AEC Magazine November / December 2022

Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology for Architecture, Engineering and Construction

IMAGE COURTESY OF TAL FRIEDMAN, FOLDSTRUCT

Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology for Architecture,

MANAGING EDITOR

GREG CORKE greg@x3dmedia.com

CONSULTING EDITOR

MARTYN DAY martyn@x3dmedia.com

CONSULTING EDITOR

STEPHEN HOLMES stephen@x3dmedia.com advertising

GROUP MEDIA DIRECTOR

TONY BAKSH tony@x3dmedia.com

ADVERTISING MANAGER

STEVE KING steve@x3dmedia.com

U.S. SALES & MARKETING DIRECTOR

DENISE GREAVES denise@x3dmedia.com

subscriptions MANAGER

ALAN CLEVELAND alan@x3dmedia.com

accounts

CHARLOTTE TAIBI charlotte@x3dmedia.com

FINANCIAL CONTROLLER

SAMANTHA TODESCATO-RUTLAND sam@chalfen.com

AEC Magazine is available FREE to qualifying individuals. To ensure you receive your regular copy please register online at www.aecmag.com about

AEC Magazine is published bi-monthly by X3DMedia Ltd 19 Leyden Street London, E1 7LE UK

F.

©

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without prior permission from the publisher is prohibited. All trademarks acknowledged. Opinions expressed in articles are those of the author and not of X3DMedia. X3DMedia cannot accept responsibility for errors

in

Engineering and Construction

Industry news 4

Exyn and Trimble explore fully autonomous surveying; Bricsys makes flexible licensing promise; Allplan 2023 adds precast concrete, plus lots more

Rhino on the iPad 12

With a thriving ecosystem on Windows, Mac and in the cloud, Rhino has now gone mobile with iRhino

The pillars of fabrication integrated modelling 14

Tal Friedman explores how a fabrication centric approach could help impart real change in the construction industry

Bentley Systems iTwin ‘phase two’ 18

The company continues its drive to lead the digital twin infrastructure market with the release of new iTwin products

Q&A: Keith Bentley, Bentley Systems 22

We talk iTwin technology and the ‘platformification’ of the design software world with the Bentley CTO

Monitoring asset health in real-time

26

From reality modelling and IoT, to AI and simulation, Bentley is drawing on a range technologies to monitor infrastructure

Digital twin tech 28

A Trojan horse for systemic and cultural change in AEC?

Autodesk Tandem 30

What’s new and upcoming with the cloud-based digital twin platform?

The Metaverse 34

Roderick Bates of Enscape on how architects can help the Metaverse live up to its hype

Streaming digital twins into Unreal Engine

36

Bentley Systems has a new technology that streams models from its iTwin platform on demand, into the visually rich Unreal Engine environment

A new architecture for Architecture

38

With a major rearchitecting of Archicad underway, Martyn Day spoke with Graphisoft executives to find out more

Modumate: BIM powered by Unreal Engine 42

A San Francisco-based start-up has built an architectural design system on top of Epic’s legendary game engine

SimpleBIM: taking back control with IFC 46

Founded in Finland in 2009, SimpleBIM has played a key role in the rise of IFC standards for data exchange

Swapp: the algorithmic assistant 48

Exyn and Trimble explore fully autonomous surveying with Boston Dynamics Spot robot

ever-changing complexity of construction environments.

The ExynPak mounts and integrates with a robot, supporting level 4 of autonomous exploration missions without requiring the robot to “learn” about its environment beforehand.

The surveyor simply defines a 3D volume for a mission and the integrated robotic solution then handles the complexities of self-navigation without needing a map, GPS or wireless infrastructure.

The Trimble X7 provides 3D laser scanning to capture the state of the environment. The captured data can be uploaded to the Trimble Connect collaboration platform and shared with project stakeholders for further analysis, including a comparison to BIM models and previous scans to monitor quality and progress.

Trimble and Exyn Technologies, a specialist in robotic autonomy for complex environments that can’t access GPS, are exploring the use of autonomous construction surveying technology.

The solution will integrate Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot, the ExynPak portable, real-time 3D mapping ‘SLAM’ solution powered by ExynAI, and the

Trimble X7 laser scanner.

The aim is to enable fully autonomous missions inside complex and dynamic construction environments, resulting in ‘consistent and precise’ reality capture for production and quality control workflows.

Autonomous robots powered by ExynAI, are designed to sense and avoid obstacles, dynamically adapting to the

“Industry has been waiting for reliable and robust autonomous technology to transform difficult and dangerous activities,” said Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies. “Exyn’s technology is helping to enable a new front in humanrobot collaboration. By working with preeminent leaders such as Trimble, we aim to create adaptable, state-of-the-art systems to tackle the complexities across construction and industrial environments.”

■ www.exyn.com ■ www.trimble.com

Bentley enhances Synchro construction management tool

entley Systems has enhanced its construction management solution, adding new features to Synchro 4D and introducing new tools Synchro Cost and Synchro Perform.

Synchro 4D now offers 4D/5D model authoring with model-splitting tools to create constructible components, the ability to assign construction attributes to the model, mixed reality modelling, construction geometry placement, and web and mobile access to improve team collaboration, status updates, and progress reporting from the field.

Synchro Cost is designed to help project teams control budgets and track financial progress throughout the contract with

support for multi-contract capture, payment application tracking, and change order management.

Synchro Perform supports construction performance management and includes the ability to capture daily progress quantities, diaries, unplanned events, timesheets, tickets, and estimated field costs with a view to providing the shortest cycle time for project feedback.

“Construction teams need to ensure that they are in control of both the schedule and costs of their projects,” said Rich Humphrey, vice president of construction at Bentley Systems.

“The addition of Synchro Cost and Synchro Perform extends Synchro’s

industry leading 4D scheduling and project management solutions to include more capabilities to help contractors manage their costs and effectively connect the planning and tracking of costs and schedule.”

■ www.bentley.com/software/synchro

BricsCAD v23 launches with flexible licensing promise ROUND UP

Streamlining Revit

Microdesk has integrated its BIMrx product line into Symetri’s Naviate. The expanded and rebranded suite of tools aims to improve workflows for AEC professionals by streamlining Revit project setup, model management, and documentation ■ www.microdesk.com

Scia Engineer 22

Version 22 of structural analysis software Scia Engineer has been designed to give users better insight into the economy of their designs. The extended AutoDesign report helps users save material by evaluating the weight of reinforcement per cubic metre of concrete ■ www.scia.net

Telecom digital twins

Axians France has partnered with Pix4D to provide operators and telecom infrastructure managers with infrastructure digital twins. Pix4D technology will be used to automatically identify telecom assets and their dimensions. BIM models will then be created for use in 5G antenna installation and maintenance ■ www.pix4d.com

CICES BIM paper

A new white paper from the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors (CICES) ‘Transforming the civil engineering surveyor’ aims to help improve understanding of BIM and how it relates to civil engineering during site operations

■ www.cices.org/publications/white-papers

13th Gen for BOXX

BOXX Technologies’ APEXX S3 workstation now features 13th Gen Intel Core i7 and i9 processors. The new CPUs are said to offer exceptional performance for CAD, 3D design, motion media, and other professional software applications

■ www.boxx.com

NBS subscriptions

NBS has launched a ‘cost-effective’ subscription option for its specification platform, NBS Chorus. NBS Chorus Designer enables users to annotate design models in Revit, Vectorworks or Archicad directly from the specification, view guidance and add notes

■ www.thenbs.com

At the Bricsys Digital Summit 2022 last month, Bricsys introduced BricsCAD v23, the latest release of its DWG-based family of CAD tools, which includes BricsCAD BIM, its ‘AI-powered’ BIM software.

Speaking at the event, Rahul Kejriwal, CEO, also addressed inflexible licensing models for CAD software, “Bricsys will never trap your data in walled gardens, and we will offer new and flexible business models to serve users who need the best, most accessible design, modelling and collaboration software,” he said.

New features for BricsCAD v23 include drawing health management tools and a ‘significant expansion’ of the drawing recovery tools. There have been updates to the Optimize 3D command for

correcting errors in 3D models, and CopyGuided 2D, which offers a ‘smarter way’ to copy entities. For the civil sector, BricsCAD also includes civil and point cloud capabilities.

BricsCAD BIM v23, which now offers compatibility with IFC, RVT and RFA, includes an improved stair 2D representation and a new type plans feature, which allow elements of scan-toBIM modelling to be automated.

Bricsys 24/7, the company’s CDE for managing project data and exchanging multi-format documents, has also been enhanced. Demonstrations at the Summit included workflows for tender documents, building drafts, building models, site plans and bills of materials.

■ www.bricsys.com

Bentley launches Infrastructure Cloud

Bentley Systems has launched the Bentley Infrastructure Cloud, a combination of enterprise systems powered by its iTwin Platform and infrastructure schemas, which ‘seamlessly integrate’ with Bentley’s engineering applications. According to the company, Bentley Infrastructure Cloud will enable better creation, delivery, and ongoing operation of infrastructure, through complete and evergreen digital twins.

Bentley Infrastructure Cloud encompasses ProjectWise, for project delivery; Synchro, for construction; and AssetWise, for asset operations. Now

powered by iTwin, Bentley explains that these enterprise systems are becoming fundamentally data-centric without disrupting file-based workflows.

As part of the platform, Bentley has introduced new AssetWise Asset Health Monitoring Solutions that use reality modelling and IoT to deliver real-time asset health monitoring (see page 26)

Bentley also expanded its iTwin platform with iTwin Experience, for visualising and navigating digital twins; iTwin Capture, for capturing, analysing, and sharing reality data; and iTwin IoT, for acquiring and analysing sensor data (see page 18).

■ www.bentley.com

Allplan 2023 adds precast concrete to material range

Carbon assessment for digital twins

Bentley Systems has linked Building Transparency’s Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) to its iTwin platform to streamline embodied carbon calculation in digital twins.

EC3 is a no-cost, open-access tool that allows benchmarking, assessment, and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials.

llplan has expanded the range of materials supported in its core BIM software with the 2023 version now including precast concrete as well as masonry, cast-inplace concrete, steel and timber.

According to the developers, the ability to coordinate different materials and construction methods in one common model enables architects to better consider the economical and sustainable use of building materials, earlier, and in accordance with environmental requirements. It also means engineers and construction companies can build directly on the architects’ design and use it as the basis for structural analysis and detailing, MEP engineering, prefabrication and construction.

Allplan 2023 has also been enhanced to better harness graphics card processing. According to the developers, this helps process large volumes of data more

reliably, in particular terrain surveys or point clouds with millions of points.

For structural design, enhancements include: new tools to make it easier to create and adjust openings in walls and slabs; automated reinforcement modelling with the ability to reinforce several identical walls and columns at the same time; a new precast design and detailing feature for creating complex precast components in one platform; and new tools for accurately modelling steel framework.

For construction planning there are new functions for bored pile, and soldier pile walls, as well as ground anchors, and the ability to ‘intelligently place’ cranes, containers, or fences, complete with collision detection and capacity checking.

For infrastructure design, there are new productivity tools for users working on terrain and road plans, while bridge design also get a boost.

■ www.allplan.com

FineHVAC helps cool World Cup venue

ineHVAC software from 4M was used in the design the HVAC system for the Qatar Foundation Stadium, one of the host venues for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

The piping and air-duct installations serve the free space under the stands of the “Diamond in the Desert” sports complex, comprising an air-conditioned area of 55,000m2 structured in four levels.

One of the considerations for the design was that many of the existing spaces are

to be reconstructed into a mall complex as soon as the World Cup is over.

The HVAC design was carried out by GKA engineers on behalf of Salfo & Associates SA. According to 4M, FineHVAC was selected for three reasons: smart BIM modelling of the HVAC installations; automatic generation of the final drawings and calculation reports; and accuracy in calculations, complying with the latest international standards.

■ www.4msa.com/brands/finehvac

WSP is applying both the EC3 database and the Bentley iTwin platform on infrastructure projects. “Implementing this link will significantly reduce the time and cost of generating EC3-based detailed embodied carbon analysis and reports along the design and construction stages,” said Thomas Coleman, vice president of WSP USA.

■ www.buildingtransparency.org

Avvir joins Hexagon

Hexagon has acquired construction reality capture and analysis specialist Avvir, and is integrating the company’s AI-powered technology stack into its portfolio of solutions, including BricsCAD and the hxGN Smart Build suite.

Avvir’s reality analysis platform compares BIM models to onsite reality capture data using AI algorithms that compare thousands of elements at a time to determine what is built and whether it is built in place. Construction firms can then use the results to keep schedules up-to-date, verify subcontractor payment applications, or update the BIM model to reflect as-built conditions.

■ www.avvir.io

Trimble Construction Cloud powered by Azure launches

Trimble aids HP in robotic site layout

Trimble and HP are working together to integrate the Trimble Ri robotic total station with HP SitePrint, a robotic layout solution that prints 2D plans on construction site floors.

SitePrint can avoid obstacles and print lines and complex objects with ‘pinpoint accuracy and consistent repeatability’. In addition, text printing capabilities are designed to bring additional data from the digital model to the construction site to prevent errors.

Trimble has launched Trimble Construction Cloud, a new platform powered by Microsoft Azure to link project teams, data, processes and multiple stakeholders –including general contractors, subcontractors, designers, engineers and owners – across all phases of construction projects.

Trimble Construction Cloud takes advantage of Microsoft Azure services including Logic Apps, Azure DevOps, and Azure Kubernetes Service.

A Common Data Environment (CDE) connects the office with site operations tools, enabling Trimble and non-Trimble solutions to ‘automatically integrate’ into one usable data set.

Configured and Custom Workflows

help project teams automate different aspects of their business. There are three pre-configured workflows: a model-toprocurement built for Mechanical, Engineering and Plumbing (MEP); a model-to-fabrication for structures; and a civil bid-to-build for site management.

