significant challenges for cooling.

Recent top-end Intel Core processors, which are ideal for CAD as they deliver the highest single core frequencies and impressive Instructions Per Clock (IPC), are rated at 125W, but draw up to 253W at peak. Most compact workstations simply can’t get rid of the heat that a chip like that produces.

To deliver what it describes as the best balance of perfor mance and energy efficiency, Scan has configured its new Scan GWP-CAD A124R Micro workstation with a 65W AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 processor. According to Scan, the proces sor draws 121W less power than an equivalent Intel Core i7 under maximum load. The chip has 12 cores, 24 threads and a max boost clock of 5.4 GHz.

With Ryzen Pro, together with the Asus Pro A620M-CCSM motherboard, you also get enhanced security and manageability, compared to a consumer processor.

The slim chassis means the Scan GWP-CAD A124R is limited to a lowprofile graphics card. In years gone by these were only really suited to CAD / BIM, but the latest models from Nvidia are significantly more powerful, and some are ideal for entry-level architec tural visualisation.

Our test machine came with the new Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada pro GPU, a replacement for the Nvidia RTX A2000 which originally launched in 2021. It’s not only more powerful than its predecessor but boasts more memo ry – 16 GB compared to 12 GB (or 6 GB with the original version of the card).

32 GB (2 x 16 GB) of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 5,200MHz RAM should be fine for entry-level to main stream CAD and BIM. However, for

more demanding workflows, especially those that fill up the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada’s 16 GB of GPU memory, we’d recommend 64 GB.

For storage, there’s a 1TB Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, which is rated at 4.1 GB/s read and 2.9 GB/s write. Additional storage is available via a second free M.2 NVMe SSD slot on the motherboard. Scan can also squeeze in a 3.5-inch Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or two

seven USB Type A ports, including USB 3.2 round out the specs.

The CAD workhorse

CAD and BIM are bread and butter workflows for a workstation of this type. The AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 delivered good performance in 3D CAD software Solidworks, hitting 5.2 GHz in many of its single threaded workflows. However, compared to the Intel Core i9-14900K, our CAD performance processor of choice, it’s a fair bit off the pace –between 10% and 41% slower in the SPECapc for Solidworks benchmark. But when it comes to small form factor workstations this is a bit of a moot point. With the Intel chip drawing 253W at peak, you’re unlikely to ever find one in a machine of this size. And even if you do, it’s likely to be throttled.

Of course, the AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 is all about power efficiency. In rendering benchmark Cinebench 2024 it drew a mere 44W on the single core test and 90W on the multi-core test. This leaves plenty of headroom for the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada GPU, which draws 65W at peak. Even in the most demanding of workflows – CPU rendering in Cinebench and GPU rendering in Solidworks Visualize - we observed a peak total power of 220W at the socket. Amazingly, the Scan GWPCAD A124R didn’t even break into a sweat, maintaining an all-core CPU frequency of 4.6 GHz for well over an hour. This is all done with air-cooling too, using two fans – one attached directly the CPU heatsink, and another to push air over the GPU and SSD.

One of the trade-offs of power efficiency is fewer CPU cores. The AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 comes with 12 cores, four less than a top-end Ryzen 9 processor with 16 cores, typically used in larger towers.

Despite this gap, the AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945 still does a good job in multi-threaded workflows. When rendering, it was only between 30% and 50% slower than the Intel Core i9-14900K, which has 16 P-cores and 8 E-cores but consumes around three times as much electricity!

Of course, these days for

AEC visualisation, it’s often the GPU that does most of the heavy lifting. Tools including Enscape, Lumion, Twinmotion and D5 Render, rely entirely on GPU processing, and the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada is a good entry-level option for architects. It doesn’t deliver anywhere near the same level of performance as a high-end pro GPU like the Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada, but it can still do a good job for BIM-centric visualisation. Importantly, it has 16 GB of on-board memory, which should be plenty for mainstream real-time viz datasets, and enough to play with early-stage ideation or concept design using Generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion.

From our testing the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada GPU looks best suited to real-time viz at FHD resolution. At 4K, frame rates in our Unreal Engine and Enscape scenes were too slow for a smooth real-time experience. Of course, you can always upgrade to the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada with 20 GB of memory, but this will add £625 + VAT onto the price of the machine. Scan has also yet to qualify this top-end low-profile GPU, but it should be available as an option soon. You can read

more about the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada GPU in our in-depth review on page 48.

