Feature
BIMobject Live In late September BIMobject hosted its annual event for customers and users in Malmö, Sweden, and broadcast live over the web. With presentations from manufacturers, consumers and the company’s CEO and CTO there was little doubt of the momentum behind downloadable BIM content. by Martyn Day
B
IMobject’s project portal was opened in 2012, providing manufacturers’ BIM objects, in Revit, ArchiCAD, SketchUp and AutoCAD formats for free download to the BIM community. Bentley Systems’ AECOsim Building gets support through the Revit RVT format. By October 2014, BIMobject had 3,750 products for download from over 280 companies. In just two years it has amassed over 1,183,000 downloads by a registered user-base of nearly 60,000 customers world-wide. In that time the company has been floated on the Swedish stock exchange, established six subsidiaries across Europe and received a considerable investment from Hexagon Geosystems, owners of brands such as Intergraph and Leica. It seems BIMobject has velocity.
BIMobject BIMobject creates new, and optimised, 3D models for building component manufacturers (Velux, Crawford, Assa Abloy, and Hilti, among others). The BIM components can be simple models or complete assemblies, from a door to a lift, a brick to a curtain wall. These objects are placed within the BIMobject portal for free download by AEC designers. Each CAD system has its own BIMobject app to enable direct access to BIMobjects from within that system. Users can request more information via BIMail and the system can warn users 26
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recently achieved 1,000,000 downloads. After explaining its evolving product offering over the last two years, he introduced a new online tool called Mosquito, which will potentially capture and distribute BIM objects faster than ever before.
Mosquito
Stefan Larsson (left) BIMobject founder and CEO, and CTO Ben O’Donnell at BIMobject LIVe
when products have been superseded. The use of objects is tracked through the BIManalytics service, so it is possible for manufacturers to measure the return on investment. A message centre enables several people to work in the same system and share information. BIMail also enables contact with consumers and there is a hook up to Salesforce. com. Manufacturers can have a private cloud for their own components. BIMobject’s flexible back-end system appears to be its key differentiator. Looking beyond the download, the system can identify sales pipelines and projects where products are currently specified. BIMobject CEO Stefan Larsson kicked off September’s BIMobject LIVe event in Malmö, Sweden, with the news that Hexagon had bought 31 million Swedish Krona worth of stock, equating to 13% of the company, and that the company had
BIMobject Mosquito is a radical new web technology that allows developers, partners and manufacturers to create BIM objects directly on a cloud server without any CAD or BIM knowledge. Using Google X (WebGL), the user is presented with a live 3D representation of a rectilinear object, onto which a bitmap can be added and scaled, with height, width and depth input. This can be done one at a time or through a bulk load option, which also supports Excel / spreadsheet data, enabling mass creation. The Mosquito technology will then automatically create native files for ArchiCAD, Revit, SketchUp and IFC. BIMobject sees this technology enabling manufacturers of ceramics, white goods, appliances and HVAC equipment, as well as flooring and mosaics, to provide BIM objects. BIMobject CTO Ben O’Donnell introduced several new technologies for the first time at BIMobject LIVe, including a radical properties extension for its customers called BIMobject Open Property Cloud technology and a slick new standard HTML5 interface for all its embedded BIM apps. www.AECmag.com
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