Meanwhile, Live Data/Model Sharing (pictured above) allows for ‘real-time’ model collaboration for both Trimble and nonTrimble solutions. Trimble explains that multiple users can be in several Trimble solutions—such as Quadri, Trimble Connect and Tekla—and view model changes as they happen. According to Trimble, those with non-Trimble solutions, such as Microsoft Teams can also collaborate in the same modelling process.

■ www.trimble.com

DotProduct launches iOS scanning app

DotProduct, a provider of realtime, handheld 3D capture solutions, has released a professional scanning app for Apple iOS, which runs on all iPhones and iPads equipped with a built-in LiDAR scanner.

Dot3D 5.0 features what Dotproduct describes as ‘ultra-large scene capture’ thanks to the rebuilt core engine.

According to the company, with Dot3D’s new intelligent streaming technology, users

are now able to scan and optimise entire small buildings, roadways, landscapes, infrastructure, and other outdoor spaces all in one go, with virtually no limits to scan time or scale, outside of practical considerations.

This new core also includes a fully rebuilt optimisation engine, which performs full global loop closure, tight alignments, surface reconstruction, and reference constraint satisfaction, all on-device.

Dot3D 5.0 is available as a free 7-day trial and there is an indefinite free version for testing without export. Subscriptions start at $49/month or $299/year. ■ www.dotproduct3d.com/ios

Using optical technology, the precise positioning and navigation of the HP SitePrint robot is driven by the Trimble Ri total station. Equipped with automatic level detection, selfcalibration, and Trimble Vision technology for advanced tracking, the Trimble Ri helps the robot achieve autonomous, highaccuracy indoor layout work. ■ www.hp.com ■ www.trimble.com

DroneDeploy acquires structionSite

Aerial reality capture platform DroneDeploy has acquired ground reality capture specialist structionSite with a view to delivering a complete reality capture platform for construction.

structionSite helps contractors capture photo documentation of their jobs in 360-degrees. Photos are automatically organised by date and floor plan location. DroneDeploy offers autonomous drone flights and ground-based walkthroughs to help contractors virtually document construction projects. Captured data includes 360 tours and reality models.

■ www.dronedeploy.com

Solibri Inside to check BIM models as you design

Solibri Inside is a new cloudbased service that allows users of Nemetschek authoring tools Graphisoft Archicad, Allplan, and Vectorworks to check BIM models as they design. The SaaS-based offering uses a plug-in to work as a native feature within the authoring tool. It means the designer no longer needs to export the model and open other software to perform basic model checking.

According to the developers, Solibri Inside ensures that every model can be checked upfront before submitting the model to the coordination workflow.

“Today, more models are created than ever, yet many lack the essentials of a good BIM: the information. This missing information makes Quality Assurance impossible to deliver,” said Ville

Kyytsönen, Solibri CEO. “Solibri is improving the quality of models by bringing quality checking as part of the model authoring process. With Solibri Inside, we improve the process by enabling more QA early in the process before coordination takes place.”

The first release of Solibri Inside allows the checking of Door and Window clearances and the supporting Level of Information (LOI). The service is a standard free package within Graphisoft Archicad, Allplan and Vectorworks. By registering, more features are unlocked, and the Premium paid package allows the customisation of rule checks to suit a designer’s specific project need – to help ensure everyone in the team works with the same requirements.

■ www.solibri.com

Datumate boosts analytics for Procore

Datumate, the developer of construction analytics platform DatuBIM, has partnered with Procore, the construction management software provider, to provide civil construction teams with enhanced infrastructure site analytics and progress monitoring.

The integrated solution is said to solve a key industry challenge by giving project stakeholders up-to-date data for better decision making, improved efficiency and accelerated project delivery.

“DatuBIM complements the Procore

portfolio – providing owners and contractors with a complete lifecycle management solution and the field data they need to better control budget planning and ensure project quality,” said Dror Friedman, CEO of Datumate.

Datumate’s DatuBIM analytics platform is designed for large-scale civil and infrastructure projects. It helps teams access a single source of truth for design, plans, and as-built data, run advanced analytics, and overlay design plans to check for deviations and potential quality issues.

■ www.datumate.com

Resolve breaks down model barriers in VR

Resolve, an XR-based collaborative design review tool for AEC, has introduced the ‘Wellington Engine’, a custom 3D engine designed to render BIM models with millions of polygons on standalone VR headsets.

Supported devices include the new Meta Quest Pro, which also enables Resolve to add AR capabilities to the software by taking advantage of the headset’s colour passthrough cameras.

According to the developers, the ‘Wellington Engine’ uses virtualised geometry, occlusion culling, and adaptive partitioning to enable the review of complex files without having to stream data from an external workstation/server or devoting hours to model clean up.

■ www.resolvebim.com

DDScad gets boost from Graphisoft

Graphisoft Building Systems (formerly Data Design System) has released version 18 of the building services planning software DDScad.

The new release features a new user interface with re-designed buttons, function icons and input windows. Electrical installations can now be modelled faster and more precisely thanks to new routing, configuration and calculation options. In addition, electrical planning can be based on room information from an IFC reference model.

The software also has a connection to Graphisoft’s interactive app BIMx, allowing 3D models and project info to be viewed on a variety of mobile devices and operating systems.

■ www.dds-cad.net

Rhino on the iPad

The Apple iPad has been on a journey. It started life back in 2010 as a giant iPhone that didn’t make calls (unless they were via VoIP), but went on to finally cement a tablet market that had previous ly failed to attract many customers.

Today, with desktop-class Apple sili con, the iPad continues to provide porta bility, along with long battery life and pretty decent pen input.

We have already seen some great AEC application developments for the iPad, but historically, these have been mainly for the consumption of AEC data – via Autodesk BIM 360, Graphisoft BIMx and so on — rather than the creation of designs. If you go back to around 2010, you’ll find that iRhino 3D also started life as a navigator/viewer.

A lot has changed since then. Today’s reality is that the iPad is now pow erful enough to run design-based desktop applications. One only has to look at Shapr3D (www. shapr3d.com), the excellent Spaces by Cerulean Labs (www.spacesapp.io) and SketchUp for iPad (www. tinyurl.com/sketchup-ipad) to see how the iPad has become a viable laptop replacement for creatives.

This fact has not escaped McNeel Associates CEO Bob McNeel or the compa ny’s lead on business development, Scott Davidson. In response, iRhino 3D has been relaunched with the full Rhino tech stack underneath and offering big possi bilities. It requires the latest operating system, iOS 16. And, as it runs on an iPad, it obviously also runs on an iPhone, but you would have to be pretty desper

ate to do anything on such a small screen. For now, the 12.9-inch iPad would be ideal and there are rumours of an even bigger device in the works, with the pos sibility of a 16-inch model at some point in the future.

Rhino has not been ‘ported’ from the desktop. Instead, it was completely rewritten from the ground up and per forms exactly like other versions, but with an interface that makes the most of a touch environment.

New horizons

Before readers get too excited, it’s impor tant to stress that the initial version is intended for model viewing and mark-up only. But we have been assured by McNeel executives that, under the hood, the entire functionality of desktop Rhino is there already. Over time, that functionality will be exposed as the company finds out how users want to use the system and what new addi tions make sense in product development terms.

Apart from the power of the processor, Apple has with each generation of chip included more and more direct memory cache and expanded the addressable memory per application. This allows bigger programmes to run, working with bigger data sets. In other words, with each generation, the iPad is becoming increasingly usable for professional modelling use.

One of the original ‘melon twisters’ of the original iPad was its complete lack of a file system, or rather, its lack of expos ing a file system to the user. This has been addressed over time, but even for long-time users, finding where the device

stores files can sometimes be an absolute mystery. The safest option is to link the iPad to a cloud storage service. iRhino 3D supports iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and other cloud storage providers. There’s a built-in file browser, too.

When models are loaded, they can be displayed in shaded, wireframe, ren dered, ghost and X-Ray display modes. This is for all object types, breps, curves, meshes, point cloud, text and annota tions. You can pan, zoom and orbit by dragging your fingers on the screen, pro viding instant and accurate control of the viewing position. The software supports any previously set up layouts (page views) and objects can be selected and queried for information.

There’s a built-in mark-up tool that works with the pen, which allows drawn highlights, text mark-ups, and some dimensioning. The software also sup ports an augmented reality (AR) mode.

Community feedback

In common with most McNeel products, iRhino is a work in progress and with the active user community, the company real ly listens to feature requests on its forums (www.tinyurl.com/iRhino3D). Moreover, developers actually reply back to posts.

While it may not initially seem that iRhino 3D has made dramatic steps for ward, the company has had to go back to the drawing board in order to support Apple silicon and the new Metal graph ics. While that work was being done, adding in the Rhino engine for later exposure and usage made sense.

Now, the question is, will iRhino 3D remain a handy portable viewing and mark-up tool, or play a wider, more crea tive role in conceptual design? That, of course, will be down to users. I wonder how far away we are from Grasshopper running on an iPad?

In AEC, McNeel Associates is a familiar and much-loved brand, along with its product Rhino. With a thriving ecosystem on Windows, Mac and in the cloud, Rhino has now gone mobile, as Martyn Day reports

‘‘ The question is, will iRhino 3D remain a handy portable viewing and mark-up tool, or play a wider, more creative role in conceptual design? ’’

SOLIBRI PUTS YOU IN CONTROL OF MODEL QUALITY

Solibri

The right tools for the right people.

Solibri Anywhere

Model viewing and access to the digital information flow for free.

Solibri Site

Get the information you need, right when you need it.

Solibri Office

The complete solution to meet the toughest QA/QC needs.

Solibri Enterprise

Customized solution for maximum scalability.

With Solibri you can take your quality assurance to a whole new level and ensure that the information flows seamlessly from design to build. No more hiccups – the future of building better is here.

DISCOVER MORE AT SOLIBRI.COM

The pillars of Fabrication Integrated Modelling (FIM)

Tal Friedman explores how a fabrication centric approach, one where the entire building process is considered holistically, could help impart real change in the construction industry

It is a common notion in the AEC industry that building is a linear process. It begins with conceptual design, moves into compliance, then analysis, and finally, fabrication. That process can take months, and sometimes years, every single time.

But FIM (Fabrication Integrated Modelling) offers to reverse the equa tion, allowing us to get fabrication right from the start.

Looking at the construction software

industry roadmap in past years, it is evi dent that the design/engineering process is perceived as a ‘solved’ issue by the mainstream CAD/BIM companies that dominate the market. In the eyes of exec utives at these companies, the next stop on the journey to conquering the entire construction value chain is project man agement and procurement.

But I would like to propose an alterna tive perspective. To my mind, procure ment and project management are not a

‘continuation’ of the design process, but a derivative of it. Instead of running for ward, perhaps we need to go back to basics, and think about the building pro cess more holistically. In the age of FIM, the one who controls the initial design/ engineering process controls the rest of the value chain, too.

Though BIM’s original concept was to simplify the design process and cut resources, current methodologies demand special BIM managers and experts and

more planning time and costs. It is no won der, then, that only an estimated 20% of projects use even the basic capabilities of BIM. A much smaller fraction is actually implementing detailed, high-level model ling, as seen in BIM Level 3.

In today’s construction world, space layout planning is not enough. Design teams (architects, engineers, consultants) often reside in ‘masstopia’ or ‘renderland’, their thinking dominated by virtual envi ronments and documents nested as far

away from a real-life work site as possible. As a result of this fragmentation, the level of control that design teams exert on the fabrication supply chain is diminishing.

In an age where the biggest challenge the construction industry faces is adopting advanced industrialised methods, smart materials and sustainable supply chains, why do these considerations come last, when it’s already too late to make changes?

Fabrication first

Getting started with ‘FIM thinking’ requires a mind shift at every stage of the pro cess. Below, I outline the current situation and then the necessary shift to be made at each of those stages.

Design phase

Current situation: Architecture starts with a sketch and moves towards detailed design, regulation and building

A midjourney, AI-inspired vision of the future for Fabrication Integrated Modelling (FIM)

permits. Fabrication, sustainability and supply chain considerations come at a later stage.

FIM thinking: Building details and regu lation compliance are integrated as part of the design process using AI. This ensures that everything we design is ready for construction from the get-go.

Supply chain and procurement

Current situation: After planning is approved and permits are given, the design and plans are ‘frozen’ in place and the search for methods, procurement and detailed fabrication drawings begins. This makes it impossible to adjust to any meth od or system that requires design optimi sation, ruling out most industrialised methods by definition.

FIM thinking: Supply chains and bestpractice methods are an integrated part of initial design and decision-making. FIM methodology creates best-fit results using big data gathered from supply

chains to help planners make the right choices from the start.

Cost analysis

Current situation: Costs are assessed as general numbers and after a design is fin ished, it goes to tendering. This creates many unknowns and a tendency to design for the lowest common denominator in order to reduce risk.

FIM thinking: Costs are embedded in the planning data and connected to a realworld supply chain, turning your BIM model into a shopping cart.

One offs vs. network effect

Current situation: A building is designed once and lives in a vacuum. It is a one-off in every sense of the word and lacks interaction with external supply chains, knowledge bases or other projects in its surroundings.

FIM thinking: Building plans live in a smart network. They learn from one

another and share a unified supply chain. Not only do they all have access to pro curement data, but they can also be opti mised, to achieve economies of scale and reduce costs.

A digital revolution

Construction, the largest industry on the planet, is going through a digital revolu tion. If we want to see more sustainable, affordable and efficient cities, a radical approach is needed to break the current bottlenecks.

FIM offers such an approach — but it also demands that we push back the boundaries of our comfort zone in order to get there. This means letting go of old hierarchies, business models and work flows, leading the way to true human/ machine integration.

In my work with Foldstruct, these prin ciples are being applied on a daily basis in a constant battle to expand architectural horizons with artificial intelligence (AI). ■

‘‘

In the age of FIM, the one who controls the initial design/ engineering process controls the rest of the value chain, too ’’

Bentley Systems iTwin ‘phase two’

It is almost four decades since Bentley Systems was founded — or 38 years, to be precise. It’s almost as long since the 1986 launch of MicroStation for DOS, and yet MicroStation continues to be the base platform for the infrastructure software company’s wide range of vertical prod ucts. These cover areas as diverse as plant, rail, roads, bridges, dams, telecom, electricity, and water systems.