Conclusion

It’s become the accepted norm that if you want a small workstation, you must give up some performance. And with mainstream desktop processors now burning through more watts than ever, this has never been more true. But shrinking things down also turns the conversation to energy efficiency. And with a careful choice of processor, and a maximum total power draw of 220W, Scan looks to have found a good balance here.

With HP, Dell and Lenovo all investing so heavily in tiny workstations there’s certainly an appetite for these types of machines. Scan’s latest offering doesn’t really bring anything new to the table in terms of chassis design – the OEMs have been doing this for yearsbut it really shines on price/performance. At £1,292 + VAT it’s considerably cheaper than the equivalent from Dell, HP or Lenovo. And none of those manufacturers are yet to offer the new Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada as an option.

Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada

This entry-level pro viz GPU is a great option for small workstations. Thanks to the Ada Generation architecture it gets a boost in all the right areas, including ray tracing and AI, but also receives an important memory uplift, writes Greg Corke

Small form factor (SFF) and Ultra Compact workstations are big business these days. They are among the biggest sellers at Dell, HP and Lenovo. And as you will see on page 46, specialist system builders like Scan are also getting in on the action.

Small workstations need small GPUs. They require a special low-profile form factor, a compact GPU design with a shrunk down circuit board and a half height bracket for space efficiency.

Half of Nvidia’s recent pro graphics introductions are low-profile boards. There are four models: two take up a sin gle slot on the motherboard, the Nvidia RTX A400 (4 GB) and the Nvidia RTX A1000 (8 GB), and two take up two slots, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada (16 GB) (the focus of this review) and the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada (20 GB).

While the single slot cards are mostly targeted at CAD and BIM workflows, the dual slot cards are much more powerful. They are ideal for architects that want to push their workflows beyond the likes of Revit, Archicad and Allplan, into the realms of Enscape, Twinmotion, and D5 Render for real-time viz.

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada launched in February 2024 as part of a staggered roll out of Ada Generation GPUs. However, the card is only now starting to become available in the channel through PNY. Expect to see it in OEM workstations soon.

the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada comprises three different types of cores: Nvidia Ada Lovelace CUDA Cores for rasterisation and general-purpose processing, fourth-generation Tensor Cores for AI compute and third-generation RT Cores for ray tracing.

On paper, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada represents a big step up from the Nvidia RTX A2000. It boasts 12.0 TFLOPs vs 8.0 for single precision performance,

viz capable low-profile GPUs from the same GPU architecture.

To the untrained eye, both GPUs look identical. Both are rated at 70W, so draw all their power from the motherboard’s PCIe slot. Both have four mini DisplayPort connectors, and both can be fitted with a half-height or full-height ATX bracket, so can be used in SFF workstations or full sized towers.

pared to the Nvidia RTX A2000.

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada is not to be confused with the Nvidia RTX A2000, which has a remarkably similar name. The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada actually replaces the Nvidia RTX A2000, which is built on the previous generation Nvidia Ampere architecture.

Like all Nvidia Ada Generation GPUs,

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada also adds more memory to the board. It has 16 GB of GDDR6 compared to 12 GB or 6 GB, in the Nvidia RTX A2000. 16 GB is significant as it should provide a good platform for most BIM-centric viz workflows.

Nvidia RTX 2000 vs 4000 SFF Ada

With the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada (16 GB) and Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada (20 GB) it’s the first time that Nvidia has had two

Naturally, the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada has a more powerful GPU (19.2 TFLOPs single-precision performance, 44.3 TFLOPs RT Core performance and 306.8 TFLOPs Tensor performance) and slightly more memory (20 GB). It also has more features, including support for Nvidia Quadro Sync II for display walls and 3D stereo for immersive 3D. As a result, it costs more than twice as much as the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada — £1,160 + VAT versus £556.

It’s important to point out here that the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada has a fullheight sibling, the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada, that can only fit in full sized tower workstations. Both GPUs have the same core specs, but the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada can draw twice as much power (130W), so you get significantly more performance out of the same silicon. They also cost exactly the same, so there’s little point in putting an Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada in a tower workstation unless you’re extremely focused on energy efficiency.

Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada on test

For testing, we compared the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada (16 GB) with two other cards in the Ada Generation family: the low profile, dual slot Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada (20 GB), and the full height, single slot Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada (20 GB).

We also included two previous generation Ampere GPUs: the low-profile, dual

Workstations

slot Nvidia RTX A2000 (12 GB), and the full height, single slot Nvidia RTX A4000 (16 GB).