Having achieved its long-awaited Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2020, the company recently passed $1 billion in annual revenue, and while its products remain emphatically desktop-based on Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft Azure cloud is now an option, too, when that

option makes sense for customers.

Over the past five years, Bentley Systems has been on a mission to per suade infrastructure owners and opera tors to invest in digital twins of their assets using its iTwin technology, on the promise of better lifecycle management for those assets, as well as to extend their use of asset information, whether it is designed in CAD or modelled from the field using reality-capture technology.

That message seems to be getting across, especially with customers in Asia, with entrants for the company’s Year in Infrastructure (YII) 2022 awards using the iTwin technology significantly out numbering those from other regions. As CEO Greg Bentley pointed out, 50% of

the world’s infrastructure projects are currently happening in Asia.

These Asian companies are using digi tal twins to address three critical areas, according to Greg Bentley. The first is ‘digital context’, the ability to use and deploy 3D and 4D technologies to capture the physical reality of an asset being twinned. The second is ‘digital chronolo gy’, which focuses on maintaining a data base or record throughout the lifecycle of an asset to create what Bentley refers to as an ‘evergreen’ digital twin. The third area is ‘engineering technology’, the abili ty to model and simulate a facility over the lifetime of a project in order to opti mise its efficiency.

But this focus on digital twins is by no

iTwin Experience for visualising and navigating digital twins

means confined to Asia. According to a survey of infrastructure CEOs conducted at the event by AEC Advisors, when asked about their main concerns over the next three years, it was clear that respondents are worrying less about 2D drawings and more about 3D models. Almost one in five said their companies were evaluating and deploying digital twins.

This interest comes at a time when many customers are having to do more with less, as chief operating officer Nicolas Cumins explained. Infrastructure investment is on the rise, to support eco nomic recovery, ensure energy security and tackle climate change, he said. But such projects must play out against a backdrop of extreme labour and skills shortages, which are causing considerable work backdrops and, in some cases, forc ing companies to turn down projects.

One way that Bentley can help, said Cumins, is to give firms the digital tools they need to mine data held in many dif ferent file formats and in hard-to-access data silos. Hidden away, that data goes stale and ‘dark’, he said.

CIOs estimate that around 70% of the data produced by their organisation is never used, and in the infrastructure sec tor, the picture may be even worse — as high as 95%, according to Bentley Systems. If only 5% of an infrastructure organisation’s data is being analysed to derive actionable insights from it, then decision-makers are likely making underinformed decisions on critical infrastruc ture on a regular basis.

Bentley’s goal, then, is to make this ‘dark data’ more accessible, more usable and available to more people.

Technology evolution

From a Bentley perspective, the signifi cant interest in digital twins demands a fundamental shift from files to databases and thus a fundamental change in soft ware architecture and its ability to sup port very large digital twin models. Both Greg Bentley and his brother and chief technology officer Keith Bentley touched on this, while stressing that files continue to be useful, logical and here to stay.

At the same time, Keith Bentley explained to attendees how the company’s view of digital twins has changed and matured since the 2018 launch of iTwin. Back then, he said, “I thought that the prospect of digital twins would add more value than all the progress that had been made since the beginning of Bentley Systems, back at the beginning of the PC. I thought that the opportunity around digital twins was a once-in-a-lifetime

opportunity and I was extremely excited.” He is still excited, he said.

From the start, he added, openness was a key theme for the product, which is why iTwin was made open source early on. In that way, he said, customers “can use the iTwin platform without paying a licence to Bentley Systems at all, downloading the entire source code to the iTwin platform.”

That’s still true today, he says, and now the company has plans to create a lot more open-source projects around iTwin.

In ‘Phase Two’ of the company’s iTwin initiative, the company will work harder to help users understand how iTwin can assist them in their day-to-day work and integrate iTwin services into the desktop products they use. That won’t mean replatforming, reimplementing or repro gramming of existing products, he stressed: “They are what they are.”

In other words, customers can move to iTwin-enabled versions of the core prod ucts, without losing any of the capabilities to which they are accustomed. But they will improve in three key ways, he promised: first, in the input to those products; second, in their operation; and third, in their output.

Building on reference files, MicroStation will be able to add a reference iTwin — not only files on a desktop or server, but also in the cloud – and the iTwin itself can connect to many other sources. Bentley Systems is also working on incorpo rating interactive tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom with MicroStation, for collabo rative design sessions. Finally, digital twins will be updated directly by design applications, not via some convoluted check in/check out document management system.

“Phase Two is about empowering our existing user base to become digital twin natives,” said Bentley. In the long term, he promised, “nobody will be thinking about their role in the project. They will be thinking about how they contribute to everything that every body else is doing at the same time.”

The next release of MicroStation, due in 2023, will be powered by many new iTwin features, he said.

New iTwin Products

As mentioned, the iTwin platform was officially launched in 2018. While this

built on the open iModel database work that Bentley had done in previous years, iTwin provided a host of services on which to build digital twins. There was one main omission: applications to ease the creation and management of twins. Five years later at YII 2022, we saw the first three iTwin applications launched: iTwin Experience, iTwin Capture and iTwin IoT, which are all available immediately.

iTwin Experience is a new cloud prod uct for owners and operators which gives them ‘a single pane of glass overlay’ to their engineering, operational and enter prise data. It enables users to visualise, to query and to analyse critical infrastruc ture data at any level of granularity, at any scale, all geospatially referenced. It will also be used by engineering firms as a platform to offer their own digital twin solutions to their owner/operator clients by adding their proprietary algorithms.

iTwin Capture, which has evolved from ContextCapture, will be used to create 3D models of existing infrastructure assets derived from photograph or point clouds with engineering level precision. These will be used in engineering workflows, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to auto matically identify, locate, and classify reality data.

Adobe is already using iTwin Capture as part of its Substance 3D solutions, to help designers leverage their own pictures to create photorealistic 3D environ ments. When it comes to Infrastructure, the majority of digital twins will be derived from capturing their existing infrastruc ture assets by using a reali ty model and not a BIM model. This makes iTwin Capture probably the most important on-ramp to cre ate infrastructure digital twins.

iTwin IoT does what it says on the tin, enabling the seamless incorporation of Internet of Things (IoT) data from sensors and moni toring devices. IoT devices are being used increasingly in both construction and operations for real time safety and condi tion monitoring, to measure and visualise any change in the environment of an infra structure asset, to look for changes to the structural condition and to know when to perform repairs.

Dustin Parkman, VP of Mobility, gave an example here of a workflow that focus

‘‘

Producing a model to generate dumb drawings may well be a means to an end today, but Bentley figures that there are many more benefits to be had in talking to and repurposing a virtual model ’’

1

2

es on an elevated road section. In a single environment, he brought in a GIS map, a modelled asset created via a reality cap ture of the actual structure. BIM informa tion was then added to this, and GPR (Ground Penetrating Radar) data over laid to identify pitting and to assess hydroplaning risks on the bridge as cap tured. Subsurface data was also added and IoT sensor feeds were placed for realtime performance analysis. AI was then run over the photogrammetry of the sec tion, to assess visible cracks, rust and critical deterioration to the structure.

New tech, new insights

Other executives speaking at the event also focused on the integration of differ ent types of data to inform more insightled decision-making.

For example, according to Julien Moutte, vice president of technology, Bentley Systems is creating a sensor data service to manage connectivity to smart devices and analyse the data they collect, brought in from Azure IoT Hub or Amazon IoT Edge.

The company’s experience with integrat ing enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning or asset management systems, is enabling it to create an enter prise data federation service, to expose a simple yet secure API to connect custom ers’ enterprise data to their digital twins.

Bentley also has a new mesh export service, which will enable digital twins to appear in the Metaverse and in game engines. It will use the best format depending on output, whether that is USD for Nvidia Omniverse, DataSmith for Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, glTF for Unity, and many more.

The problem with digital twin data, Moutte pointed out, is that it is usually very large and any changes require a complete reload into these game engines. The solution to this challenge comes in the format of 3DFT – 3D Fast Transmission. The technology uses

streaming, meaning users no longer download entire models, but only that which is visible in the viewport. See page 36 for more on this.

That’s a wrap

At Bentley Systems, digital twins are the new BIM. Now that’s a loaded sentence if ever there were one, so I will explain fur ther. Producing a model to generate dumb drawings may well be a means to an end today, but Bentley figures that there are many more benefits to be had in talking to and repurposing a virtual model. More benefits, in fact, than today’s somewhat limited workflows support.

The vast majority of BIM models, after all, are created to produce drawing sets and then not reused. Bentley wants to drive that digital thread on throughout the life cycle, and digital twins is the next destina tion after adopting a modelling-based view.

This is a technology approach where Bentley Systems enjoys an impressive industry head-start. Autodesk’s Tandem, for example, only came out last year with an embryonic feature set, limited to deal ing with BIM twins from Revit.

With that in mind, the three iTwin

applications that have been released by Bentley look set to simplify and lower the barrier to entry for more resistant cus tomers, enabling them to experiment with the iTwin platform.

Bentley’s vision makes a lot of sense of its 2015 acquisition of Acute3D, which led to the ContextCapture capabilities that allow customers to ‘grab’ data relat ing to existing real-world assets, ready for its inclusion in digital twins. After all, the vast majority of assets don’t cur rently have a corresponding BIM model at the ready to drive their digital twin, so most of them will still need to be cap tured by drones using photogrammetry and some laser scans.

But what about Bentley customers with no plans at all to get into ‘twinning’? Here, there is good news, because the new iTwin features due to arrive in Bentley’s desktop software portfolio will still benefit existing workflows, extend ing their connectivity and collaboration capabilities. And, if such customers do feel the need to explore twinning further down the line, every application will be ‘twin ready’ in the coming years.

■ www.bentley.com

iTwin IoT for acquiring and analysing sensor data

iTwin Capture, for capturing, analysing, and sharing reality data

All images courtesy of Bentley Systems

Q&A: Keith Bentley, Bentley Systems

At Bentley Systems’ recent ‘Year in Infrastructure’ event, we got the chance to catch up with CTO Keith Bentley and get his perspective not only on the company’s iTwin technology, but also the ‘platformification’ of the design software world

Astudy of Bentley Systems’ cur rent marketing output could easily bamboozle the reader with its terminology and fool them into thinking that the company’s only focus is now digital twins. For any one led down that path, it’s important to keep in mind that the company is still sol idly built around a single platform (MicroStation), its core DGN format, and its broad array of design and project management tools.

At the same time, the digital twin mes saging and focus on iTwin services are about more than just marketing. In fact, they signify an important technology pro gression, from file-based, project mile stone workflows to live databases that can ultimately be integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) and Bentley iTwin services for infrastructure lifecycles.

The first stage of this transition came with the introduction of the iModel back in 2007. An iModel is Bentley’s informa tion container for data exchange — a self-

describing, geometrically precise, portable and secure entity, containing the history of file changes and encapsulating informa tion regardless of its original source, be that a Bentley tool or software from anoth er vendor. Then, in 2017, Bentley launched iModel.js, version 2.0 of its iModel tech nology, providing spatial and unit align ment between the contents of iModels. At the same time, iModelHub was also intro duced, in order to handle change manage ment, time stamping and allocating chang es to team members to support managed digital workflows.

As iModel.JS developed, it became clear that it was going to contain and do a lot more than just manage iModels. Its new roles included connecting to IoT devices, connecting and streaming geometry to Unreal Engine, storing reality data, and so on. It was renamed iTwin.js to reflect this expanded vision — a move that has caused some understandable confusion.

From there, Bentley open-sourced iTwin.js on Github under an MIT licence.

The thinking here was that an open approach to users’ data is necessary because digital twin information will never come from a single source, requires a fusion of formats and has many layers. With this methodology, it’s possible for anyone to leverage the open-source code to create, query, modify and display infra structure digital twins.

At Bentley Systems’ ‘Year in Infrastructure’ (YII) event, held in London in November 2022, we sat down with the company’s CTO and co-founder Keith Bentley to get his views on how this signif icant technology progression is unfolding.

Martyn Day for AEC Magazine (MD): Keith, I’d like to start by asking whether you can define a Bentley data lake work flow without concentrating on iTwins?

Keith Bentley for Bentley Systems (KB): We purposely use the iTwin brand to describe what I call ‘Phase Two’. Here’s what’s going to happen: You are using

MicroStation, just plain old MicroStation. It’s the lowest common denominator. Everybody understands MicroStation — and here, I’m not saying you need a prod uct like OpenRoads to get any value out of iTwins. What I am saying is you can be using products, and I expect many people will be using STAAD and other products that they have bought, where there is no such thing as a digital twin.

Over many years, you’ve built up a workflow that works. Of course, it involves DGN files for our products, mostly DGN. It might involve creating, exporting, importing SketchUp files etcetera. There’s a workflow that people use today to get their jobs done, and the output of their job is not a digital twin. In fact, it is largely drawings. So, what we’re going to do is deliver a version of MicroStation next year. It will have, with in it, an engine, but it’s the iTwin plat form embedded inside MicroStation.

So you’re using MicroStation, you’re opening up a DGN. These DGNs are being

managed in ProjectWise, or you are using another file share service. The digital twin doesn’t change the way you start. You start with that DGN file and you’re going to end your session with that DGN file.

During your session, you modify a bunch of elements, you add a bunch of elements. The iTwin engine is running in the background and you either select to synchronise - or it can happen automati cally, when you exit at the end of your session. Now, you’ve got an iModel. This is synchronised with all the changes that you’ve made and your DGN files are still your master file.

Now you have an iModel sitting on your desk, updated with the changes you just made to the DGN file. What good does that get you? For one thing, it gives you the ability to invite somebody else who has a web browser to look at the changes you just made. They are my changes, they haven’t been published by anybody other than me. I can now syn chronise with the iTwin server.

Today, the way it works in the demos that we’ve been showing at YII, with our iTwin format, customers change the data on their desktop, they push that up to the cloud, where we run a copy of a pro gramme that effectively mirrors MicroStation in the cloud and it updates the iModel in the cloud.

The phase lag can be minutes, hours, depending on many things — but usually, people don’t do it often. Instead, they only do this at project milestones, only when they then generate the PDFs for the milestone. The iModel is always out of sync, it’s not up to date, nobody has it on their desk. So nobody thinks of it when you’re using MicroStation as being rele vant to the job.

But because you now have an iModel, you don’t have to do any extra work and use a different tool to create the iModel. You didn’t end up with a different DGN file. It’s the very same DGN file. Now, when you’re at the point where you’re going to push your changes to

‘‘

Drawings are stupid and the goal of BIM is to automate drawing creation ’’

ProjectWise, we push them into an iMod el on your desktop. So now there’s an iModel that exists that includes all the users’ changes — but only the changes between milestones get recorded. They don’t include the changes in between milestones. But now the iModel has the ability to store the whole team’s collabo ration history.

MD: Will this support real-time collabo ration?

KB: In MicroStation or OpenRoads today, you have a DGN file, you have it locked, perhaps I have a copy of it. But I can’t make any changes. We can’t change the way that that works. Those locks are there so we don’t conflict. It doesn’t change that. This iModel is merely a jour nal of what happened. It doesn’t include new capabilities for you and to be on the same model at the same time. It’s a cache, but it’s more than a cache, as it’s been transformed and combined.

If we were working on a project togeth er, people segregate their data into files, for locking purposes. We have to decide who takes what file and what part of the

can do. We can give you the tools that we’ve written to do carbon footprint anal ysis, clash detection, consistency checks, etcetera. We can run that against the iModel on your desktop. And it didn’t cost you anything, because you already paid for that computer. If you don’t use the cycles, they go to waste. If we run it in the cloud, somebody’s got to charge you and give you feedback. The iModel tells you when someone else just changed something that affected the thing you’re working on. So we can start improving the process of creating the data, even though the master copy is still a DGN file. People will start to recognise that iModel isn’t ‘an output’, it’s just sort of ‘always there’. It’s a second copy of my data. So why do you need two copies of your data? Well, because we can’t change the way that OpenRoads works with DGN data, as well as other data files and stuff.

MD: Will you start rewriting the apps to use iModel as the new format?

KB: If you have been using OpenRoads for a long time, you are now going to have some new features that are going to be in

KB: Covid didn’t really hurt us. When you think about adoption of new technologies, people were way more interested in doing things differently during Covid. They had to do things differently. If it hadn’t been for Covid, I don’t think we would have been able to convince people to start to have digital design review meetings. Online meetings were necessary because they couldn’t physically be in the office. They were presented with a fact: the old way couldn’t be the current way.

We need to go fast. But we should expect that only incremental change gets adopted. But what I hope is that, in the mental world view of the designer using MicroStation, they think their purpose in life is not to modify the DGN, but to mod ify the iModel. Even though to modify the model, they first modify the DGN file, DWG or RVT, even if they’re going to use a different tool. But when they’re done, they’re going to look at what’s in the iModel, what’s in the digital twin.

I know you think “There’s that term” — that term ‘digital twin’, which you say that not many people want to hear. But I don’t think they don’t want to create a digital twin. When they get paid for it,

‘‘

project will be done in that file. And another user is going to work on a differ ent project — otherwise, you can’t write to them at the same time. In the iModel, they’re all combined. They’re geo-located, so that if you’re using five different tools inside the same iModel, I can do a query and find everything in this volume of space - and that’s really hard to do in a DGN. They’re also synchronised, right, so that you have this journal of change and you can push that to the cloud.

So, for now, the iModel someone else creates for me is on my desk. Now what? Well, there are some really cool things we

the iTwin model. Maybe it’s in a separate window, but wouldn’t it be really cool if we then start adding some new capabili ties that are in the iModel part of it? Over time, the iModel part of it grows and the DGN part of it shrinks, and by the time we are done, you’ve gone through the transition and you are only working on iModels. It’s not going to happen all at once. It’s going to take years. It has taken us five years to get us to where we are now. Do you think that’s quick for the AEC industry? [laughs]

MD: Was this because of Covid?

they will care about it. When we start giving them ways that they can be more productive, add more value, they’ll wish for a digital twin.

MD: But people naturally switch off when a message gets repetitive. It’s always about change. How about them getting value from the stuff that’s already been paid for and delivered?

KB: I do concede that. But I think a digi tal twin is a big thing. Drawings are stu pid and the goal of BIM is to automate drawing creation. And here’s an easy

When people say files are bad, they mean that loose files, lots of files, are bad. One big file, like an iModel, is still a file and it’s a big file — like a gigabyte file — but they are in a database and that means they are as open as we can make them ’’

step forward. I want the world view to be that, at the end of a design session or after a period of work, users think: “I’m going to commit my changes now and modify the digital twin.” And, in the case of our users, an iTwin.

DGN files are of course important. You can’t throw them away — but everyone who’s looking at my work and comment ing on whether or not a change had some kind of positive or negative impact, they’re going to evaluate the iModel. We have to get people using smart tools to analyse the current state of projects and looking at past stages of other similar projects to get feedback. I don’t think that’s going to happen with a bunch of loose DGN and RVT files being the input for machine learning, especially not when they’re all in different coordinate systems.

MD: At our NXT BLD event, and in AEC Magazine, we’ve been covering industry initiatives to get data out of proprietary file formats and into data bridges that span the silos and deliver entity-level exchanges. What’s your view on that?

KB: Well, that’s another reason why I assert that automatic creation of iModels is better. With OpenRoads and DGN, it’s a great product — but while the product is called ‘Open’, the data is not. It’s open

by interface but, in reality, there’s noth ing we can do to make DGN files open, even if we wanted to. To publish the for mat of a DGN file, we would have to pub lish a bunch of code. It’s miserable, because even if we documented it all, it wouldn’t make sense, as it’s kind of defined internally to represent the data in memory that OpenRoads uses.

When people say files are bad, they mean that loose files, lots of files, are bad. One big file, like an iModel, is still a file and it’s a big file — like a gigabyte file — but they are in a database and that means they are as open as we can make them.

So another large difference between iModels and let’s say Revit RVT files is that I don’t send you my iModel, I just send you my changes. And these transac tional changes are small, even if the data base is big. I don’t even know what kind of change it would be that would end up having touched every object making a modification to every object.

Looking ahead

While our conversation mainly wan dered around in the weeds of industry data structures, these are fundamental concepts when it comes to understanding how the AEC industry is likely to change over the next five to ten years.

Platforms being designed today cannot

deliver productivity enhancing capabili ties if they are based on old data schemas. As Keith Bentley pointed out, drawings are dumb.

For Bentley to help its customers tran sition to an iTwin outlook, iModels are fundamental to future direction, and it was fascinating to return to this topic. Somehow, this point has got somewhat lost in the deluge of messaging around iTwin and the wider digital twin focus.

The move to build in automated/paral lel iModel creation perhaps indicates that previous innovative work at Bentley has failed to gain traction, in an industry that can be notoriously slow to adopt new technology.

If the success of the iTwin technology relies on the uptake and proliferation of iModels, things need to change. Over the next few years, iModel looks set to quiet ly replace DGN-centric workflows at the core of MicroStation, bringing new capa bilities and features. Even customers that are not explicitly planning to deliver digi tal twins will nevertheless be ‘digital twin ready’.

Bentley executives are keen to point out that files will never disappear from the process — and this is a company that I have only ever seen change its core file format once. So I trust Bentley to deliver this tran sition without disruption to customers. ■ www.bentley.com

Monitoring asset health in real-time

Bentley is starting to carve out real niches in the AECO sector apply ing its broad portfolio of technol ogies to solve specific problems. In recent years, monitoring and inspection has become a big focus - assessing the health of a wide range of infrastructure assets from telecommunication towers and bridges to rail and dams.

Early solutions focused solely on pho togrammetry, applying machine learning (ML) and object recognition to 3D reality meshes captured by drones. But through acquisition and investment, Bentley has been expanding the technologies that can contribute to the ‘digital twin’ from design to construction.

In 2021 Bentley acquired sensemetrics and Vista Data Vision, providers of soft ware for Internet of Things (IoT) applica tions that allow digital twins to incorpo rate real-time sensor data. The tools sup port interfaces to hundreds of different sensors and related data types, including inclinometers, piezometers, strain gaug es, crack meters, and many more.

These tools have now been integrated into Bentley’s iTwin platform in the form of a new product - iTwin IoT - that can be used to monitor, in real time, a range of environmental changes, such displace ments, vibrations, deterioration, settle ments and more; the idea being that any change on the condition of an asset can prompt interventions when necessary.

Bentley is now marrying iTwin IoT with iTwin Capture (a new product for capturing, analysing, and sharing reality data) to create two new solutions designed for real-time health monitoring - AssetWise Bridge Monitoring and AssetWise Dam Monitoring.

These solutions are not necessarily designed to eliminate in situ rope access inspections, but help consultants keep a

close eye on the asset and develop a more informed inspection plan from the com fort of the office.

Monitoring dams

AssetWise Dam Monitoring employs a particularly diverse range of technolo gies, starting with the obligatory reality model captured by all manner of drones to create the foundation for a digital twin.

Early iterations of the product were able to use sensors to provide specific feedback about the dam, such as how much settle ment was happening in a certain place or how much flow was causing pitting on the concrete. But, according to Santanu Das, chief acceleration officer, Bentley Systems, it was missing one big element, “We couldn’t predict where these cracks were, how deep the cracks were and what kind of crack propagation would cause prob lems in the future - the insights.”

Bentley looked to Niricson, a Canadian startup that had developed an AI-based predictive analytics SaaS platform designed to verify the structural integrity of concrete structures. The company has several hydro dam owners and engineer ing consulting firms as clients.

Rather than pursuing an acquisition, Bentley made an investment in Niricson through Bentley iTwin Ventures, a $100m corporate venture capital fund specifically set up to invest into AEC startups.

Niricson’s technology uses acoustic sensors on drones to go deep behind the concrete where the rebar is, then applies AI and ML to the reality model to figure out exactly where the spalling is happen ing. This is in stark contrast to traditional on-site methods, which leave a lot to interpretation, as Das explains, “Today, inspectors use a hammer, they listen for that void to see exactly where a lot of this delamination or cracking is happening.”

Armed with this information, engi neering consultants can then precisely locate IoT sensors to monitor the dam moving more effectively forward.

With the open nature of the iTwin plat form, data from Niricson’s Autospex soft ware can then be fed into Bentley’s AssetWise Dam Monitoring product, then married with the reality model and sensemetric IoT data to see cracking anal ysis superimposed with temperature, dis placement, vibrations and other metrics.

“An operator of a dam now has the abil ity to get information from disparate dif ferent repositories and sources under a single pane to look at some insightsexactly what’s happening to their asset,” says Das.

Closing the loop

The story doesn’t end there. Bentley is also exploring how simulation can be used more effectively to study the future impact of cracks and other forms of degradation on dams and other concrete structures.

Bentley recently acquired Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software devel oper Adina, whose non-linear technology is well suited to analysing existing struc tures. “[Adina] shines when you have an asset, and this is how it really is - it’s degraded, it’s spalled, it’s cracked, it’s cor roded. It can answer the question - what is the strength that remains?” said Raoul Karp, VP engineering simulation, Bentley Systems.

Results from simulations could be married up against data from sensors that have recorded the response of the structure over time. This allows the model to be calibrated more precisely so it can more accurately predict future events, and what needs to be done to min imise their impact, further closing the loop on the digital twin.

From reality modelling and IoT sensors, to AI and simulation, Bentley is drawing on a vast portfolio of technologies to monitor infrastructure assets, such as dams, over time, writes Greg Corke

Digital twin technology:

a Trojan horse for systemic and cultural change in AEC?

By Bola Abisogun OBE, digital director, BIM Academy

When it comes to diversity of thought, technology has created something of a level playing field. In construction, it’s getting tougher and tougher to achieve true competitive advantage, in both the design and con struction phases and beyond.

The business case for digital twin tech nology is that intelligence collected, mined and shared in the twinning pro cess translates to reduced risk and great er return on investment. These are clear ly desirable outcomes — so why then has the adoption of this technology been so slow in construction, especially when compared to other industries?

The client-facing decision to construct an asset ‘with the end in mind’ is based on the idea that it is possible and advan tageous to first design and build an asset virtually. But when faced with tight schedules and insufficient time to pro cure a design team, the level of detail achieved in the traditional design process often falls far short of the goal of ‘asbuilt’ information. In other words, we’re

still not delivering detailed, asset-tagged, data-rich 5D models prior to construc tion. This objective has never been fully understood and embraced by the indus try and remains vastly undervalued by commissioning clients. A full under standing and appreciation of the princi ples of end-to-end, whole-life cycle, design management must be pri oritised by the client if we are ever to achieve a net zero future.

The critical component of a successful project is typically measured across three key pil lars: cost, time and quality.

During the traditional construc tion delivery process, it is often difficult to ensure that the right design informa tion is continuously provided across the entire value chain and acted upon accordingly.

It’s a shameless challenge to tradi tional ways of

working, this notion of a digitally ena bled, data-driven solution, complete with visualisation, that captures granular detail in real time. The cultural behav iours of project participants typically result in one of two responses across the ecosystem of actors: fear or inspiration.

But here’s the thing: while digital twins have been used for years in other sectors — for example, in avi ation and manufacturing— the global construction sector con tinues to push back when it comes to this innovation. The real value to project participants, funders and wider society is gravely misunderstood.

Fit for purpose

A digital twin is a virtual represen tation of a sys tem, asset or pro cess. It can collect real-time infor mation about the

asset via an architecture of sensors and other interdependent technologies. Using advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) algo rithms, it is possible to gain detailed insights into the function of a building dur ing design, construction and on through to occupation. (In the case of Grenfell Tower, for example, this might be the fitness for purpose of a proposed specification.)

In essence, the proposi tion here is that the value of a physical asset becomes greater thanks to its connec tion with a virtual twin.

While the global market for digital twin technolo gies is expected to grow by up to 40% cumulatively year on year, achieving an estimated market value of between $16 billion and $20 billion by 2023, the real challenge remains a cultural one.

For many clients/stakeholders, be they development or investment companies, a better understanding of project constraints is needed in order to determine and expe

dite project viability, as part of the wider risk-evaluation process. And here, the real challenge is the ability to collaborate close ly, openly and seamlessly.

To my mind, there is no better environ ment than a virtual one in which to under take this informed and collaborative pro cess. In effect, a digital twin represents the possibility of a ‘try before you buy’ offer.

In fact, I would go one step further. A digital twin workflow, robustly built on a common data environment (or CDE), can be used to assemble a detailed history of the entire decision-making process, in a way that provides complete confidence for any third parties who seek to acquire the asset in future.

In the UK, the post-pandemic business case for digital twins (an argument forti fied by the tragic events at Grenfell Tower) has been further strengthened by the Building Safety Act 2022. We are now looking at the very real prospect of the ‘pre-construction’ digital twin becoming a day-to-day reality in our industry.

But real questions remain. In a post-Grenfell environ ment, where cost of capital will be directly correlated with the net carbon intensity of all project-level opera tions, will digital twin tech nology become the only fea sible way to deliver projects that command whole lifecy cle metrics on actual performance beyond the construction phase?

And perhaps more importantly, will the sector be ready and adequately skilled to deliver on this ambition, in a world where accountability for our actions as qualified professionals may become a real indicator of project viability?

‘‘

Will digital twin technology become the only feasible way to deliver projects that command whole lifecycle metrics on actual performance beyond the construction phase? ’’

Autodesk Tandem: digital twin update

Ajourney of a thousand miles begins with a single step. In keeping with that maxim, the 2021 launch version of Autodesk’s cloud-based digital twin plat form Tandem showcased only a fraction of the capabilities that might eventually be expected on the company’s journey to flesh out the product.

Autodesk started where it needed to start, working predominantly with Revit data, to come up with a platform capable of supporting the rapid display and filter ing of Revit BIM data.

To do this, the team created a new parallel file format, removing unnec essary and heavier ele ments of Revit data not required in downstream maintenance and facili ties management. This decision immediately delivered a side benefit of making Tandem a great Revit model viewing tool.

Since then, more has been made clear. Ahead of the 2022 Autodesk University event, the Tandem team held a public Zoom call for interested parties who wanted to see the capabilities it plans to deliver. While vanilla in func tionality, the demonstration of this initial offering made it clear that Autodesk is aiming to put a lot more ‘meat on the bones’ in the year ahead.

In particular, Autodesk developer Kean Walmsley’s Project Dasher work on sen sor technology and 3D rendering tech niques ranks high on the list of potential forthcoming features. (This is a develop ment I pondered in an earlier article on

Tandem (www.tinyurl.com/tandem-aec) However, I should point out that accord ing to Autodesk’s Safe Harbor statement, displayed immediately before the start of the Tandem session on Zoom, features demonstrated may or may not appear in the shipped product.

Opening remarks

The session opened with an explanation by Bob Bray, VP & general manager, Autodesk Tandem, of the company’s long-term aims for the product and the role it sees digital twins playing in the AEC process.

“We really think about how we help our AEC customers [of] today become the digital twin providers of tomorrow. And that’s through this notion of digital hando ver,” he said. “How do we harness the process that we all use today in terms of delivering projects, to really create that digital twin, with all of those connections to operation al systems and data, intact at handover?

He continued: “We think about the ini tial twin as being a descriptive twin. What are the spaces? What are the equip ment, the assets in that facility? How are those things connected together into sys tems to create that replica of the build ing?”

Autodesk aims to show operational information in the context of that digital twin and start to draw some insights from connected assets, pieces and systems, as well as live operational data, said Bray. “Then [we want to move] downstream

into the ability to take that collected data and create predictive insights, like when might this component fail, based on past history of similar components in my port folio of facilities, and then moving on to run simulation of a comprehensive twin and eventually the idea of a twin that can self-tune and self-heal the building.”

Building tools

This being Autodesk, no product would be complete without some way to encour age third-party developers to build on top of the base solution — and that requires robust APIs (application programming interfaces) and SDKs (software develop ment kits). With Tandem being a cloudbased application, web APIs will be essential to connect and extend Autodesk’s digital twin offering.

Bray outlined Autodesk’s API / SDK approach as follows: “The Tandem plat form is built on Autodesk Forge. This starts with this idea of a low-level API that provides access to all the asset infor mation, access to any of the event history and time-series data that’s being collect ed. Then a slightly higher-level SDK is built around the ability to create a custom digital twin that wraps around that, if that’s the desired effect.”

Bray went on to state that Autodesk envisages building a long-term market place of vertical integrations to various content management systems (CMSs), integrated database management systems (IDMSs) and other types of operational solutions, as well as custom data analyt ics. Ideally, these would be simple plugins that could be repurposed across mul tiple sites and multiple tools, without needing a lot of new coding and reducing

1 Colour-coding to show which elements still need classifying

2 3 3D coloured heat maps can be be used to show real time temperature, humidity, CO2 levels and more

4 Building workspace alerts

Internet of Things (IoT)

New features in development were dem onstrated using a digital twin of Autodesk’s downtown Toronto office, which is fitted with IoT sensors and a building management system (BMS), modelled in Revit, and then connected to a live Tandem representation.

The session showed how it is possible to interrogate the BMS and see flow rates, CO2 levels and humidity across 90 zones over multiple floors and various MEP sys tems. These connections can be achieved via individual or batch collection, or from IoT hub import from Microsoft Azure.

Using a template structure, the capture data can be easily defined, tagged, mapped and reformatted. This is essen tial, since IoT and BMS implementations differ widely in how they package up and format data and because consistency of data is paramount. While you can see snapshot data in the streams panel, it’s also possible to see charts for individual devices over time and drill down deeper into the underlying data.

Numbers and graphs are great for spe cifics, but a new feature in development supports 3D coloured heat maps across entire floors. This is achieved by allocat ing units and sensors to individual spaces and zones, enabling these heat maps to display temperature, humidity, CO2 levels and so on. This makes it easy for building managers to identify problem areas and drill down into the information to predict potential hardware failures. In the future, Autodesk sees this data forming the basis of an alert system.

Spaces and workspaces

Tandem organises data into four catego ries: assets, spaces, systems and streams.

Assets are individual items, such as a chair. A system would be MEP, for exam ple. Streams are inputs from a building’s sensors and management systems.

But when is a space a space? It’s impor tant to be able to slice and dice and navi gate areas of a building and collate equip ment and sensors together. Here, Tandem relies heavily on Revit’s concept of spaces when importing the BIM model. But when defining a room, you will have transitional MEP elements, façade ele ments and other systems running through them.

Post import, it’s possible to define groups of assets, elements, devices and transitional ele ments as they belonging to a specific space; these could be floors or rooms, for exam ple. Once these are defined, navigation throughout the building can be fast. Tandem also offers fast floorplan generation show ing the space allocation.

Workspaces are a togglea ble prototype capability that offer unique configura tions to address the individ ual needs of specific users with role / per mission access controllable by a site admin. We were given two examples: a digital twin handover (digital twin build ers) and facility monitoring (systems and sensor data monitoring).

In the data validation workspace, the user is building the digital twin in Tandem. They can see all sources of data being imported to the workspace, the version history and the time data was updated. Also, Workspaces show the classifications that can be allocated to

imported objects (assets, spaces, sys tems, streams), together with a colourcoded progress system to indicate how much more work is needed to apply dig ital twin mapping to the imported geom etry. There are an array of filters that enable the user to quickly see what remains to be defined / tagged.

Within the Operate category, we saw the facility monitoring workspace. This shows the digital twin with all event data from IoT sensors and highlighting notifi cations, which automatically alert the user when sensors report findings that fall outside of predefined parameters.

Tandem can then show the sensors in the model that are out of range, ena bling operations teams to drill down deeper into problems.

Workspaces appears to be the way Autodesk is approaching the various roles that fall within Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM). There are unique work spaces for common job roles, for example, and this approach ensures that data is man aged by an admin, while users are pro vided with just the functionality and level of detail that is appropriate to their responsibilities. I am sure there will be many additional Workspaces to come.

Portfolio concepts

Autodesk is also looking at how Tandem handles multiple buildings, as well as multiple campuses in different regions and countries. To facilitate this, the team is developing new interfaces and naviga

tion front-ends for multi-building and international clients. Here, customers should ensure that they have good inter nal standards that govern how every building in a portfolio is managed, ensur ing that the same quality metrics are applied and that data mapping is support ed across multiple facilities. Autodesk is developing templates for this.

Conclusion

The updates scheduled for Tandem rep resent a significant leap forward from what was available in the initial release of this product. Tandem is still very Revit-focused, but to be fair, RVT is the market-leading format for BIM data in many regions.

It’s also clear that Autodesk is working to make digital twins and dashboarding a lot less complex, through the delivery of a plug-and-play system of components, in an area where projects have previously relied heavily on a great deal of custom programming and bootstrapping. While implementations may still require some tailoring, a configurable system is still eas ier and cheaper to deploy than a custommade digital twin created from scratch.

The colour mapping feedback of build ings is simple but compelling, offering easy to interpret information, and alert/ notification capabilities from sensors and spaces will help back up alerts with extra detail.

One year on from launch, the team is now tackling a number of complex issues that take the Tandem platform way beyond its core definition. There is still a lot of work to be done, and many other data types to be considered — but what Tandem does today, it does well. ■

‘‘

Tandem is still very Revitfocused, but to be fair, RVT is the market-leading format for BIM data in many regions ’’

STAY FOCUSED, DESIGN MORE.

With powerful improvements to automated design, documentation, and collaboration workflows, and professional out-of-the-box visualization solutions, Archicad 26 lets you focus on what you do best: design great buildings.

Archicad 26 introduces faster, more accurate documentation with fewer manual workarounds thanks to powerful enhancements to the documentation workflow.

Learn more on graphisoft.com

Szervita Square Building DVM Group, dvmgroup.com, Hungary

How architects can help the Metaverse live up to its hype

By Roderick Bates, head of integrated practice, Enscape | Part of Chaos

The metaverse is set to go main stream, with the potential to be a $200 billion market by 2024, according to an estimate by ana lysts at Bloomberg.

Achieving this level of success will require the metaverse to become a desti nation that people want and need to visit. Architects, more than any other profes sion, understand what is required to cre ate compelling environments, placing the profession in a unique position to take a lead in bringing definition to the metaverse.

Currently, the ultimate metaverse vision of a sin gle, universal and immer sive virtual world — facili tated by the use of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets — exists only as a hypothetical.

While some components and technologies are availa ble today, it certainly isn’t universal, existing on a lim ited number of disconnect ed platforms like Roblox, Decentraland, Fortnite and Mona. For the metaverse to live up to the hype, it needs to become far more inter connected, enabling the type of collabora tion and immersion previously only pos sible in the built environment.

Architects could lead the way Long-time experts in creating the built environment, architects and designers are well ahead of the game and poised to take the lead in the metaverse’s creation.

The modern architectural design pro

cess requires teams well-versed in design technologies including BIM, 3D render ing and virtual reality to create immer sive virtual spaces that showcase projects before they are actually built.

In addition to that creative process, there’s also a requirement for the design and delivery of a building to be highly collaborative, capable of engaging a wide range of stakeholders and consultants, while also operating within strict con straints when it comes to building codes, financial costs and physics. If one were to look for a cohort prepped and ready to take on the challenge of designing the metaverse, they would be hard pressed to find a bet ter group than architects.

As metaverse develop ment advances, architects have the opportunity to capitalise on their expertise honed in the delivery of building in the physical world to lead the way in designing and delivering metaverse architecture governed by a new, and in some ways liberating, set of constraints.

For example, instead of considering circulation requirements and climatically driven water manage ment strategies, architects can design spaces where occupants can teleport to, from and within a building. The pesky rules of physics, including water penetra tion risk, no longer apply.

Perhaps even more importantly, archi tects understand the ethical implications that come with designing environments

for people. To quote from the American Institute of Architects, they have a long standing professional obligation to “design for human dignity and the health, safety and welfare of the public.”

From architects’ experience using visu al communication tools during the design process, and from studying the way build ings interact with their occupants, archi tects can bring to the metaverse a muchneeded ethical awareness of how it might affect users, for both good and bad. With their ethical standards, architects can be a key voice for ensuring the metaverse is a constructive environment, rather than a new medium for manipulation.

While the metaverse may be in its ascendency there is clearly room for archi tects to assert themselves and help the metaverse realise its potential and move from trend to established technology.

A metaverse architecture

Despite skill alignment, it can be chal lenging for architects to identify the right metaverse entry points. Here are three tips on defining opportunities and taking the first steps toward metaverse develop ment projects:

Consider areas ripe for metaverse development

There are several key sectors that are prime for early metaverse development. These include commerce spaces that help companies showcase their products; media and entertainment spaces, includ ing concert venues, fashion runways and galleries; and virtual offices for companies to develop and manage the critical collabo ration spaces they need for contemporary hybrid work environments.

‘‘ Firms can prepare to capture new opportunities by ensuring that they have a keen understanding of the metaverse culture and how its space impacts its users ’’

For example, Danish architecture stu dio BIG recently worked with Vice Media Group, a digital media and broadcasting company, to design a virtual office for Vice employees. Dubbed Viceverse, the project has given the media firm an opportunity to inspire the metaverse com munity and at the same time redefine journalism.

“It’s not about just getting in there and planting a flag. We wanted to do it in style with aesthetics and ideas when creating, so we teamed up with BIG,” said Morten Grubak, global executive creative director of innovation, Vice Media Group.

Global architecture firm IAXR has also embarked on an exciting metaverse pro ject, creating an office space that enables interior designers and project stakehold ers to collaborate virtually. Their metaverse workspace is accessed via VR and acts much like an actual office space with custom workflows that mimic the way they are accustomed to working.

Build a pipeline of opportunities

Architects can begin to identify opportu nities for offering metaverse development by targeting both existing and new cli ents. Firms that don’t yet have a portfolio of metaverse work to share can benefit from building their own presence in the metaverse and offering to develop pro bono metaverse spaces that showcase their talents and capabilities.

For a universe dependent on collabora tion, it makes perfect sense for firms to partner with others to explore metaverse opportunities. They can identify firms or architects that they’d like to work with, ideally those with metaverse experience, and reach out using alternative platforms,

such as Discord, to expand their reach and capabilities and explore potential clients.

Conscientiously market and educate Selling a new service, including metaverse development, requires strategic marketing efforts. This includes market ing the capability as an additional service option to existing clients, for instance offering to build a metaverse commerce space for showcasing products, and advertising to a broader universe of potential clients.

In helping to define the metaverse, architects also have a responsibility to leverage their communication tactics to educate metaverse users, including the general public, about how they can be conscious consumers. Creating a code of

ethics for metaverse projects that can be shared with clients and future users of the metaverse environments can help architects convey this important message.

As the metaverse unfolds, organisations across industries will look to create a stake and turn to architects and designers for guidance and know-how. Firms can prepare to capture these new opportuni ties by ensuring that they have a keen understanding of the metaverse culture and how its space impacts its users. Their success also depends on having the peo ple, workflows, tech stacks and partner ships to build and manage the spaces as they evolve, and to tackle issues as they emerge, including ensuring proper gov ernance and safe, seamless data transfer between platforms.

1 Hasham’s Metaverse: Hisham Laila, Creative Manager www.linkedin.com/in/hishamlaila

2 VICEverse by BIG. Image courtesy of Vice Media www.vicemediagroup.com

Technology

Bentley Systems has developed a new technology that streams models from its iTwin platform on demand, into the visually rich environment of Unreal Engine 5.0, writes Greg Corke

When it comes to real-time visualisation, Bentley Systems has followed a familiar path. Much like Autodesk, it first addressed its needs through acquisition – buying e-on soft ware, the developer of LumenRT, in 2015. However, in recent years, it has slowly turned to the major players - Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Unity and Nvidia (Omniverse). And that’s hardly sur prising. These 3D engines / visuali sation platforms have massive development resources, can handle colossal datasets, and offer out of the box support for multiple platforms and devices – desktop, VR, AR and MR.

Beyond files

File-based workflows simply don’t cut it if you want visualisation to become an inte gral and truly influential part of the design process. When designs change, you have to

re-import the model. In a worst-case sce nario, you must re-build your entire viz asset. The workflow is just too fragmented.

On the desktop, applications includ ing Enscape, Lumion, Twinmotion and LumenRT have benefitted from ‘live links’ to many of the major CAD / BIM authoring tools. Move a wall in Revit, Archicad, Rhino or SketchUp and, sec

Greg Demchak of Bentley Systems demonstrating 3DFT at the Year in Infrastructure (YII) event in London Image courtesy of Bentley Systems

Engine 5.0 and (in the future) Unity and Nvidia Omniverse.

It’s important to note here that this iTwin service isn’t just for users of Bentley design and construction soft ware, such as Synchro 4D, MicroStation and OpenRoads Designer. The iTwin platform can quickly bring in data from a whole host of third-party software including Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Navisworks and Civil 3D.

onds later, see that change appear in the visualisation tool - on the desktop and in VR. Most importantly, models are always up to date.

Bentley is now looking to apply this optimised workflow to huge infrastruc ture ‘digital twins’, with a new ‘mesh export service’ that streams data from its iTwin platform on demand, into Unreal

The ‘mesh export service’ is based around a new Bentley tech nology called 3D fast transmission (3DFT). Rather than having to download a huge dataset in its entirety, it streams only what you need to see at any given moment.

Simply reference the iTwin model, and it creates a live link, dynamically stream ing the mesh on demand at different lev els of detail (LoD). According to Greg Demchak, senior director, Digital

Innovation Lab, Bentley Systems, this dynamic streaming is Bentley’s unique IP.

3DFT also takes care of optimising the models automatically, as Julien Moutte, VP, Technology, Bentley Systems, explains, “You can bring very large and complex models to your users. And the performance is still very acceptable, even on mid-size hardware.”

Of course, Moutte’s definition of ‘midsize’ won’t apply in all cases. Unreal Engine 5.0 is very adept at handling large datasets, but some of the models Bentley customers deal with are colossal, tera bytes in size. We can’t imagine many facil ities or cities will not require GPUs that sit at the high-end, especially as render quality and resolution increases.

The graphics processing requires a local GPU. Mesh data is streamed to a local workstation, where it is temporarily cached and processed in Unreal Engine.

At the recent Bentley Year in Infrastructure (YII) event in London, Bentley demonstrated the technology with several datasets, including a water treatment plant from Jacobs, a bridge maintenance project, and a huge 500 mil

lion polygon model of the ITER Experimental Fusion Reactor in France. This fully interactive experience was derived from a snapshot of a Synchro model, showing a specific moment in the construction timeline with all the tempo rary scaffolding. It could be experienced in VR, using the fully immersive Meta Quest Pro, and on a powerwall, where users could teleport around the model using an Xbox controller.

The path to applications

Unreal Engine is very different to push button real time viz tools like Enscape and Twinmotion. “It’s not just a render ing engine, it’s a complete dev environ ment,” explains Demchak. “It’s a C++ toolkit, the UI UX, you can wire up things however you like.”

In terms of development, Bentley has so far provided a means to get huge infra structure models into Unreal Engine very quickly, and stream any changes in near real time. However, there are no ‘products’ per se. The company is looking for cus tomer feedback before it decides if it will build products on top of Unreal Engine.

Of course, AEC firms could also take the lead, using Unreal Engine developers to create their own interactive custom apps for desktop, VR, and MR.

There’s a tonne of directions this could go, from simple collaborative design / review using an iTwin service called issue resolution, to remote bridge inspections streaming in photogrammetry meshes from iTwin Capture. Demchak explains the potential for this to simulate the real world, “You could have avatars, many people walking through the bridge. Instead of a [Microsoft] Teams meeting with 2D graphics of just a face, we can be walking together and identifying issues and talking about it.”

Bentley is also exploring ways to stream IoT data from digital twins into Unreal Engine, pulling data from physical sen sors to provide a real time spatial context for the live information.

Indeed, 3DFT could be key for Bentley for extending the reach of digital twin data, instantly streaming it on demand to your visualisation platform of choice, all while maintaining a single source of truth in the iTwin platform.

Graphisoft’s new architecture for Architecture

It’s no secret that software evolves. Over the years, minor and major chunks are likely to get rewritten. With a major re-architecting programme underway at Graphisoft, Martyn Day speaks to Zsolt Kerecsen VP of Product Development, and Sylwester Pawluk, Director Product Management

Keeping a successful product alive over decades is a big task. Customers want new features, enhancements and improved performance — but they don’t want major user interface changes or the acci dental bugs that sometimes creep in. Doing anything new with a much-loved brand is risky. It’s like changing a tyre on a car moving at 90mph.

Graphisoft’s Archicad product is 40 years old, but has continued to develop over its four decades: from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit, the addition of Windows, its support for multi-threading, and for arti ficial intelligence, Apple Metal and Silicon, other capabilities.

At Graphisoft’s recent 40th birthday party, VP of product development Zsolt Kerecsen gave attendees some insight into the major software architecture changes yet to come. Many are already underway, designed to radically expand the way that Archicad works with the cloud and with future data workflows. These workflows might involve links to disruptive technol ogies such as blockchain, machine learn ing, augmented reality, algorithmic design, generative design and robotic fab rication. In short, Archicad’s code is under continuous review.

One of the most interesting aspects of all this is how Graphisoft plans to use cloud computing, giving users the option to run cloud services locally, either on their desk top or on remote servers in what the com

pany terms the ‘Adaptive Hybrid Framework’. While Autodesk is increas ingly cloud-centric, Graphisoft prefers not to force users to always be hooked up to the cloud and be able to perform process ing locally on their own machines.

With this in mind, I recently spoke to Zsolt Kerecsen, along with his colleague Sylwester Pawluk, Director Product Management, about the changes coming down the line.

Martyn Day for AEC Magazine (MD): Looking back through history, how has Graphisoft looked after Archicad’s code?

Zsolt Kerecsen for Graphisoft (ZK): That’s a really good question. We have to take into consideration that the Archicad is 40 years old. At that time, the architec ture, the thinking of how to build an application, was completely different to how it is today. You had to create layers: database layer, data layer, presentation layer etcetera. The hardware technology, the operating system technology were completely different. And the maturity of the programming languages was differ ent. Forty years ago, there wasn’t real multi-threading, and if you chose to inno vate your new technology, there was no JS. You had to write your own! To add a new technology would require you to take into consideration many, many things, before you introduced it. Even then, it was also quite dangerous,

because rewriting something is always a tricky thing. So we have had to be extremely conscientious. If we went through the process of introducing some new capability, where was the value?

One value, from a software engineering perspective, is that we like to create main tainable code, because someone else will have to continue the programming, or do the maintenance. It’s much easier, of course, from an engineering perspective to maintain code when you maintain good housekeeping, always tidying things up as you go along.

But what happened 20, 30 years ago? All companies wanted to get to market as quickly as possible, and they didn’t really care about how ‘nice’ the code was. Investors were interested in how quickly you could get the product on to the street and recoup the investment. This meant that many different software architec tures were created and we had to main tain those.

At that time, the most important code was written as monolithic applications. We had so many really big applications like SAP or Oracle, and software compa nies realised that this monolithic code, after 20 years of development, became huge mountains — not easy to manage, to modify, to find bugs, to re-architect or rewrite. It was a never-ending story. About 20 years ago, the industry started breaking down applications into smaller, more manageable parts.

It’s a very similar journey to what Graphisoft did, creating monolithic code. There was tons of engineering, architectur al, structural, mechanical, plumbing knowledge inside. As software engineers, we had to sit down, think and calculate where the real value was. In some cases, we would identify a capability that was a small service and rewrite it. In other cases, we found that there were one million lines of code and we didn’t want to rewrite it again, because it took many years to create.

If we can define a functionality border, then we can make the code a service, by adding an interface. Then we can set the right API (Application Programming Interface) on how to connect to that. We have tons of APIs to let third-party devel opers create content on top of Archicad and we also use them internally.

With respect to your question, what have we done already is we started this separation. But in parallel to this work, we also reflowed and started to renew the APIs, not just in a programmatic way, but also in a philosophical way. We are going to create a robust layer for APIs, because of security, speed and to more easily sup port scripting languages or new languag es, because the basis of Archicad is C++, which is a very robust, very fast and secure implementation. But now we can add additional languages like Python or other scripting languages, if needed.

It’s work that is all happening in paral lel. We are also renewing the entire test

automation system, too. After checking every test solution on the market, we decided to write our own, because none of them were good enough from a speed and functionality perspective to be able to check the desktop code with many other applications. With the new test automation framework, and with welldefined APIs, we have dramatically sped up our testing time, whilst dramatically decreasing the number of test cases we have to run again and again.

MD: And am I right in thinking it must be even more complex for Graphisoft to programme, test and maintain Archicad, because you support multiple operating systems: Windows and MacOS?

ZK: Exactly. And it’s even worse than that, in fact, because when we started, there was just Windows, and then Apple, but now Apple has two different types: Intel and Apple Silicon. And it was just recent ly announced that Microsoft is coming out with an ARM version of Windows as well. So that’s actually four platforms that we will have to support in our portfolio. It’s another reason why we have to completely rethink how we are going to organise our development and deployment.

Stepping back a little bit, everything is about user experience. And user experi ence has three main aspects. One is the security and stability — we call this quali

ty. We have to ensure that for customers who are using Archicad, the data will be 100%, 200% safe, whether it’s on the cloud or on the desktop. We need to guarantee that there will be no data loss. Without that assurance, any kind of nice functionality you offer will not be appreciated. Stability, too, is important. The software should run properly, and I’m not just talking here about functionality, but about ensuring that what the user sees, they get. So together, this is quality.

Second is performance. Speed is super important. BIM cannot be super slow, of course, and younger users will not wait long for a function to react. We have to consider the overall user experience of performance, from functionality to work flow, and how easily they can use the UI.

Finally, go-to-market speed is also super important. This concerns how quickly we react to anything, how quickly we can deploy to a customer and how quickly we react to customer needs. This applies to fixing or adding something. On the engineering side, with what we are building with this new architecture, the underlying philosophy inside of every thing is the continuous integration and continuous delivery [CI/CD] concept. When code is a monolithic and full-desk top application, it’s hard to do that, as the customer has to reinstall the desktop application when new functionality drops. That was another reason why we

Graphisoft’s ‘Adaptive Hybrid Framework’ helps the company bring new technology to market faster

are creating a new framework.

When you install Archicad, you install the frame, where you login, access securi ty and so on. The content’s origin can be hybrid. If you run a desktop application, you have the benefit of deeper access to the operating system and the hardware. Browser-based solutions are limited. The content inside is what we call ‘hybrid’, because at that point, we are going to combine the cloud and desktop parts. You can download locally to utilise your hardware, if that makes you feel better. Alternatively, you can make use of the power of cloud computing, and store lots of data in the cloud, enabling you to work from anywhere. It’s just another possibil ity and totally down to the user.

A big benefit of this separation will be plug-ins or services. Now it’s much easier to create and define the smaller plug-ins. We deliberately call it a plug-in, because as a function, it’s a service that can run locally or in the cloud. Plug-ins work like Lego. You can plug in the elements you need and define what you would like to do, wherever you want to do it.

I mentioned before how quickly we can develop. Decreasing testing time decreas es development time and also makes code cleaner. It also makes it much easi er to manage legacy code. Legacy code can absolutely still be good, and if we can create a new border around that legacy code and put it in a plug-in, we can decide to rewrite it later, when we have a brand-new technology or idea.

we already have three plug-ins complet ed; for example, an analytical model was carved out from the big code, somewhere around 15 million lines of code. The next version of Archicad will already contain some of this new technology.

Sylwester Pawluk for Graphisoft (SP): If you think about Archicad in terms of that human body analogy, then at the right time, it’s critical to be able to recre ate certain parts, when it makes sense. But at the same time, going back to our roadmap and how we build that road map, we also create new things. So we have made a strategic decision to actually make sure that the new things that we create are created in a way that allows that type of follow-on strategy, that allows you to plug it in. From the technol ogy perspective, the code that we are building is really modularised. So it’s much easier to maintain, much easier to integrate with other parts of our systems.

MD: From talking with Autodesk, Bentley and hearing the ideas that Greg Schlusener discussed at NXT BLD

have a fear that if you store your data in the cloud, it’s a little bit harder to support offline work. We still have to support offline work, even if a user is offline for a couple of weeks or months. We have to take into consideration that one of the key benefits of Archicad was that it can run offline mode for quite a long time. In many places, there is no internet or it’s very hard to reliably connect to any kind of services.

It’s worth mentioning that Graphisoft is one of the few companies that supports older, unsupported operating systems as well! We are still supporting Archicad 17! [the current version is 26.] We try to be quite customer-centric and userfocused, of course.

Speed is super important. BIM cannot be super slow, of course, and younger users will not wait long for a function to react. We have to consider the overall user experience of performance, from functionality to workflow, and how easily they can use the UI

SP: Let me give you an example of how we think about technology trends: a cou ple of days ago, Microsoft quietly announced its Windows ARM develop ment kit. From our perspective, we are already looking at that, and we are already thinking seriously about it. We have actually already purchased that development kit, because we want to be among the first ones to support the new platform. If Microsoft comes out with an ARMcompatible operat ing system, manu facturers will jump on it.

Another very important aspect of this plug-in technology is the flexibility it brings when it comes to using different programming methodologies. As I said, the majority of our code is C++ for 3D modelling, when we really rely on the power of the operating system or the hardware. I still think it’s a good choice, and we don’t want to introduce a new technology for that. But for UI or mobile, we can bring in something new without having to reskin the entire software.

MD: In the human body, it takes a full 7 years for every single cell to be replaced. How much of your code is being rewrit ten in this current re-architecting?

ZK: It’s not too big. The good news is that

(www.nxtbld.com/videos/greg-schleusner) , it seems there is a lot of discussion around moving from files to data lakes — a fundamental change in outlook. Is this something that Graphisoft has a plan for, a BIM cloud?

ZK: User experience is our priority. If the user can update frictionlessly, they don’t really care where the data is. If it’s in a file format, or a data lake, or a database — whatever. We just have to ensure that they can record the data at any time they want.

We are absolutely thinking about renewing this part. But here, we are not talking about the focus being where we store the data. The most important part for us is how smoothly we can provide an update for our customers. So we call it a ‘frictionless update’. They just press a button and a new version is there.

With the concept of the data lake, I

MD: And what can you tell me about how you plan to deploy artificial intelli gence in Archicad?

ZK: I’ve been working with AI for around a decade now. And what I have seen is that many companies use an algo rithm and claim it’s AI, when it isn’t. I think where to apply AI is a million dol lar question. Where is the right place in the business to be able to utilise AI from a technology perspective?

I’m working together with my team with universities in Hungary that are researching AI. Big data is the mandato ry part, but how it’s applied, with proba bility theory and so on, means it’s not just the data. I think with our new approach, we will try to implement AI in the cloud first, and then somehow move it to the desktop path. But the first step is defi nitely that big data component.

■ www.graphisoft.com

‘‘

’’

Modumate: BIM

powered by Unreal Engine

1

sent a building with deep enough seman tics that Modumate can automate the production of the three core document types — bill of materials (quantities), drawing set and 3D rendering — as well as the BIM model.”

For now, the team is focusing on the small building market, but with some planned investment, it will be possible to increase Modumate’s capabilities to address MEP and get the necessary performance to drive larger models, larg er projects.

It was only a matter of time before a developer built a building informa tion modelling tool on top of a game engine. As a platform, Epic’s Unreal Engine offers incredible functionality: the ability to work in a high-fidelity realtime environment; a suite of capabilities for importing 3D data; built-in team col laboration; and a constant, ongoing drive to improve frame rate and mesh quality.

While Modumate may be building on the shoulders of a giant, creating a BIM tool is still a hefty development task, par ticularly when you consider its need for structured data and accurate details. The net result of the company’s efforts is a modelling tool that offers a cross between SketchUp, Revit and 3ds Max, with the

visual fidelity of working in a real-time rendered environment.

While modelling an initial design looks very similar to working in SketchUp, it’s a great deal more revolutionary, with a unique approach to building and refining increased levels of detail to ultimately produce a highly detailed building infor mation model. This can be done either solo or through team collaboration, sup porting up to 16 users simultaneously. Take-offs from these sections form the basis of their drawing output.

As Richman Neumann, co-founder and CEO of Modumate, explains: “Modumate has the information density, the integrity, the professional data structure for an architecture team or a builder to repre

According to Neumann, $300 billion out of the trillions of dollars that get spent on construction every year in the US is spent on small buildings. “We found that there’s enough of an under served market there, and it’s the market that is least served by Revit, and there is a lot of greenfield opportunity down stream in the long tail,” he says.

“We think of Modumate as a very com plementary product to Revit, in that it unlocks parts of the market that [Revit] could never touch — the builder and owner who wants a more game-like experience, as well as a faster, more enjoyable workflow for small buildings than Revit offers.”

This approach is similar to the one taken by Higharc, which we covered in the September / October edition of AEC Magazine (www.tinyurl.com/higharc-AEC) At Higharc, developers are working on a new BIM tool aimed at the small house builder in the US, having similarly iden tified that smaller buildings tend to be

AEC Magazine’s hunt for exciting newcomers to the BIM space continues with a conversation with Modumate, a San Franciscobased start-up that has built an architectural design system on top of Unreal Engine from Epic Games

1

3 Modumate model massing graph

4

designed in AutoCAD, rather than Revit, and that an opportunity exists for an interactive, easy-to-use replacement for dumb 2D drawings.

Back at Modumate, Neumann offers more details on his product’s capabilities. “We can do 200,000 square feet (20,000 square metres) warehouses and empty shell office buildings and so forth. It’s when the information density is similar to a hospital, for example, which would need to be furnished and laid out with so much information that that’s where things start to slow down.”

While you might be surprised that a BIM application would slow down on a game engine, it’s worth understanding the incredible depth of data that Modumate is capable of handling. Prior to starting development, a lot of time and effort was put into breaking down the modelling pro cess and much thought was paid as to how the data should be structured to improve the granularity of BIM data. Neumann’s attention to granularity in his semantic approach is very much on a par with some of the work Greg Schleusner (director of design technology, HOK) was mulling over at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD 2022 event (www.tinyurl.com/greg-schleusner)

Modelling philosophy

Modumate’s BIM creation offers four lev els of detail hierarchy, taking the user from napkin to very specific detail. The initial phase is the creation of what it terms a ‘massing graph’; this acts as a map of all the connections in a building,

2 Modumate offers the visual fidelity of a real-time rendered environment

Team collaboration is built in, supporting up to 16 users simultaneously

and all the assemblies that will be con nected. It’s the most SketchUp part of the process, but it’s not just dumb facets. Using a family of planar modelling tools, every plane, edge and vertex represents either an assembly such as a wall and a window, or a detail that connects them. The start point can be an imported 2D drawing, you can type in distances, snap or use the rounding function from a known point.

The next phase is the modelling of sep arator assemblies. These are the physical construction assemblies that separate spaces like walls, floors, doors, roofs, windows, stairs and so on. This is the part of the process that’s the most Revitlike, but these are actual construction assemblies that are end-user defined and are made up of parts. For example, doors have a frame and four panels, and the active panels have a slab, as well as a han dle set. In addition, the handle set has a front and back handle.

While standard wall assemblies are included, it’s obviously possible to create very detailed custom components. The sepa rator BIM Manager for editing these is excep tionally visual, being node-based (think Grasshopper) and can be surprisingly detailed, down to their constituent parts like individual wall studs. All this level of detail increases the quality of quantities and BoMs you get out of the system at the end. To apply an assembly, click on a ‘host’ mass in the model and then adjust to how you want it to fit.

Surface graphs are primarily about dividing up surfaces to allow for different surface finishes. You simply draw regions where you want to subdivide or split. For example, this might involve adding sur face finishes to cabinets in a kitchen.

The final stage is attachment of assem blies — finishes, trim, cabinets, and fur niture, fixtures, and equipment, all of which can be customised. Again, you simply pick the material and click on the massing geometry to which you want to apply it. With the potential to add lots of detail, models look as they will be built.

As you work through each phase, you add detail and refinement, fleshing out the model depth. In the workspace, you can also see this increasing model richness in the textures and detail of the real-time

shaded model. In other words, you start off with a facet model in white and end with what looks like a completed and tex tured building. It’s very compelling and feels as though all ‘architectural’ tools could learn something from this. With the level of detail factored in, it’s a by-product to get an accurate bill of materials output in Excel as the model evolves.

As this is Unreal Engine, the view and model interaction are dynamic and can be easily controlled.

Because the BIM environment is the same as the rendering environment, you get instant high-resolution renders, as well as real-time shadows when you change the time of day. You then create sections to generate DWGs, which can be taken to AutoCAD for additional work. There are plans to expand this drawing output to be fully automated, and thus needing no additional work, which would be a feature highly prized by many of those complaining of lack of productiv ity in today’s BIM tools.

Modumate is a desktop application, but

fun GUI for laying out HTML and CSS relationships. There’s no such similar thing for the way that parts get arrayed in space in construction. Trying to represent the way that parts get arrayed in space has either missed the mark, stopped too short, or ended up building option trees that are almost unintelligible in the num ber of pages of checkboxes,” he argues.

A conversation with Neumann feels a bit like a logic bomb going off. It’s clear there has been a truly epic level of analy sis of the industry and software at all lev els and at every stage of this project: busi ness opportunity, system design, hierar chy, process, data architecture, even industry trends and spends. It’s rare that you meet someone who has real clarity and has evaluated every problem from so many angles. As a small developer, this is a great asset. Stepping into the BIM cage, home to an 800lb gorilla that is Revit, even if elderly, is no experience for the faint-hearted.

collaboration is possible over a network. The actual design files are stored on a cloud server, and every ‘player’ ends up running Modumate like a ‘Counter Strike’ player would run a locally installed ver sion of the game. When they edit using their local copy of the model, that request is sent to a central server that handles the document, which then updates the model and sends the new document to all collab orators. The cloud is a hot topic for nextgeneration products, and the Modumate team is currently evaluating pixel-stream ing technology as another way of deliver ing its application.

Not Figma for 3D

While other BIM startups - Snaptrude (tinyurl.com/snaptrude) and Arcol (www.tinyurl.com/arcol-AEC) follow a simi lar path to collaborative interface design tool Figma for 3D associations, Neumann is not a fan. “All [Figma] did was build a

Modumate is unusual in that it will appeal to users who find its modelling methodology quick, easy and a joy to the eyeballs — but even those who are seri ously into modelling deep detail for accu rate take-offs will find that the database has been primed for their needs when it comes to accuracy. Team play certainly looks interesting, although I wonder how many customers use it. It looks very similar to Arkio, although participants are modelling real BIM, not conceptual blocks.

The key limitations of Modumate for now appear to be its lack of curved geom etry and its focus on small buildings. That said, there is a viable market in the US, with some potential to support young upstarts with big BIM ambitions. It would take a number of large firms to engage with the Modumate team and encourage expanded development to cater to more complex building styles and content. However, that team is pretty savvy to focus on a market where there is not much overlap with Revit and to gen erate a little heat.

Modumate is certainly at a stage wor thy of evaluation. It’s free to view Modumate models and an authoring seat costs $80 per user, per month.

■ www.modumate.com

‘‘

Modumate is unusual in that it will appeal to users who find its modelling methodology quick, easy and a joy to the eyeballs — but even those who are seriously into modelling deep detail for accurate take-offs will find that the database has been primed for their needs when it comes to accuracy ’’

Imagine a single powerhouse event that champions the coming together of geospatial technologies and the built environment. Where professionals from a range of disciplines network and gain insight into the increasing confluence of their worlds. Where cuttingedge technology offers new possibilities, improved efficiencies, and better outcomes. And where education opens the door to the future just ahead. Use code

SimpleBIM: Taking back control with IFC

The Nordic region was the first place where AEC firms jumped on board with BIM, back in the early 2000s. It was also here that we started to see IFC standards for data exchange taken seriously. SimpleBIM, founded in Finland in 2009, has been a leading player in that movement

When the design world was limited to 2D technology, data exchange was pretty simple. The de facto standard was DXF. Once Autodesk’s pro prietary AutoCAD format DWG had been reverse engineered, most competitors supported that, too.

Then 3D BIM came along and mayhem ensued. The only neutral / agnostic exchange format was IFC (Industry Foundation Classes). It was embryonic and lacked the kind of data fidelity that the industry expected.

But in the Nordic region, IFC was embraced. It was used as the basis for national standards, long before broad BIM adoption was even on the horizon else where. And one country in particular, Finland, gave us two of the leading IFCbased developers: Solibri, the modelchecking firm eventually acquired by Nemetschek; and Datacubist, the developer of the IFC management tool, SimpleBIM.

Datacubist was founded in 2009 by CEO Jiri Hietanen and marketing manag er Sakari Lehtinen. Both had previously worked on the IFC standard at BuildingSmart, the global organisation responsible for developing and maintain ing the IFC schema. They also coauthored the Finnish national BIM standards for both buildings and bridges.

Having seen at first hand the mess that firms could get into with BIM data, the pair decided to develop an application

called SimpleBIM that would consoli date BIM dataflows for different design disci plines, different soft ware applications and from firms running dif ferent data standards.

While IFC is a document ed standard, software vendors have different interpretations of that standard and integration can be tricky. On top of that, many users don’t really understand IFC. Many think pressing ‘IFC-out’ is sufficient, without considering what subset of data is actually relevant in the model that they are trying to share. This leads to incon sistent data exchange that can seriously hamper the work of AEC firms collabo rating on projects.

SimpleBIM acts as a central conduit for collating BIM information and provides a suite of tools to repurpose, filter and organise project information by making data exchanges consistent and automated.

SimpleBIM features

The first thing any SimpleBIM user needs to do is stop thinking in silos, about silos and where the limits of silos lie. While most industry data is held within proprietary files, the benefits of SimpleBIM come from thinking about IFC as a data bridge, rather than a some what troublesome point-to-point data

exchange format. SimpleBIM does not damage or remove original data. It just offers tools to centralise, speed up and automate IFC-based workflows.

The product lives up to its name. It has a very basic layout, with dynamic and interactive model viewing windows for displaying basic shaded models, an object data tree, a properties palette and a ribbon bar of in-context menus.

For filtering, trimming and cleaning up IFCs, simply import a model and choose one of two options. You can either drag and drop the objects you wish to keep into the export ‘bucket’ or window; or you can select from the property palette or by storey, in order to produce a filtered IFC exported file.

The next level of capability and automa tion is to apply templates to transform imported data. Templates are straightfor ward Excel files, so are easy to create or edit. SimpleBIM comes with a lot of tem plates, and you will find additional sam ples online. The software generates a report on errors that occurred during the template application.

Templates can do many things, such as filtering a model to include only objects rel evant to a specific analysis, swapping prop erty values, or enriching model data with new properties. It’s also possible to run multiple templates across merged models, all generated from different sources.

Through the ‘Location Prism’ feature, user-defined portions of models can be sliced and diced using clipping planes/ bounding boxes, so that data that was omitted from the model and perhaps needs to be added, such as concrete pours, spaces, apartments, storeys and other construction sections, can be included.

Another feature called BIMsheet extracts user-selected model data for Excel calculations or Power BI. This might include, for example, quantities and cost ings. These are saved with the SimpleBIM data, for reuse. This is a process that has typically been possible only when using the native BIM authoring tool.

It directly addresses the problem of ‘dark data’, hidden away in current BIM systems, since Simple BIM provides tools to extract and analyse data from models

that have been merged, even when models have been created according to disparate standards and/or contain high levels of inconsistency.

The built-in BIMCollab BCF Manager for open workflows, meanwhile, enables report creation and distribution with all project participants, from boardroom to construction site. This centralised issue management system generates BCF files from SimpleBIM’s validation reports, highlighting issues in models that need addressing.

Customer uses

SimpleBIM has found favour in construc tion firms such as SRV in Finland and Bylor, together with consulting firms such as HOK, AECOM, Sweco, Cowi and Ramboll. Benefits claimed for the applica tion include: lightweight models for onsite work, accurate costing of materials and time, model-splitting, automatic classifica tion, a single version of the truth and reduc tion in time while producing richer models.

Some firms such as Auckland Airport are also using the tool to stitch together a variety of models to be published for postCovid expansion. The model will aid deci sion-making in redevelopment and ongo ing maintenance. Here, SimpleBIM is almost being used as a digital twin.

Conclusion

In BIM workflows heavily dominated by one vendor, mainly Revit, the RVT file is

king and delivery stipulated in contracts can be the Revit model. This does differ from country to country, but is especially true in the United States. Either way, it inhibits adoption of open standards.

In countries that have mandated national BIM standards, such as most of Europe, Australia, Japan, South Africa, IFC (along with derivatives such as BCF, COBie) is an essential part of the mix. This also extends to countries adopting international standards like ISO 19650.

SimpleBIM offers a tool that moves the concept of open standards from ‘data exchange’ to being at the heart of project management by offering a suite of power ful mapping, filtering, data enriching and automation tools, to pull clarity out of industry data exchanges that can be pret ty chaotic.

Looking forward a few years, platforms like Forma from Autodesk, with its uni fied databases and cloud-based applica tions with API access, could bring more interoperability. But today, SimpleBIM and its rule-based classification on filebased workflows is already taking the pain out of wrangling with project data.

This is the first of a two-part article. In the January / February 2023 edition of AEC Magazine we will look at how SimpleBIM can be used as an aggregator for project workflows and how it can assist in construction.

Swapp: the algorithmic assistant

Maybe I’m getting old, but the future seems to be coming faster at me every day.

Swapp is a cloud-based application that can automatically gener ate an entire Revit model with all the nec essary detail drawings, from a simple space layout and without any indication where doors or windows should be.

For a simple residential building, all this happens in the time it takes to get a coffee. For an office block, you might need to wait a little longer. After lunchtime, maybe. Either way, this is going to be game-changing — and it’s only just started.

Throughout 2022, this maga zine has focused on identifying start-ups that look set to move the industry forward and deliver new productivity benefits. One thing that I have observed is a general acknowledgement of a move towards the ‘templatification’ of certain building styles. And most agree that this will be achieved through the use of solv ers, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and as yet undefined genius.

Four-year-old, Israel-based Swapp is on a mission to automate the drudge work of repetitive design, modelling and documentation when it comes to predict

able building types.

We might talk emotionally about the design and construction of buildings as unique and discrete processes, but if you boil it down, these are mainly based on tried-and-tested recipes. In other words, they are driven by parameters and by common methodologies that operate with in the constraints of building regulations.

Swapp breaks down this process and

while, is its Design Decision Language (or DDL), which encapsulates the core rules of architecture. This is linked to user-specific data and libraries which contain furniture, rooms, families, mate rials and building details.

Starting with a grid and a set of Revit spaces, the code identifies where spaces meet; what wall construction and finish es are typically used for each use case; typical door styles; and the furni ture load for each room type. The final output is a full, code-compli ant Revit model.

learns by analysing previous Revit mod els. It then formulates ‘recipes’ it can apply to subsequent projects. Once the system is trained, it can automate designs that range from simple schematics through to full sets of construction docu ments. It achieves this using an AI plan ning and documentation rule system, hosted in the cloud.

This start-up’s ‘secret sauce’, mean

But Swapp doesn’t stop there. It also captures the print set styles that you prefer, in order to create a complete set of construction draw ings that are automatically loaded into Procore. Now, this system may not fare well with a Foster + Partners airport design, but for buildings that are predictable and boxy, such as residential units, stu dent accommodation and some office designs, Swapp can do in a day what might take you weeks or months to achieve.

Origins and aims

Swapp co-founders CEO Eitan Tsarfati and chief science officer Adi Shavit are veterans of the AEC industry. Tsarfati started his career as an architect before moving into the technology business, he

In September’s AI Special Edition we began our journey to better understand how artificial intelligence will impact design and construction.

In Swapp, Martyn Day finds a contender for the most audacious AI tool yet for automating detail design work and producing drawings

explains. His first start-up was Homestyler, where Shavit was also a cofounder. This company was subsequently acquired by Autodesk, which Tsarfati and Shavit both joined as part of the deal.

“At Autodesk, we got more and more responsibilities, more products,” Tsarfati explains. “It became the home and build ing platform, which I headed up. Adi became the head of algorithm, as his spe cialisms are AI and computer vision.”

Having worked at Autodesk, the pair felt that the solutions that the company was providing to architects were insuffi cient, he says. “We understood that either we were going to re-do Revit, which is not something that a start-up should think about, or that we could try to practically solve the problem with what exists today, with what we can add to the equation.”

The architecture industry gets over looked by many entrepreneurs and ven ture capitalists, he says, because they mistakenly believe that architects don’t have any money. As a result, 80% of today’s start-ups in AEC focus on job sites and try to solve construction issues. “But that’s a mistake, in my opinion,” he says. As a former architect, he under stands the upstream pressures on archi tects, the lack of time for drawings, the tedious aspects of the job.

“Architecture has many functions, from feasibility studies, test fits, sche

matic design, VDC, DCA, you name it. But construction doc uments are the most tedious work, and this is the part where architects spend most hours, from the DD to CD stage,” he says.

“I think this is what makes us different from the rest of the start-up ecosystem, because most of the ecosystem — and I’m excluding Higharc here — are mainly doing feasibility studies. We are not going to do another parametric design system; we hate the terms ‘generative design’ and ‘optioneering’. We’re a very solution-oriented platform for construc tion documents. This is what we do.”

Off the grid

Working through an example, starting in Revit, a typical Swapp building starts off with a grid layout. The architect then des ignates areas for rooms, spaces, corri dors, lifts and so on. These room-bound ing components create an adjacency dia gram which indicate to the AI where walls should go.

“There are some algorithms that can generate building plans like this, but I don’t believe that this should be the work of an algorithm. It’s actually the planning part. It’s where humans can think and make important decisions,” he says. “I mean, it’s architects who talk to the customers. The algorithm doesn’t!”

The process starts with a schematic design, one for each project, he explains. For each project, there are data libraries and design decision roles driven by Swapp’s design decision language.

“For example, in multifamily, you might say that all the walls between the restroom and the living room will look like this and will belong to a specific Revit family. On one side, wall finishes are ceramics, and on the other side, you’ll have gypsum, or plaster, or whatever it is,” he says.

The rules are specific to the way an architecture office works and to the type of project. A school design, for example, will work from different rules in the design decision language. “How do we know? We look at our client’s past models and how they have done it before. Swapp’s AI understands what kind of doors you put in this type of mid-rise, multi-family block, in this current multifamily building. We also have a lot of best practices already built in, should you not have any past models,” says Tsarfati.

A key aspect of AI, and its ability to learn anything, is that you don’t feed it rubbish. As the saying goes, ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out.’ But Revit users vary wildly in their capabilities and adherence to standards, so Swapp has developed a suite of tools to learn from even badly organised Revit models and understand what went wrong.

Swapp can generate models and full sets of construction documents

Once a schematic is loaded into Swapp’s cloud, where the company has its own BIM modeller, the AI planner gets to work. Model and drawing gener ation is automatic. Decisions about where windows and balconies go, for example, are made. Everything is done by the Swapp algorithm, based on the basic layout from the architect’s plans, plus past project data. (By the way, this frees up your Revit licence to go and do something else, such as create another space layout for another job.) Typical processing times are between 40 and 50 minutes. The results are then translated back into RVT.

The resulting building may not win any awards, but the model will be highly detailed, each corre sponding space load ed out with furniture content as defined in standard layouts. While the model is typically code com pliant, Tsarfati explains that the architect should still ‘be an architect’ and check the model for themselves.

“We have the option to do all the energy loads and simulate that. We produce a very detailed model. We can do load calcu lations, we can do environmental analysis, we can run it through anything that we want, because we know everything about this building, even to the sub-layers of the paint on a wall,” says Shavit. A model that takes 45 minutes with Swapp, including all the layout sheets, might take three months in the real world, using human effort, he adds.

“If you think about details,” Tsarfati explains, “basically it’s the solutions for a typical intersection of two materials in the building. This is what it is, roof and wall, wall and floor, window and wall. So

AI plays Minecraft

If Swapp hasn’t already given you enough food for thought, you might be interested to know that Daniel McKenzie, senior data scientist at Life Time, recently sent me an article from the MIT Technology Review. In it, we learn about how OpenAI has built an AI-based game playing bot, which watched 70,000 hours of people modelling in Minecraft. The technique

again, we work with companies, we take their data and we add it to the system, so the next time you use it, we have the details ready to add.”

To date, Swapp has focused Revit workflows and seems to have clients mainly in the US. But the target BIM sys tem doesn’t have to be Revit, according to Shavit. “None of our processing happens in Revit. It happens in the Swapp projects cloud system. We only use Revit as the input and output,” he says.

“We already have automatic conver sions, import and export for IFC, and since our model is as detailed as a Revit model can be, it’s very, very rich. Not just modelling, many systems actually use a 3D model. They don’t need the sheets. So,

Users also get to reuse the knowledge and effort that has been put into the creation of families. And, since Swapp has multiple clients, they also get to benefit from every thing Swapp learns from the common ‘hive mind’ of the industry.

This is a start-up that throws up all sorts of questions. It’s a bit of a curve ball. After all, the industry is somewhat hooked on selling billable hours and charging clients for changes. A piece of software that can model and document in 45 minutes, what would take an architec tural practice months to achieve, changes the rules of engagement — but it’s open to everyone, including your competitors.

we could export to any compatible sys tem, if the business makes sense.”

A bold game

It’s early days, but Swapp is attempting to do bold, game-changing things here. While the company’s leaders talk mainly about automating construction drawings, they almost bypass the fact that they, by the way, do a large chunk of the architec tural detail design too.

And while it might appear that the architect’s job is reduced to simply arranging some conceptual rectangles in 2D, the model they get back is still Revit, and fully editable.

It’s the drudge work that has been done. The model and design can still be finessed.

And what happens when clients get wind of the fact that your practice uses AI to achieve new heights of productivi ty? Will they expect to see that reflected in your fees? And final ly, what about jobs? In other words, many firms globally have too much work and too few staff, so an AI-driven boost in productivity could be a massive benefit. But at some point, firms need to consider what a technology like this means in terms of team size, if and when the world returns to some level of normality.

It will be extremely interesting to see where Swapp ends up and how much traction it gets along the way, and in which markets. Perhaps it will build its own market as word spreads? Or maybe it will get snapped up by Autodesk to keep the Revit customer base happy? Adi Shavit has an invite to come and speak at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD event in London on June 20. We’ll be looking for ward to hearing more on the company’s progress between now and then.

■ www.swapp.ai

it uses is called Video Pre-Training. This lets an AI neural network train itself just by watching humans, a step up from the trial-and-error reinforcement approach to learning.

Researchers at OpenAI hope to use this to teach bots to achieve in 3D space what GPT-3 has done to imitate human text.

■ www.tinyurl.com/Minecraft-AI

‘‘

The industry is somewhat hooked on selling billable hours and charging clients for changes. A piece of software that can model and document in 45 minutes, what would take an architectural practice months to achieve, changes the rules of engagement ’’