Here, it’s important to state that our benchmark comparisons are not perfect, as not all GPUs were tested in the same machine. For the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada and Nvidia RTX A2000 we used the latest 552.22 driver inside an AMD Ryzen 9 Pro 7945-based workstation from Scan.

For the other two GPUs, benchmark data was taken from previous lab tests. The Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada and Nvidia RTX A4000 with 536.25 driver were tested inside an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D-based workstation from Armari. The Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada with 537.7 driver was tested in an Intel Core i9-14900KF-based workstation from Workstation Specialists.

We would expect the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada benchmark scores to be elevated a little in 3D CAD, as the Intel Core i9-14900KF is faster in single threaded and lightly threaded workflows and CAD is typically CPU limited for 3D graphics. However, in graphics intensive real-time viz tools, the partner CPU shouldn’t make as much difference and, in GPU rendering, very little at all.

For CAD, the Solidworks benchmark scores only really tell part of the story. The reality is, we found the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada able to easily handle the largest of assemblies, including the colossal 8,000+ component MaunaKea Spectroscopic Explorer telescope model.

The visualisation benchmarks gave greater insights into the capabilities of the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada. For real time 3D we saw a performance bump of around 30 percent over the Nvidia RTX A2000.

However, our Unreal Engine and Enscape tests indicate the card is probably better suited to working at FHD resolution. When working at 4K, frame rates dropped below that golden 20 frames per second (FPS) threshold. However, this is of course dependent on the types of models you work with.

With less complex datasets, especially with real-time ray tracing disabled in

Unreal Engine, performance at 4K may be perfectly acceptable. Either way, moving up the range to the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada will give you a significant boost, but only choose this GPU if your heart is set on a compact workstation. For the same price, you can have the Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada in a tower– although you can also fit this full height GPU in the slimlime HP Z2 SFF G9 workstation thanks to a riser card that rotates the GPU through 90 degrees.

In Twinmotion and Lumion, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada delivered batch renders between 27% and 37% faster than the Nvidia RTX A2000. This went up to 45% in KeyShot and 51% in Vray, both of which lean much more heavily on ray tracing, so take full advantage of the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada’s far superior RT Core performance. With the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada, you’ll get an additional 26% out of Lumion, 33% out of Vray and 39% out of KeyShot.

The verdict

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada is another great pro graphics card from Nvidia that hits the price / performance sweet spot for BIM-centric architectural visualisation. For most practices it’s hard to justify giving every architect that has a viz requirement a workstation with a high-end GPU.

RTX A1000 (8 GB)

If budgets are tight and design visualisation isn’t part of your day to day workflow, you should consider the Nvidia RTX A1000, based on the older ‘Ampere’ architecture. This new single slot, lowprofile GPU is nailed on for 3D CAD, BIM and entry-level visualisation workflows.

And with RTX capabilities — a first for a ‘1000’ class desktop GPU — it also has RT and Tensor cores, both of which will likely become more important in the coming years (RT cores, if ray tracing finally makes it into the viewport of modern BIM / CAD tools, and Tensor Cores for AI processing).

With only 8 GB of memory, the Nvidia RTX A1000 is unlikely to be that useful for text-to-image Generative AI with tools like Stable Diffusion, but it could be a great companion for general PC tasks, such as background blurring or noise suppression in Teams, using the efficient

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada GPU is ideal for entry-level BIM-centric viz workflows in tools like Enscape

But at £556 + VAT, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada is certainly affordable, and provides a great starting point for tools like Enscape, Twinmotion, Lumion and D5 Render. We’re not just talking frame rates and render times here though. The GPU also has enough memory to load up some fairly sizeable datasets.

Energy consumption also deserves a mention. With a peak power of 70W, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada uses significantly less electricity than its full height siblings and produces less heat. With many practices under pressure to hit sustainability targets, this is more important than ever.

The Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada might be primarily designed for small form factor / compact workstations, but it’ll be just as at home in a standard tower. Unlike the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada, there’s no full height equivalent.

We expect the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada will start to be available in OEM workstations like the HP Z2 Mini G9, HP Z2 SFF G9, Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra, and Dell Precision 3280 in the coming months. For now, you can get it through the channel via PNY, and in custom workstations like the extremely price competitive Scan GWP-CAD A124R Micro, which we review on page 46.

■ www.pny.com/professional ■ www.nvidia.com

Tensor cores to do the heavy lifting, rather than having to rely on general purpose Nvidia Cuda cores or Intel / AMD CPUs. The card has four Mini DisplayPorts and a max power of 50W and comes in at £333 + VAT, more than £200 cheaper than the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada.