AEC Magazine July / August 2019 by X3DMEDIA

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

From robot fiction to

robot reality

Boston Dynamics Spot Mini laser scanning a construction site near you soon

July / August 2019 >> Vol.103

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SPOT the difference - NXT BLD report 31 report from our annual London the robots are here 8 We event, examining the broad array of There’s been lots of talk about the use of robots on site. Boston Dynamics SPOT Mini dogs are indeed the droids that the industry has been looking for

Graphisoft customer conference 14 For the launch of ArchiCAD 23, we report from Graphisoft’s key customer conference, the first time it’s been held in the USA

Design through a Prism 18 A new app is helping developers conform to London’s planning rules and embrace rapid off-site construction technology

BAM and Autodesk Construction IQ 22 Construction is a highly complex and fast paced activity to project manage, but what if an AI system had your back?

disruptive ideas and technologies that are set to have a huge impact on our industry

BIM: not just for specialists 36 At Wilmott Dixon, Revizto is bringing projects to life for many more stakeholders

3D in the cloud 40 What happened when Kohn Pedersen Fox moved its VDI workloads to the cloud

VDI: on-premise or in the cloud? 43 Adam Jull of IMSCAD Global explores the benefits and costs of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in the cloud and on-premise

ThinkPad P53 46 Lenovo’s new pro laptop delivers the kind of 3D performance never seen before in a 15.6” mobile workstation

Seeding the National HP Reverb 50 We share our first impressions of HP’s Digital Twin 26 new VR headset which boasts a much We report on the University of Cambridge pilot project for the UK’s ambitious National Digital Twin

higher resolution than the competition Also this month: 4, 6, 7 News July / August 2019

22/07/2019 16:07

News

New Unity collaboration tool gets smart with Revit

Verity Photo to simplify QA learEdge3D, the developer of Verity construction verification software, has introduced Verity Photo, an ‘affordable and easy to use’ QA/QC tool for the construction industry. The software enables users to snap photos of a project site, align them to a coordination model in Autodesk Navisworks, and identify mistakes and misalignments onsite before they become expensive problems.

■ clearedge3d.com

nity Reflect is the first product to come out of Unity’s strategic partnership with Autodesk, which was announced last year at Autodesk University. The software is designed to get smart data out of Revit for collaboration. But don’t get too excited just yet, as the launch date is expected to be the end of the year. The news comes soon after Epic Games’ surprise announcement in May that it had acquired Twinmotion and would be giving away the arch viz tool free until November. But Unity’s new offering seems to be a different beast entirely. From what we have seen it is a cross between Enscape in its ease of use and Navisworks in its feature set. With one click, Revit models seamlessly export into Unity Reflect, bringing all the key BIM attribute data with it. The software

includes a range of data querying tools. While the rendering quality is really good, it’s not photorealistic or aimed at the high quality real-time visualisation market. Models can be shared on pretty much any device (25 types supported), including VR and AR platforms. Unity Reflect is live-linked to the original design application, so when changes are made in Revit, such as relocating a door, adding a window or adjusting materials, it will be automatically reflected in Unity Reflect in real-time. Collaborators won’t need to be in the same room, or on the same device, to make real-time changes, as everything is linked via the cloud. Changes can be made to the Unity model, for ‘what if’ design experiments. However, these do not alter the original model in Revit. ■ unity.com/aec/reflect

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ongrid, the Finnish construction quality and safety software company, has announced its expansion into the UK. The Congrid cloud-based system and mobile app is designed to introduce new levels of transparency and communication for safety and quality on construction projects and help deliver zerodefect buildings to clients.

■

congrid.com

Budget GPU for 3D CAD

The BLK2GO’s compact and handheld design is said to allow a much greater degree of mobility and give access to spaces that may have been difficult to scan before. According to the developers, it has spatial awareness to know where it is and where it has been and will accurately follow a user’s trajectory while scanning. When used with the iOS app, users can get live feedback while scanning, check the device status, or do quick data inspection.

MD is going after the budget end of the workstation market with its new $199 Radeon Pro WX 3200 professional graphics card. The low-profile card is focused on mainstream 3D CAD and is designed to fit into Small Form Factor workstations like the HP Z2 SFF.

■ blk2go.com

■ amd.com

Leica’s new device for scan on the go eica Geosystems has announced the Leica BLK2GO, which it is pitching as a firstof-its-kind mobile scanner. The wireless handheld device combines two-axis LiDAR with visual SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping) technologies. Unlike its sibling, the BLK360 laser scanner, it captures 3D environments while the user is in motion. It continuously creates a digital representation of reality in the form of 3D point clouds.

Construction quality for UK

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ROUND UP Style management

V-Ray for Unreal adds support for Unreal materials BALÁZS ŐRLEY, FABIAN BULYOVCSITY, ANDRAS PALL

Ideate StyleManager is a new add-on for Revit designed to help users maintain style standards by analysing, deleting, or merging non-standard styles. According to Ideate Software challenges with Revit styles arise when users import content, because the corresponding styles automatically come with the content ■ ideatesoftware.com

Enterprise VR SystemActive, a UK reseller of HP, Lenovo and Nvidia workstations, has created a new team, SystemActive – Immersive, to support enterprise customers who need VR, MR or AR hardware. The company will offer a wide range of headsets, smart glasses, peripherals, tracking systems, workstations, tablets and laptops, for lease, rental or purchase ■ systemactive.co.uk/immersive

Schedule boost Tenderfield has added construction scheduling, complete with MS Project integration, to its online construction management platform. The new feature is designed to make it easy for construction teams to create and assign tasks, track progress of tasks and collaborate ■ tenderfield.com

Early-stage design Digital Blue Foam is a new webbased tool for early-stage building design and automated feasibility analysis. The software can be used by designers and non-designers and is said to help develop economically and environmentally viable solutions ■ digitalbluefoam.com

Construction link Leica Geosystems has integrated its site software Leica Captivate and iCON with the Autodesk BIM 360 construction management platform. The aim is to create ‘seamless workflows between office and field’ ■ leica-geosystems.com

AutoCAD toolkits Excitech has launched a productivity toolkit for AutoCAD, which complements its recently launched toolkits for Revit and Civil 3D. The toolkits are offered free to Excitech’s Autodesk subscription customers ■ excitech.co.uk

July / August 2019

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haos Group has released V-Ray for Unreal Update 1 which includes viewport rendering and new support for native Unreal materials, so designers can ray trace ‘every part of their scene’ from their existing Unreal projects. ““V-Ray for Unreal has enhanced KPF’s visualisation process from offline

rendering to VR and AR, helping us achieve better, faster results with less applications,” said Cobus Bothma, Director of Applied Research at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. “The light baking functionality also taps right into our GPU workflow, letting us efficiently bake large scenes at high quality.” ■ chaosgroup.com/vray/unreal

LetsBuild to extend on-site BIM adoption etsBuild is looking to close the gap between office and construction site with a new BIM solution that ‘seamlessly’ links on-site activities and checks to the project’s BIM model. The new solution, which will be fully integrated with LetsBuild’s Aproplan app, is designed to put BIM into the hands of construction workers, allowing them to provide real-time data from site.

According to the developers, the app will connect the BIM objects in the model to site activities, checks and forms to allow a transparent digital built environment. In that way, the BIM model will be enriched with field data and the underlying BIM object data will be made available to people in the field. LetsBuild was recently formed by the merger of Aproplan and GenieBelt. ■ letsbuild.com

London practice invests in Project Center ondon-based architecture and planning firm Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) has chosen Newforma Project Center to manage its project information and collaboration processes. “Projects, by their nature,

develop in size and scope and we need to be flexible to respond to this,” says AHMM’s Keith Austin. “Project Center supports that flexibility, whilst giving us confidence that our information is easily managed and discoverable.” Meanwhile, Newforma

has also announced an integration with the Autodesk BIM 360 platform that will give users of both apps a ‘unified solution’ for searching and accessing project information wherever it resides. ■ newforma.com

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22/07/2019 13:29

News

Oculus Quest will be a ‘game-changer for VDC teams, architects and BIM managers’ he Oculus Quest, the new all-inone VR headset from Facebook, is starting to garner significant support from AEC software developers. IrisVR, who develops the push button VR tool Prospect, which works with Revit, Navisworks, SketchUp and Rhino, considers the new headset to be a ‘benchmark moment in the development of virtual reality for AEC.’ The Oculus Quest is different to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in that it is standalone and doesn’t need to be connected to a PC or external sensors. “We believe the increased portability that comes with Oculus Quest will be a game-changer for VDC teams, architects, and BIM managers,” says IrisVR CEO Shane Scranton. “For the first time, you’ll be able to step inside your 3D models in the field office or on the job site without plugging into a computer. That means the processes AEC professionals are using VR for right now – like design review, model coordination, and visual clash detection –

are more broadly accessible and easier to get started with than ever.” With increased portability and low cost ($399) the new HMD looks ideal for team collaboration. However, because it is mobile and all the processing is done in the headset, it’s not as powerful as a desktop VR setup, therefore making it better suited to smaller, more optimised files.

According to the developers of VR/AR collaboration platform ‘The Wild’ which also supports the Oculus Quest, a lot of factors affect file size, including textures, model scale and geometry. The Wild has produced an article on how to optimise your models for the Quest, including tips for Revit and SketchUp. ■ thewild.com ■ irisvr.com

AECOM uses online viz platform for town redevelopment detailed 3D computer model from Bluesky is being used to communicate a £250 million transformation of the town centre of Huddersfield, UK. Created from up to date, nationwide aerial photography, the Bluesky model forms part of AECOM’s visualisation of plans prepared for Kirklees Council. The AECOM presentation includes a 3D fly through and realistic animations and will

form part of an online platform used to consult and engage with the community over the coming months. “The Bluesky model gave us an accurate, up to date base from which our specialist team was able to create a stunning visualisation which, it is hoped, will help to sell the Huddersfield Blueprint to the public, investors and stakeholders,” said Becky Mather, AECOM. ■ bluesky-world.com

Autodesk invests in modular construction firm Factory_OS utodesk has invested an unknown sum in Californiabased pre-fabrication company, Factory_OS. Some of the money will be used to support the build-out of the Factory Floor Learning Center, a space dedicated to education and research on industrialised construction. Factory_OS is very much in the ‘off-site construction’ category, taking the

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mentality of the Ford assembly line to buildings and having the workers assembling components to make modular sections. In our knowledge of Factory_OS there is little digital fabrication or automation in its process and perhaps in the US the Unions may be a problem when it comes to moving to full automation. ■ factoryos.com

July / August 2019

22/07/2019 13:29

Feature and n o i t truc ston s o n B o , c D on in NXT BL indeed i t a are utom s yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s e a s t e u Day i h o t h n b t t y a a t t r f talk on site. A nstrate th rites Ma o s t o een l of robots i to demo ing for, w b s â&#x20AC;&#x2122; e Min look Ther y the use T n e O e icall ht SP try has b f g i c u e o r s sp ics b the indu m a t Dyn s tha d i o r the d

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SPOT Mini can climb stairs, move side to side, strafe, stretch, move side to side, walk backwards and even lie down

July / August 2018

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22/07/2019 15:57

g n i m o c e ts uset s a c h e nt l y s a M curr the of rom y. It is idiary f f f o g s m o n b l o i r u no sp (a s d i n g f r ch is a of Tech X d a n n e e a e fu gl Res fertitut G o o o u gh eir ced n d th - Ins ed by r a y dif n h v a T n Ad man s, from t l own abet). bots k of ma e i o s u r f e rm fen sb g) h wor efor pt o Alp A (De cy) it ha ot platfo ittleDo o n c e t o do t h e t h u s b nt o r P L c b n so R , l o e e i h l DA cts Ag obile r heetah re a inve nt i a e en w e ch a i c a l l y j C i m o , f h r g o pote has be ury. An Europ w o d - P t types t e nam t l a s) BigD kind 8th cen n toure alleged en ed ( man, A ving dy am sur p u e r 1 h t l e n I c o i e d s e i l e . a e P p m h k ( s th l th m , w qu ic an p e d a o r p h i c m e ch a n e o s o f d n Ke l Turk’, min Fr e liti o n b v a o m d b t g a ja vi ces ly a opo n like e r p fgan echanic nd Ben d out to ox of l h h l r t t o a ei ra W a an b hum all seen ough th d gene tive a ‘M tune na ’s leon ith r c n with t Napo ugh this idden i l Capek w a e h a t e v r ha h e e o ed ea w ing ly b ss, alth a bloke 21 Kar from th you ines go , cajol how ho e d s h 19 then be. bot, at c h o r e t h a n r s . I n m ac u sh e d to a e Ro nd from our g p ab u s e t h e y c a n e m n g m i e a e l t n b in rk lly cing ur ’ a e st the role kwo sica s fir c l o c c o i n e d c e d l ab o m aj o r o t h h e r phy elf-balan so it P OT a b l y r s a d y o d e d f a o s r e ‘ y pl r an tu ob ot i , S e pla h fo e fu y. N ini latest rob product og-like’ Czec bots hav s of th ar awa M T ‘d e f o ew SPO mpany’s available druped ighs just p l ac on r pian vi es f ar, k r o a o c i u y o q ly ted , we nl ew he dyst n galax orld… rcial mpact, 0.84 m articula to n th nd mai m T e i i w m s t t t o an ice com is a c ands a and ion Wes of robo iting a yed for h ju with t i ts d t c lo Min which s n come s enoug maps i , men reality less ex ost dep ti-jointe a t y ca l o h lk e d a b t T h e n f a r . Th e m h e mu l i g h t i n v o n I i w r ga act e er. s t an c k e b i c d s s t b 0 e b i n , n a s 3 a o s t a gr m he s ideo ion 25 cle h a s dibly s and minute s obsta online v ad a ricat s a com world. T celle b r a m c f r i 0 a lo e id e n in d th etitive, nes, ors, for 9 h i ch in th bot i , avo i run onment rs and, open do t of ro a r m , w t s a r o u n ep r u o t n an vir stai ed r orm o nr ob o b l y p l a perf rescrib es to c n- en t, climb n seen, c d m n e p v o e o s a l r r v t e ry as c se vi ave stati s, to ve d them lled en we h o are n sk r e a t l t . n t d ge co 92 base o no r un chan n 19 ch d s i t e s o bout to r m e d i i h w a as fo ction is is st r u s. All th a m i c s w t n men t o n Dy Bos

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Feature dishwasher, walk autonomously around construction sites and even do moonwalking while dancing to Uptown Funk. This is an exceptionally capable robot and Boston Dynamics recognises that it has a cornucopia of potential commercial application areas, including construction. We were exceptionally fortunate to have Boston Dynamics send a team over to the UK to present and demonstrate SPOT Mini to the NXT BLD audience with Michael Perry, VP of Business Development giving our keynote. It wasn’t all plain sailing. With the vagaries of British customs procedures we only got the all-too-essential batteries that power SPOT out of customs and delivered to London with a few hours to spare before the event. We thought SPOT Mini would be popular, but had no idea just quite how much of a frenzy it would generate at the conference! As SPOT walked down the side path and mounted the stairs to the stage, mobile phones and iPads were raised to capture seeing SPOT in the ‘flesh’.

SPOT development Boston Dynamics explored many different types of robot which could move, navigate and deal with challenging environments but SPOT mini came out of an approach to develop a mobile platform which could operate both in humanpurposed environments, inside build-

ings, factories as well as outside and on building sites. Boston Dynamics quickly identified that there was an opening in terms of inspection and surveying, a repetitive task in sometimes hazardous environments. With the increasing digitisation of construction, there is a growing need for more data, more regularly. While sensors and cameras can be fixed on site, and there is no shortage of drones, both options have restricted mobility inside structures. SPOT is omnidirectional. It can climb stairs, move side to side, strafe, stretch, move side to side, walk backwards and even lie down. It can negotiate environments using its five stereo camera pairs to photogrammetrically ‘see’ its surroundings and navigate to points on-site and position its payload sensors wherever it needs to be. The robot has three different payload ports on the back that provide power and comms to external processors. There is wide spread spectrum radio too which gives it a long-range communication distance and the company has also done tests beaming 5G/LTE from the back of the robot. The manipulation arm, with camera in its ‘palm’, sits on top of the robot’s back and takes the robot from just being able to sense the world to also interact with the world and do a wide variety of tasks. Using kinetic

modelling the arm is easy to manipulate for grabbing, reaching and even has what they call ‘chicken mode’, with the arm acting like a stabilisation gimbal, staying still and level irrespective of the body movement. As SPOT is a platform, it has a full API where developers can access the robot’s sensors and locomotion controls, enabling a wide array of autonomous behaviours and tasks, such as inspections or carrying out a laser scan, depending on the payload. It would be possible to program in an autonomous survey of a site on a daily basis for construction verification, and compare the data, even if SPOT had to open doors in the process! Last year Boston Dynamics built twelve SPOT Minis in house, mainly for testing but at the beginning of this year it went out to contract manufacturers for a series of beta builds. With its partners in Japan and America, Boston Dynamics has already tested the abilities of SPOT Mini on Takanaka construction sites in the snow, inspecting dangerous kilometre long tunnels in Japan and walking around San Francisco airport Terminal 1. With Boston Dynamics bringing SPOT to the UK and NXT BLD being specifically for advanced digital construction, we contacted a few laser scanning companies to come and meet the Boston team. The appetite to work with Boston

For NXT BLD, Faro 3D printed a bespoke attachment plate to the back of the robot to mount its Faro Focus scanner Image courtesy Matt Mccarter

‘‘

It can negotiate environments using its five stereo camera pairs to photogrammetrically ‘see’ its surroundings and navigate to points on-site and position its payload sensors wherever it needs to be

’’

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Feature Dynamics initiated a huge response. We had teams from Faro and Topcon come to NXT BLD to see the robot and talk about combined development strategies. Faro even 3D printed a bespoke attachment plate to the back of the robot, so it could mount its Faro Focus scanner in the exhibition space. This live R&D generated the first laser scans from the SPOT Mini platform from the two providers. There were some initial concerns that the vibration of the robot’s internal fans may impact the scans but the great news was that the output was as good as it would have been were it mounted on a tripod. SPOT could walk about a site and stop at specified points to carry out all the scans required for a survey. The only potential issue is that SPOT’s height is lower than a tripod, so in a busy environment, it may generate more voids where information isn’t captured. Obviously, the inspection market has massive potential for automated data collection. Perry explained that mining, nuclear power stations and other hazardous environments were all obvious targets for SPOT Mini application.

Given the reaction from developers in construction, we can confidently predict that SPOT Minis will be deployed to construction sites all over the world, helping further drive the digitisation of the building industry. From NXT BLD coverage we have connected Boston Dynamics with a whole host of interested parties, including Bentley Systems’ Synchro team, various SLAM scanner developers and the construction division at Tesla’s Giga Factories.

When and how much? By the end of July 2019, Boston Dynamics had made 100 beta SPOT Minis and this summer it will be putting these beta robots through hundreds of hours of cycle times each week to tease out any remaining hardware and software faults before they go into mass production. SPOT is due to ship very soon and will cost less than $100,000 per unit, and we understand there will be leasing options.

Conclusion The digitisation of the construction industry has only just started but it’s snowballing as venture capital money is

injected into research, fabrication and productisation. As skilled labour becomes harder to find the industry is looking towards automation. Construction firms are setting up factories with an eye to deploying robots to fabricate components to bypass the skills shortage and reduce on-site construction time. With increased used of laser scanning and the potential of robots like SPOT carrying out continual mapping of sites, when combined with advances in AI-driven image recognition, increases the viability of introducing bigger robots for heavy lifting for placing of components such as walls and steel structure elements, or to drive a concrete 3D print nozzle on a ‘smart’ site. As science fiction becomes science fact, the very nature of the construction business is about to fundamentally change. ■ bostondynamics.com

NXT BLD 2020 will take place at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London on 9 June 2020. ■ nxtbld.com

‘‘

It would be possible to program in an autonomous survey of a site on a daily basis for construction verification, and compare the data, even if SPOT had to open doors in the process!

’’

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Feature

Graphisoft Key Customer Conference For this year’s Key Customer Conference and launch of ArchiCAD 23, Graphisoft opted to hold it in Las Vegas, the first time in the USA, and very apt as the company’s new CEO, Huw Roberts is from Philadelphia by Martyn Day

t times it seems as though the whole design technology development and investment world is focussed on the changes that are currently underway in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction sector. The industry is well on its way to transitioning to adopting BIM as the standard process for modelling to deliver co-ordinated drawings and now it’s in the early phases of evolving ways to digitally fabricate components and buildings off-site. Revolution is in the air. We are also seeing this in the broad array of software tools that design and construction professionals are deploying to get their job done. Twenty years ago, most architects would have had a sea of AutoCADs; now it’s Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Unity, Grasshopper, Dynamo, Tekla Structures, MicroStation, Unreal, Enscape, Vectorworks, Catia, Maya and ArchiCAD to name but a few. As the design process (and now the fabrication processes) change, firms need to refine their workflows and build new product stacks to address new design challenges. Nemetschek, the owner of ArchiCAD developer Graphisoft, is responding to this through acquisition, rapid development and better sharing of technology between its ‘brands’.

Nemetschek and Graphisoft The Las Vegas KCC was an opportunity to introduce Graphisoft’s new CEO, Huw Roberts to the company’s global audience and to unveil a slightly more aggressive stance to promoting itself in the BIM market, especially as it opens up with all these firms evaluating new workflows. Roberts proudly still holds his US Architect’s licence and has formerly held 14

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VP and CMO roles at Bentley Systems and BlueCielo respectively. He is the second American to head up Graphisoft, the first being Dominic Gallello, formerly of Autodesk, from 2003 to 2009. The Nemetschek Group now has 16 brands covering various niches in the design and construction market with 5 million customers. Some brands overlap, like Graphisoft, Allplan and Vectorworks, which frequently compete for the same clients. Others are unique and have pretty much got categories to themselves, such as Solibri for model checking. Former CEO of Graphisoft, Viktor Várkonyi is now Chief Division Officer, Planning & Design Division. He gave a description of the group’s outlook on the market. Várkonyi is responsible for the division’s global strategic alignment as well as for positioning the Nemetschek Group in the BIM market as a leading provider for connected end-to-end AEC workflows. The net result of this move has been a more coordinated approach in sharing technology and more promotion of key brands.

ArchiCAD 23 Every year, Graphisoft delivers a healthy set of new features and has taken to the wholesale rewriting of core functions to keep the code fresh. It helps maintain the feeling that ArchiCAD has development velocity and quite frankly puts the rest of the industry to shame. The reason for this is that Nemetschek, for all the positives and negatives, has kept its brands separated and fairly siloed. This means that Graphisoft can focus on delivering a single product to the AEC market. And while you can sub-

scribe, it’s not mandated and upgrading is the decision of the customer, not the software developer. So, every year, the Graphisoft developers have to deliver content that is deemed of value for continued maintenance payment by its customers. Having seen what happens to product development when mandated subscription is brought into play by its competitors, Graphisoft is clearly setting its business offer apart. This year’s update focuses on revamped column and beam tools as well as voids, niches and recesses. The structural columns and beams tool allows for the generation of detailed complex, even curved, pre-cast concrete, steel and laminated timber structures. The new void commands make it particularly quick to punch multiple holes in building components for MEP geometry. System performance has been addressed in opening files, quick previews while hovering over tabbed views and instant view when changing views. BIM Cloud projects have also been accelerated. With regard to project size, Graphisoft has overcome the memory limitations of mobile machines by streaming data to BIMx on tablets, enabling incremental loading of huge models, as demonstrated with one comprising 50 million polygons. Graphisoft is unique in its partnership with McNeel, the creator of Rhino and Grasshopper, linking Grasshopper to ArchiCAD’s BIM components. With each release the integration goes deeper. In ArchiCAD 23 there is a new workflow which Graphisoft calls deconstruct, enabling data to flow easily in both directions so ArchiCAD geometry can be analysed in Rhino using its ecosyswww.AECmag.com

22/07/2019 13:23

Graphisoft’s new CEO Huw Roberts

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The presence of so many new and significant global architecture firms at the event is a sign that there is a period of re-evaluation going on, looking to augment or move away from a pure Revit-based workflow

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tem of third-party applications. On the viz and rendering side, there is the inclusion of a new Cinerender engine and Graphisoft has formed a strategic relationship with Epic Games, developer of Unreal Engine, to drive real-time rendering and VR with its recently acquired Twinmotion product. Twinmotion is an AEC-specific rendering tool that rapidly speeds up the creation of interior and city environments via an easy to use UI and a huge library of renderready components. Epic Games is giving away the current version of Twinmotion for free until November 2019. However, as a major bonus to ArchiCAD 23 customers, they automatically get access to the next generation of Twinmotion as well. Historically, Graphisoft has been somewhat cautious when working with thirdparty companies, as in this industry many just get bought up by the main competitor. However, under new CEO Huw Roberts, there appears to be a new drive to connect and work with aligned firms. Epic Games is certainly a good friend to have and the benefit from this initial deal is all ArchiCAD’s customers. The new features and product launch demonstrations of ArchiCAD 23 in Las Vegas can be seen at tinyurl.com/ ArchiCAD23

Customer presentations Graphisoft’s KCC is only partially about the new release. The three days of conference includes many presentations of projects from customers and usually features a keynote talk from the architect who designed the building that appears on the box of the new ArchiCAD release. This year’s amazing image is from www.AECmag.com

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July / August 2019

22/07/2019 13:23

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Feature

ArchiCAD 23 focuses on revamped column and beam tools

PRIDE and is of a gymnastics centre project in Moscow, Russia, which has a roof inspired by the flow of a ribbon. On stage PRIDE’s Nikolai Gordiushin (CEO & Partner), Elena Myznikova (Chief Architect) and Vitali Krestianchik (Head of BIM) described the project. The talk can be seen here tinyurl.com/priderussia In fact, many customers presentations have been uploaded to Graphisoft’s YouTube channel. See box out below.

Everest One of the key technologies that KCC attendees got to see was a highly secretive development which goes under the codename of ‘Everest’, a sort of common data environment. From a company that bleeds ‘OpenBIM’, you can imagine that the intention is to provide a tool to get rid some of the huge data interoperability barriers that the federated AEC BIM process currently produces. Everest’s primary function is to enable the coordination and dynamic sharing of multiple data sources, programs, disciplines, using a single data exchange environment. Everest is either a server or

cloud-based solution that shares common elements between a plethora of BIM tools (grids, structures, spaces, voids, clearances, ports), without the need to import and translate other incompatible native formatted data. It’s still early days for Everest and it will be one of those types of technologies we will increasingly see from all the vendors as they try and crack the key problem of poor interoperability which came from the many proprietary BIM tools that IFC never truly fixed. Most large firms have data wranglers whose sole aim is to get the right data in the right format to teams at the right time. In many ways, we are getting closer to having that original utopian dream of the single building model, even though we are hamstrung by federated project structures, ‘BIM sans Frontieres’. When collaboration is no longer hard, firms will feel freer to use the software tools of their choice.

Conclusion For a very long period of time, Nemetschek was just a collection of

brands, but now the company is forging a new path. With a coherent top-down management strategy, an eye to acquiring innovative companies, and proper oversight and sharing of its portfolio of technologies, the company is becoming a serious global contender. The presence of so many new and significant global architecture firms at the event is also a sign that there is a period of re-evaluation going on, looking to augment or move away from a pure Revit-based workflow, or at least deploy the combination of ArchiCAD with Grasshopper as an early stage, BIM-driven, computational concept modeller. While there wasn’t a lot of discussion of digital pre-fabrication and connecting BIM to production, the trend was mentioned multiple times on stage and in talks with key company representatives, it was clear that strategy and partnerships with digital construction firms were being explored, although perhaps with a more European outlook as to the material choices, over straight mass timber. ■ graphisoft.com/archicad

Get the customer perspective From Integrated Project Delivery to analysis, automation and evaluation, find out how customers are using Graphisoft technology youtube.com/user/Archicad/videos

Hiroyuki Shimizu Takenaka Corporation, Japan

www.AECmag.com

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Sergey Kuznetsov Chief Architect of Moscow

Kristen Broberg + André Agi Liljewall Arkitekter, Sweden

July / August 2019

22/07/2019 13:44

Feature

Design through a Prism The London Mayor’s office has sponsored the development of a free application for developers to help conform to London’s spatial planning rules and assist in deciding which rapid off-site construction technology best fits their design. by Martyn Day

or anyone living in the UK, the entitled ‘Designed, sealed, delivered’ and developer level; it includes local and shortage of housing, the exceed- it was a call for the creation of a standard national Government as well. ingly high prices and the seem- design code for ‘precision-manufactured ing inability of the Government homes’ to combat London’s housing cri- Modular and pre-construction to solve these issues have become con- sis. In response, the Greater London What’s in a name? There are so many stants in our daily lives. Their effects are Authority and Transport for London terms for offsite construction, it’s becomactually shaping our society, should that funded the development of an application ing hard to track. Normally each defines a be by pricing key workers out of cities called Prism, which was co-funded by specific type of process, or one associated where they are needed, or by entirely Greystar, Legal & General, and the hous- with a specific type of material, which ing association L&Q. defines the process. The Mayor has decidpricing out the next generation. While there are many possible soluPrism was delivered by engineering and ed on Precision Manufacture Homes, tions, being able to build more, faster is architectural firm, Bryden Wood, together which I guess does away with the how something that could be solved by pre-con- with Cast Consultancy. It’s a free web- and the material choice. It also possibly struction and modularisation. However, based application to assist developers bet- nixes the issue of negative public associamany developers are not fully up on these ter understand how housing projects tion with prefabricated which ranges emerging building technolofrom a ‘portaloo’ to a wartime gies and may not consider them corrugated iron structure. at the conception phase. The Prism app gives developers some basic Given the utterly shoddy With a requirement for over quality of some of the tools to start early site evaluation with a lot building 50,000 new homes a year in new brick and block housing of built-in knowledge as to the viability of being built in the UK, the idea London alone, the Mayor’s each offsite construction methodology’ office is acting to promote and that a home is precision made assist developers in taking a may also offer some level of modular and offsite approach additional assurance. to building. It is doing all it can to drive could benefit from modular and pre-conThe UK is undoubtedly embarking on a acceptance of the process which could struction technologies using existing vol- dramatic investment in offsite construction, double the speed of delivery of housing umetric and panellised products. with fabrication plants popping up all over projects. Buildings can be rapidly modelled in the country and skills being imported from “We need to build far more housing in context, within a configurable-criteria of all over the globe through partnerships. The London – and particularly more council, apartments and spaces, with checks for next step is to broaden this out to include social rented, and other genuinely afford- conformance, and then an intuitive ‘traffic the developer community and to increase able homes,” says James Murray, Deputy light’ system indicating which modern their level of knowledge as to technically Mayor for Housing and Residential construction methodology would be best what is possible, through to delivery beneDevelopment. “Even if we had all the suited to the development. fits and potential cost savings. The Prism investment and powers we need, tradiPrism is the first of its kind for modu- app gives developers some basic tools to tional construction techniques will only lar residential design, globally, and start early site evaluation with a lot of builttake us so far.” shows that the UK is serious about in knowledge as to the viability of each offIn 2017, the London Assembly adopting the new building methodology. site construction methodology, given the Planning Committee produced a report Importantly, the buy in is not just at the building definition and requirement.

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22/07/2019 12:37

Prism app Prism (prism-app.io) is based on Unity, the free, open source application, and runs in a browser, so it’s available on tablets or phones. It has a very simple interface, with just a gridded plan. At the top right of the window, there are navigation tools, while at the bottom left of the screen are the creation and analytical tools. By hitting the create button, the first choice is to choose a location for the project, either by postcode or GPS. It’s possible to load maps, delete existing buildings and draw a site boundary. If you bring in the default map of central London, it automatically loads the demonstration area which is already populated with block models of buildings. You can also upload your own site model or background image. You then chose the site area and clear it by placing down a boundary. The next step is to define the building and orientation, building type - linear or tower - the number of floors, the make-up of the units and to define the apartment spaces. As standard it supports anything from studios up to three-bedroom apartments, with some configuration options and dimension driven design. The apartment areas conform to London standards and the designer can define systemisation (HRS modules, CLT modules, Steel Panels, Timber Panels, CLT Panels, Concrete Panels), corridor wall, external wall, party wall, max panel length, max load span, and whether or not there is a balcony. The model generates automatically and can be adjusted and ‘auto solved’ using combinations of www.AECmag.com

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unit types in an iterative process to meet the developer requirements. The analytics panel offers a host of useful information: apartment areas for the whole project, distribution by type and the net to gross. There’s feedback on the module or panel length and width for volumetric and panel approaches, access to map layers and project alerts. The most useful tool is the Systemisation Analysis tab which offers a traffic light system which indicates what offsite construction methodologies and material best fit the defined project’s criteria, either by volumetric or by panellisation. It checks against building height, floor-to-floor height, party wall, external wall, element size and span. Just a quick glace at this will give a developer guidance as to what process and material choice would meet the needs of the project as currently defined. Prism could be used in an interactive way where projects could be designed in conjunction with an architect to refine the result to meet key fabrication objectives. While Prism isn’t a ‘BIM’ tool it has just enough capability for a developer to rapidly evaluate some basic designs with the core business metrics, which can be handed on to a design team for further development. At the moment models can be exported as OBJ. It doesn’t support RVT or IFC natively; this could be improved, perhaps in a future release.

Cast and Bryden Wood At the launch event AEC Magazine caught up with the key drivers of this initiative Mark Farmer, CEO of Cast

Consultancy and Jami Cresser-Brown, architecture director of Bryden Wood. Farmer explained how the UK is leading the charge to change the building process, “Whenever you’re changing a market, you’re innovating, and there always is this sort of sense of risk taking, and risk is not the norm in the building industry. “We’re not quite sure of things that aren’t tried and tested but that’s the very nature of innovation. Ultimately, where this all starts is with the really positive approach that the UK seems to have taken. Even when looked at on an international basis, I’ve travelled a lot over last two years and think the UK is right up there. The level of activity on offsite construction in this country, I have not seen anywhere else in the world.” Cresser-Brown explained why the application is free and how it should be use to drive the development process, “With the app what we are really trying to do is share our knowledge that we have accrued from speaking to the manufacturing community and incorporating your kind of spatial requirements as defined by the Mayor of London. Then sharing that widely with the entire architectural community and beyond. It’s not just about architects but it’s for others as well and not hiding that behind a paywall. “What we fundamentally don’t want is for someone to produce a design in Prism and then for there to be a load of redundancy, because the design has to be recreated in a proprietary application like Revit or whatever you normally use. It’s about the transfer of that design in a very July / August 2019

22/07/2019 12:37

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Feature Jami Cresser-Brown, architecture director of Bryden Wood, one of driving forces behind Prism

straightforward and simple way through APIs to drive the process. It gives developers and designers more time to focus on the quality of the environment.”

insurance market is concerned about materiality and obviously, we’ve had a timber fire in the last two or three weeks in Barking concerning a balcony, so there is a spotlight on timber construction. Somehow as an industry we have to square the circle on how we’re going to embrace timber as a material that is sustainable. It actually goes to the heart of the Government’s climate change agenda. They’ve said by 2050 they want to be building with net zero carbon – and you’re not going to do that if we’re still building with cement. Somehow, we have got to change it. “This is a very complex subject. I am looking at finance; Jami Cresser-Brown

there is a huge opportunity to go just beyond London and to have a more multi stakeholder approach to its development. As L&G are involved, which has a building factory almost ready to go, I Timber barriers could imagine a version of Prism which In our research into modular construction may focus specifically on units in the and especially in the use of timber frame, it L&G catalogue, perhaps linked to the facseems other key elements of the building tory showing build/delivery times and market, namely mortgage brokers and costs. This could further accelerate develinsurance firms have yet to catch up on opment to delivery times. new construction processes. On looking up The momentum towards adopting offtimber frame houses, we found them in the site manufacturing methodology is same paragraph as Japanese Knotweed, building up considerable speed in the subsidence and listed buildings. UK. Now this isn’t just coming from the Farmer said, “On the valuation, morthouse builders but also developers, local gageability, financing and Government and the national insurance side of the debate, I Government. The UK took am currently leading a work- This is just the beginning and because it’s open assertive action to mandate ing group that is specifically use on Government source, there is a huge opportunity to go just BIM tasked to look specifically at projects; now it’s evaluating beyond London and to have a more multi that. We have been in session and having a dialogue with for 18 months now and we the industry on speeding up stakeholder approach to its development have all the major warranty building and looking at providers, because new build material usage to meet its warranties are the trigger for the mortgage, and the team at Bryden Wood are looking carbon targets. However, it’s clearly not which is also linked to building insurance. at design and technology opportunities to just an issue of having the factories and “If the warranty market does not open up the front end, and lawyers need to methodology to manufacture the buildembrace the precision manufactured look at the contract issue with collabora- ings, with lenders, insurers and warranhomes, then that becomes a blocker for tive approaches to procurement, rather ty holders needing to be onboarded, mortgageability and insurance which than setting everyone up to have an argu- together with long needed changes to then constrains the whole market. So, we ment from day one. All these things need industry contracts. can do all this great thinking and design adjusting to make this work.” The other component is planning, work and manufacturing but if the end which few seem to talk about. It’s all well client can’t get a mortgage, it all hits the Conclusion and good being able to rapidly develop, buffers. We are hoping to evolve this with According to Farmer there’s an ongoing build and sell residential housing but if BOPAS (Buildoffsite Property Assurance discussion about how the team keep this the planning system doesn’t catch up with Scheme) to build confidence for insurers initiative alive, how it’s managed, main- the industry’s digitisation it will be the log and mortgage providers. tained and developed. This is just the jam which holds back the entire effort. “Putting the warranties to one side, if the beginning and because it’s open source, ■ prism-app.io

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20/07/2019 10:33

Case study

BAM and Autodesk Construction IQ Construction is a highly complex and fast paced activity to project manage. All too often, errors and delays on site can lead to the most expensive cost over runs, safety issues and can quickly become an exercise in fire-fighting problems. What if there was an AI system that had your back? by Martyn Day

he use of artificial intelligence Up until July 2019 it was only available for vertical tasks might still be to companies that hosted data on the BIM embryonic, but AI is working 360 servers in the US. This has now been behind the scenes in nearly all expanded to all BIM 360 hosting locaof the digital services we use every day - tions and can be added as an additional email filters, social media, job matching, service to BIM 360 subscriptions. relationship matching, For its development, image recognition, chatbots, Construction IQ has literalface detection, web searchly been fed data from tens es, music recommendations, of thousands of real-world mobile banking, maps, historical projects, covering flights and car rides! a wide range of building Much has been written types: residential, universiabout the potential use of ty housing, office buildings, AI in the design of engitowers and airports. It has neering components and learnt from millions of buildings, helping signaissues and checklists and it ture architects generate continues to learn all the complex forms, but much time from every new projless has been said about it analyses. If this system is ectUsing how it could be applied to this past knowltaking a lot of the discipline of construcedge, the system acts like an tion, in both safety and projold hand that knows to look heavy lifting ect management. away, it’s giving out for specific warning which might be us a laser sharp signs Construction IQ imperceptible to a human. Autodesk Construction IQ is focus in terms of Construction IQ is looking a service for applying AI to what the genuine out for a wide range of risks, building project manage- health and safety from issues that would ment information. A long jeopardise project delivery issues are time in development, it’s times, to those that would gone through quite a few Michael Murphy, impact health and safety. name changes along the way, This can be at a high overBAM Ireland seemingly to avoid falling view level or at a granular foul of other (non-competlevel, identifying contracing) similarly named business applica- tors, employees which carry the most risk. tions. It was formerly known as Project As projects are run through BIM 360, IQ, then Construct IQ, and now under the Construction IQ subscribers get a conConstruction IQ brand is part of figurable dashboard where a broad Autodesk’s BIM 360 cloud platform. overview of the analysis across multiple

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projects is displayed. Obviously as the system is cloud-based it can be run on a desktop or mobile device, such as a phone or tablet. A traffic light system indicates the quality risk for today’s planned activities, safety risk, the number of sub-contractors at risk, high risk issues, water risk issues, checklist and overdue issues. This can also include a live camera feed from the site, weather information and a timeline of risks. By selecting a topic area, the user can drill down into more detail on who, why and what. The software will even prioritise what it thinks are the most critical issues and will learn the risk profiles of individuals.

The BAM experience At Autodesk University London last month, Simon Tritschler, technical development specialist and Michael Murphy, digital construction operations manager at BAM Ireland gave a very candid talk about their experiences with deploying Construction IQ and the lessons learnt about their project management and construction processes. BAM Ireland was established in 1958 as Ascon Contractors and rebranded as BAM Contractors around 2008. The company was initiated as a Dutch-Irish joint venture and today it’s the country’s largest civil engineering contractor. BAM currently employs over 2,000 people directly and indirectly and its development focus is on the digitalisation of construction, increasing standardisation and continuing the development of its preconstruction management. www.AECmag.com

22/07/2019 16:02

Simon Tritschler technical development specialist, BAM Ireland

Out of all the BAM groups, BAM Ireland seems to have a keen appetite for deploying the latest technology and seeing how it can improve its digital construction processes. It puts this down to the fact that it’s a small part of the operation and can therefore be more digitally agile. The company is also heavily into lifecycle. As BAM builds and operates many facilities for clients for up to 25 years, the incentive to manage risk and maintenance in the short and long-term gave additional impetus to join the Construction IQ beta in 2016. While BAM Ireland is obviously a big proponent of BIM and construction simulation it also wanted to rid itself of the paper process so adopted BIM 360 to host project data and digitise its data collection and distribution workflows alongside the model. Once BIM 360 had been implemented and initiated with Construction IQ, the team started to run the insight capability on projects to identify which contractors were the greatest risk to project success. The answer came back that it was clearly BAM Ireland itself! Construction IQ ‘red flagged’ inconsistent document issues in existing projects and this turned out to be project members who were raising issues but failing to close a large percentage of them in the system once they had been fixed. This meant projects appeared to have many overdue issues, even though they didn’t. This undermined the whole digital process and so BAM Ireland’s first task was one of internal education and housewww.AECmag.com

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keeping, as a lot of its collated data was ‘garbage’. This dramatically brought down the number of open issues in projects. However, the system still identified real and critical issues within the huge haystack of project documents, of which there can be 10,000 – 15,000 per building. “A huge problem here for us is overdue issues. If we fix these problems early, they’re cheaper to fix,” explains Murphy. “If we start with a $25 issue that could be fixed in design, if that gets to construction that increases to $250 to fix. If it’s spotted during snagging that will be $2,500. If it gets into operation it could cost $250,000. Knowing where the issues are early on is essential. “If this system [Construction IQ] is taking a lot of heavy lifting away it’s giving us a laser sharp focus in terms of what the genuine health and safety issues are. We don’t have to explain how it works to the team; it just happens! Not only is it pointing at major issues but it’s giving us more time.” Since adopting Construction IQ, the company has realised a 20% improvement in on-site quality and safety and a 25% increase in staff time spent on highrisk issues, both of which are products of improved decision-making, resulting from increased visibility into issues and risks. There is also comfort in the knowledge that as Construction IQ continues analysing every BAM Ireland project, it’s refining its prediction capability, improving its accuracy. For now, Construction IQ has been used on new construction projects, but the team is also interested in applying the

AI to span the entire project lifecycle for maintenance data, which could identify trends in longevity of supplied components and help define better long-term building design. The team wants to use Construction IQ to help standardise efficient processes across the BAM Group. From the early exposure, it’s clear that the application of AI and machine learning is providing extremely pertinent information about current and potential risks to the project portfolios.

The future Construction IQ hasn’t yet allowed BAM to look at how lessons learnt can be used to impact project scheduling, which is something the team would like to investigate, how it could impact managing subcontractors and sequencing for example, which remains a manual process. “The reality is that construction projects tend to have gone badly wrong before anyone has realised it,” concludes Murphy. “It is being built or has been built completely wrong. What we are seeing now is that we get early indicators, what the major issues are, [and with] which subcontractors. “You can identify and remedy issues earlier, no more floating under the radar. We have more time to have better oversight and, as the general contractor on projects, we have got to own it and anything that can help us ‘own it better ‘has got to be a good thing and we realise we are just scratching the surface of what is possible.” ■ autodesk.com/bim-360

July / August 2019

22/07/2019 16:02

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Seeding the National Digital Twin

The National Digital Twin is an ambitious project to bring new efficiencies to the UK’s infrastructure. Greg Corke reports on the Cambridge pilot project which aims to lay the foundations for a series of federated twins, connected by securely shared data

or infrastructure asset owners, the ‘digital twin’, a virtual replica of a physical asset that keeps in sync with its real-life counterpart, is a compelling proposition. It promises to optimise operations and maintenance and support better decision making when planning for the future. Creating a digital twin of an individual asset is one thing, but the UK National Infrastructure Commission has a much bigger vision. In its 2017 report “Data for the Public Good” it recommends the development of a ‘National Digital Twin’. The idea is that greater sharing of data between infrastructure assets will deliver huge cost and efficiency benefits. It would use technologies like software analytics, machine learning and big data to simulate the entire UK infrastructure system. Considering the scale and diversity of data/systems, delivering a monolithic twin for the whole of the UK would be impractical and undesirable. “You don’t want to have a ‘big brother is watching you’ situation, where somebody owns a 50TB model of the UK and they’ve got all the sewer information, the network communication information, all that stuff,” says Bruce Hutchinson, senior consultant, Bentley Systems. The plan is to create a secure, federated twin, an ecosystem of digital twins owned by different asset owners and connected by securely shared data. These assets/systems would be represented at different levels of granularity. High quality, standardised data and seamless interoperability is of paramount importance. To help achieve this goal, asset owners, mayors and other leaders in the built environment are being guided by the Gemini Principles (tinyurl.com/gemini-twin) when developing their own digital twins. The National Digital Twin is all about using it appropriately in different contexts, giving users access to the information that they need, but not too much or too little, says Hutchinson. “The Major of London is 26

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not going to care about a specific pump in a plant room, he’s going to be more interested in flood control - if the Thames goes up what streets will be affected.” Starting small, the Centre for Digital Built Britain is supporting this national goal by funding a digital twin pilot project at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with Bentley Systems, Topcon, Geoslam and Internet of Things (IoT) software company RedBite. The objective is to develop a dynamic

1 The reality model of the IfM building and surrounding site captured by a Topcon drone and processed with Bentley ContextCapture 2 Plant model and operational data viewed through the dashboard first view on Bentley’s AssetWise platform

www.AECmag.com

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Feature

‘living’ twin of the Institute for tance of developing a systematic methodol- yse data in order to understand how the Manufacturing (IfM) building and the ogy to define the asset information require- asset is performing. In the IfM, this is done West Cambridge campus, demonstrating ments and to ensure that whatever data is through the building management system, its impact on facilities management as well collected meets the organisational objec- IoT sensors and devices that monitor and as ‘wider productivity and well-being’. tives. “Often we have a problem where we control the condition and operation of crit“We want this twin to provide the foun- go around collecting a lot of data without ical assets and the environment within. dation for integration with wider city scale knowing what it is for,” he says. “So this Close to 60 environmental sensors digital twins and wider city scale data and approach ensures that we are collecting the have been deployed so far, including temsee what we can do if we have that integrat- right data in the right way. And through perature sensors, humidity sensors, and ed picture of digital twins across different the right asset hierarchy and so on, we can ones that can monitor whether windows types of infrastructure assets such as represent the data in the right manner.” are open or closed. power, water, transport and so on,” said Dr To date, over 200 assets have been “We are going to deploy C02 sensors Ajith Kumar Parlikad, research lead of the tagged within the building. Barcodes are and also occupancy monitors as well, project, speaking at Bentley Systems’ placed on the physical objects and the within the building,” says Parlikad. “On Future Infrastructure Symposium in associated asset data is stored in RedBite’s top of that there are some condition monLondon last April. “How can we actually asset management solution ‘itemit’. itoring sensors that allow us to capture have a positive impact through those digi“What these 2D barcode tags allow us to data that is not currently captured tal twins on social and economic outcomes. do is not only identify these assets unique- through the building management sysHow do we actually develop a twin that is ly but if you scan the tag, the app will show tem. So, for instance, we have these vibrafederated, for example, that is open, that is us an asset profile which provides all sorts tion sensors that are put on the pumps on interoperable, but it’s secure as well.” of descriptions about what the asset is, but the HVAC systems in our plant room.” The West Cambridge digital twin is dif- more importantly asset management data To create a central repository for the senferent to many other digital twin pilots in as well,” explains Parlikad. “So, you can see sor data and building management system that it focuses on existing buildings and information about when it was last inspect- data, everything is being pushed to a cloud infrastructure rather than on purpose-built ed, what the inspection record was, when it database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). assets. This presents a broad set of chal- is due for inspection next, when the next This is partly because the University’s lenges around the creation of the 3D model. maintenance is due and so forth. It’s a rich local data infrastructure is locked down, “The building is around ten years old collection of data that you can store on but more importantly, explains Parlikad, and we never had a good drawing or as- those asset profiles using these tags.” because the project gives an opportunity built drawing or model of the to explore how emerging building, so one of the things cloud-based solutions can we went out to do was develWe want to be able to show that if we have the be used within the digital op a BIM model based on twin context. right data and if we export and exchange the IFCs, – a standardised BIM model – that not only repre- right data in the right form, the ability to exploit Twin platforms the data does not depend on a specific platform Two digital twin platforms sents the structure of the building but also the compoare being used within the nents within the building as pilot. One is developed by well. For example, the MEP components, Users can also input information about Bentley Systems, based on its AssetWise the mechanical and electric components the assets and Parlikad’s team has been platform, and the other is a BIM IFCand so on,” says Parlikad. exploring the use of natural language based digital twin platform that has been Bentley Systems played a central role processing, as he explains. “For any user, developed in house. in generating the BIM model of the IfM given the right level of access, you can Parlikad explains the reason behind this building. This was then augmented with scan an asset, say the boiler, and enter in dual platform approach, “We want to be a highly detailed reality model of the simple plain language like ‘the boiler is able to show that if we have the right data plant room using data captured from a not working’ or ‘the fridge is not work- and if we export and exchange the right GeoSLAM handheld laser scanner and ing’ and so on.” data in the right form, the ability to exploit photogrammetry. Topcon used drone and This would then inform the asset man- the data does not depend on a specific platvehicle-based scanning and photogram- ager, not only that there is a problem with form,” he says. “As long as the data is metry to generate a reality model of the that asset but the prioritisation of that exchanged in a standardised way, we can West Cambridge campus. problem. explore different ways in which we visualResearchers are also developing an aug- ise this data through different platforms. Asset tagging mented reality (AR) application for mainte“This is also an opportunity for us to The next step was to add the contextual nance. The idea is that users would wear a explore two different pathways in terms layers within the digital twin, classifying HoloLens head mounted display and see of research - whether to go on a ‘geometobjects within the model itself so it’s assets behind the ceiling, then tap on those ric modelling BIM IFC pathway’ or a ‘aware’ of what it is. This includes the assets to get their status. The plan is to take ‘realistic modelling pathway’ [using realcreation of an asset register, along with things further and allow maintenance ity capture],” he adds. asset identification tags for critical equip- operators to do fault diagnostics online. Of course, physical assets are continument across the IfM. “If we don’t know ally changing so the project will also what assets we have, there is no point in Real-time performance data need to explore how the model will be having a digital twin,” says Parlikad. One of the key aims of the project is to updated over its lifetime. To plan for this, Parlikad is keen to point out the impor- explore the best way to harvest and anal- the site has been broken down into a

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Feature The plant room model was generated from laser scans and photogrammetry. Objects are then classified and integrated within the AssetWise common data environment to display operational and environmental data. Users can navigate the model and bring up performance data by clicking on assets

number of replaceable tiles. Some are smaller than others, depending on the density of information within them. For new buildings, an as-built BIM model might be the obvious choice, but Bentley believes reality capture has a very important role to play. Hutchinson cites a Bentley R&D project that allows a service company to easily capture assets when digging a hole in the road. A GoPro camera is attached to an excavator boom via a custom rig and the videos are then fed into Bentley ContextCapture to produce a mesh showing the exposed pipes, as well as the surrounding manholes and drains. There are important lessons to be learned about data visualisation but, as Parlikad explains, it’s of no use if you can’t exploit the data to drive decisions. With Bentley’s platform, data from the environmental sensors is pushed into AssetWise every minute, along with data from the building management system. This is then fed into AssetWise Operational Analytics with a view to giving insights into the data and the ability to predict asset failures or operational events. Through a web portal, users can access operational data via a series of custom dashboards with key performance indicators (KPIs). Depending on the permissions or role of the end user, data can be presented in different ways to convey different operational and reliability stories. Everything is fully customisable. Through a hierarchical tree, users can explore all rooms and assets within the building, but the system also offers a model first view, where users can navigate, much like in a video game. “You can interact with the assets in the room, you can click on them and get a picture in picture idea of what’s happening with that asset at any one time,” says Hutchinson, adding that you can also click to see what’s happened www.AECmag.com

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in the past and then predict what will happen in the future. This could be predicting the failure of the boilers within the plant room or monitoring the vibrations coming out of the pump to detect any anomalies. Safety operating envelopes can also be created to monitor assets during operation. If an asset is working fine, for example, then a green tick could be displayed on a custom table in the dashboard. But if it goes out of pre-defined limits then an alert could be sent by email or text. To date, the project is restricted to analysis and reporting; it hasn’t gone so far as to create control systems that can interact with the assets directly. The West Cambridge pilot has now been collecting sensor data every minute for over a year, which Hutchinson says gives a good dataset for predictive maintenance. “What we need to work on is the idea of machine learning and algorithms that Cambridge University are looking at, so if we were to click onto an object, what is its predicted failure rate, is the bolt loose, is it vibrating too much, is it too hot?” he says.

Scaling up So far, the West Cambridge project has focused predominantly on the IfM building but it is now starting to extend its reach. Working with Smart Cambridge, researchers have been exploring how a city level digital twin could deliver benefits to citizens and to the council. By looking at traffic data, for example, that the city has been collecting through sensors and through automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras, the city-level digital twin can be used to predict the impact of different scenarios. This could be how a new housing development might affect the traffic across the different parts of the city, or how the increased use of electric vehicles might impact the ener-

gy demand because people will be charging their vehicles at home or at work.

The future Over the next two years, there are plans to add sensors for things like traffic monitoring, air quality, parking and vision-based condition monitoring of the road surface. There’ll also be an increased focus on data modelling, further research into IFCs, how GIS data and BIM data can be combined and how reality models can be made more object oriented. There are also many questions that need to be answered, as Parlikad explains, “How do we reduce the cost of maintenance through predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics and so on, how do we reduce the cost of operations by reducing energy consumption and developing performance management apps that allows us to compare the performance of boilers across the different buildings in the campus?” The pilot will also seek to explore how digital twins can improve citizen level outcomes across cities through things like traffic modelling or air quality modelling using C02 sensors. But most importantly, the project needs to move away from simply looking at assets and into large scale systems and national level digital twins. The success of the National Digital Twin project hinges on its ability to bring together multiple, secure, plug and play digital twins seamlessly in one interdependent, dynamic system. “How easy is it for one organisation to say, yes we have developed a digital twin of our asset, [but] can we plug our twin into the city twin at all?” says Parlikad. “I don’t think we can do it now so we have to explore how we can.” ■ https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk ■ ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk ■ bentley.com ■ topconpositioning.com ■ geoslam.com ■ redbite.com

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NXT BLD

The revolution is here Our 3rd annual exploration of the future of design and construction technology took place last month in London, examining a broad array of disruptive ideas and technologies that are set to have a huge impact on our industry by Martyn Day

ver 17 years ago, AEC Magazine was our response to the potential of Building Information Modelling (BIM) to move the industry forward to 3D and a model-centric approach to defining buildings. AEC Magazine’s sister publication, DEVELOP3D (develop3d.com) covers the manufacturing and product design sector, one that moved from 2D drawings to 3D models and digital fabrication twenty years ahead of the AEC industry. With BIM-capable tools commonly owned by AEC firms (although not necessarily deployed in an exemplary BIM process) AEC Magazine is now examining the next set of technologies and processes which will disrupt our industry.

The key topic areas include robotics, digital fabrication, offsite production, modular approaches to design, robots, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented / virtual reality (AR/VR), real-time photorealism and computational design. On the evening before NXT BLD 2019, I sat down to write my introduction to the conference. I was going to open by making some predictions as to what will happen in the future of the AEC industry, then realised that the speakers that would come directly after me were already delivering those things - robots, automated production of buildings, etc. In Nostradamus comparisons, being able to see five minutes into the future didn’t seem like much of a vision to boast about!

The robots are here Our keynote talk came from Boston Dynamics, who had flown over especially for the event, bringing two four-legged Spot Mini robots with them. Boston Dynamics sees its roving robot as a sentinel for on-site construction and is about to launch its first commercial product into the construction space. The robot can work autonomously or be operated by remote control. Hopefully you’ve all seen videos online of Spot Mini walking around construction sites and even dancing to uptown funk! Nothing really prepares you for the first time you meet Spot. It truly is an incredible piece of hardware. Michael Perry from Boston Dynamics was only 10

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Nothing really prepares you for the first time you meet Spot. It truly is an incredible piece of hardware’ www.AECmag.com

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minutes into his presentation when Spot walked into the auditorium, up the stairs and on to stage. At that point the entire audience had their phones out to video this incredible work of engineering art. The articulated arm on top of the robot, features a grabber and a camera, and the body behind has plenty of space to mount sensor devices. In fact, while at the show, Faro and Topcon took full advantage of access to Spot Mini to do some live tests in the exhibition area, where we had the first laser scans executed on specially designed 3D printed mounts. We’re convinced that Spot Mini will be a big hit in the world of reality capture, enabling the automated collection of scanned data for surveying and 4D analysis. Melike Altınısık is a fantastic architect who creates beautiful flowing designs and runs her own practice, MAA, in Istanbul. Formerly at Zaha Hadid Architects, you can really see the influence in the curved and innovative forms which is typical of the work which MAA produces. A keen user of advanced technology, Altınışık has been innovating in her approach to construction and assembly. Her work came to our attention when she won the Seoul Robot Science Museum

competition and has designed a building for robots, to be assembled by robots. Another of MAA’s iconic projects will be visible from everywhere on Istanbul’s skyline, the futuristic 369m metre-tall telecommunication tower, which utilised revolutionary construction methodology.

Visual edge Just prior to NXT BLD, Epic Games announced that it had acquired TwinMotion (which is powered by Unreal Engine) and that it would be giving the architect friendly real-time viz tool away for free until November (ArchiCAD customers get even a better deal). Epic Games’ Ken Pimentel talked on this and how the development work in the popular video game Fortnite is driving the development of Unreal, for it to handle city-scale models and collaborative technologies. Unreal does offer one of the most realistic shaders out there and we are edging ever closer to their promise of real-time photorealism which will totally change the architectural visualisation market. Ken’s presentation gave delegates a great taste of what to expect in our dedicated viz and VR stream (see box out below) which ran in parallel to the main stage.

Advanced fabrication Just weeks prior to the event I came across a fascinating article on a designer who had come up with a way of folding metal for construction by using origami techniques. After a brief conversation, Tal Friedman was initially just going to give a short 10 minute demo of his technology but we were fortunate to be able to give him a full 20 minute slot where he looked at generative building optimisation, complex façade design and these incredible self-standing and optimised origami metal forms.

Extra-terrestrial architects Xavier De Kestelier of Hassell made the case for the practice of architectural design in the design of a future Marsbased habitat. Looking at utilising technologies such as robots and 3D printing, the design team came up with a whole process of a flock of robots constructing a 3D printed dome, from Martian soil. The idea is that the dome will shield an inflatable habitat from cosmic radiation, which gets through the atmosphere due to the weak magnetic field of Mars. This presentation really was a tour de force in architectural design story telling.

Real-time ray tracing comes of age on the design viz and VR stage Cobus Bothma Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)

In less than a year Nvidia RTX has gone from a demonstration technology to one that is being used to great benefit on real-life projects. NXT BLD’s dedicated design viz and VR conference stream provided the perfect platform for digital artists and architects to share their experiences of real-time ray tracing and for the technology developers to give a sneak preview of where things are headed in the future. Carlos Cristerna of US marketing agency Neoscape

dived straight in with a live demonstration of real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine. Cristerna showed how the technology was currently being pushed to the limits on a live New York skyscraper project that had originally been configured for offline rendering, creating stills and animations with 3ds Max and V-Ray. Doing a live demo comes with its risks but Cristerna perfectly illustrated just how fast an RTX-enabled viz workflow can be, toggling on reflections, refractions and

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global illumination on the fly with near instant results. Equally impressive was the fact that he was doing everything on a mobile workstation. The real time ray tracing demos that we have seen in the past have been multi GPU on powerful desktop workstations. Cristerna was using a 15-inch mobile workstation, Lenovo’s ThinkPad P53 with Quadro RTX 5000 graphics which we review on page 47. “In a matter of minutes, you can do as many renderings as you want. If you have a presentation for a very important client tomorrow, you can put together a pretty decent presentation,” he said. Cobus Bothma, applied research director at Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), gave an architect’s view of rapid visualisation and how it is being used to accelerate design decisions. “We don’t have a specialised visualisation team inside our office. There’s no one to go to, to say ‘can you render this stuff for us,” he

said. “We train our designers to render, to compute, to use BIM etc… they all get involved in communicating their design and visualisation.” Bothma’s presentation gave a fascinating insight into KPF’s visual design process using a broad set of tools including V-Ray (Project Lavina), Enscape, Unreal Engine and Nvidia Holodeck. This wasn’t about generating glossy marketing images; it was about using visualisation for communication and to influence the design process. Bothma explained that it’s the workflow that leads up to render process that is most important; the rendering takes care of itself through hardware and software. For the biggest scenes, he explained, these can be pushed down to clusters or bigger scale GPU machines, so precious time doesn’t have to be spent optimising models. Bothma made the very

important point that in design, real-time is relative. “We don’t need to run 11ms a frame, we can actually wait a little bit for it. If we wait half a second, it’s OK. If we run ten frames a second, it’s also OK. It’s about communicating exactly what you need to communicate at the right time.” Nvidia launched RTX last year but it’s taken a while for the technology to appear in commercial applications. Much of the focus has been on Epic Games and Unreal Engine but Enscape and Chaos Group, which have a longer history in the AEC sector, are set to bring their ‘real-time’ ray tracing, RTXenabled-applications to market soon. Presentations from both firms gave NXT BLD delegates a chance to see where things are heading. Moritz Luck, co-founder of Enscape showed how RTX technology is currently being implemented into its push button viz tool. Architects love Enscape because it is so

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NXT BLD The new Bauhaus

presented the work he’d done in the eve- firm widely tipped to become the ‘Tesla’ ETH Zurich is the Bauhaus of the 21st nings programming a Unity-based VR of building companies. Starting at zero, Century. The University is incredibly environment. This was for architectural within four years the company is now well funded and has a laser focus on modelling inside VR, as opposed to using worth many billions, employs thousands experimenting with digital fabrication VR as a just a viewing tool. and has an order book like no other and innovative ways to make buildings. Now two years later he has teamed up house builder. Last year we had Stefana Parascho (nxt- with Icelandic developer and entrepreneur Katerra is driven to use digital fabricabld.com/videos/stefana-parascho) and Andrei Hilmar Gunnarsson and at NXT BLD we tion methodology to produce buildings Jipa (nxtbld.com/videos/andrei-jipa) talking got an exclusive viewing of Arkio, a new as components, shipped to site and is robots and concrete. This year Mariana VR tool for architects specifically designed leading the charge in CLT (Cross Popescu of the Block Research Group talk- to support collaborative modelling. It runs Laminated Timber) buildings in couned about her revolutionary tries that are adopting this approach to using knitted material. Katerra has a range forms to create in-place formFor an industry that is much maligned for of configurable buildings, work for concrete. This new apartments to eight stobeing technologically backward, or lacking from process, called Knitcrete, comrey office blocks which can be bines digital fabrication, com- investment in technology, NXT BLD proves ordered online and delivered. putation and structural design London South Bank that this is no longer the case with one of mankind’s oldest University is host to fabric creation processes. DARLAB, an advanced archiPopescu gave deep insight into the CNC on a desktop or a tablet and you just need tectural fabrication research institute, knitting technique, its capabilities and a one of the new low-cost headsets to get headed up by Federico Rossi, that project completed with Zaha Hadid going in VR. The demo was exhilarating explores both subtractive and additive Architects at Museo Universitario Arte and allowed two designers to simultane- processes, combined with large-scale Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. ously work on a single model, generating industrial robots. The project work of geometry at a building or city scale. students and academics was shown at its Design inside VR full force through Rossi’s varied presenAt our first ever NXT BLD, we had a Digital fabrication tation. The algorithmic statue work for young architect from Holland called Johan For the afternoon, we were graced with the World Wide Expo which went on for Hanegraaf from Mecanoo Architects, who Richard Harpham from Katerra, a US three months non-stop was incredible.

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easy to use. In a live demo, Luck showed how this ethos will continue with the RTXenabled version of Enscape, by enhancing the visual quality of a complex scene at the push of a button with near instant ray-tracing. Simeon Balabanov from Chaos Group showed the latest developments in V-Ray for Unreal - specifically, how users of the popular photorealistic arch viz renderer can harness their V-Ray workflow for the real time engine, or simply get high-quality ray traced imagery out of Unreal. Balabanov also gave a glimpse of Project Lavina, its new ray traced rendering engine for real time previews that takes advantage of Nvidia RTX GPUs and their ray tracing cores. If delegates were left wondering what the magic was behind these advanced viz workflows, Nvidia’s Sandeep Gupte had the answers. As part of a broad presentation

on the expanding role of GPUs in the AEC sector, Gupte explained how RTX works and the technology behind its new Quadro RTX GPUs. He also gave a glimpse into the future of collaborative VR through the impressive Nvidia Holodeck. Lenovo’s Mike Leach also showed how RTX technology has now made its way into mobile workstations as well as giving an excellent overview of Virtual and Augmented Reality and the many options available to AEC firms. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive might get most attention but there are several other powerful options for architectural VR. Herzog De Meuron’s VR lead Mikolaj Bazaczek continued the VR discussion with a fascinating insight into the Swiss architecture firm’s VR journey and w o r k f l o w, w h i l e

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Nassim Saoud of Trimble Consulting turned the discussion to Mixed Reality and its growing influence in the AEC sector. Finally, Alexander Le Bell, CEO of Finnish firm Tridify closed proceedings by introducing a new technology designed to make BIM model data instantly available to anyone, everywhere in VR or on mobile phones. Greg Corke

Neoscape’s New York skyscraper real-time ray tracing demo

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22/07/2019 12:24

NXT BLD Marc Fornes, THEVERYMANY

Florian Frank works at international architectural practice Herzog & De Meuron in the Digital Technology (DT) department, which develops and investigates new creative software tools and processes for CNC, visualisation, VR, BIM, Rhino/Revit/CAD and coding, providing solutions for the architectural groups. Frank gave us practical examples as to how the DT group supports design 3D model development and we saw how physical models still play an important role within all the design teams. As he is a natural experimenter, he developed a 5-axis parametric environment in Grasshopper to generate milling strategies to bypass the old unintuitive CNC software to make fabrication less stressful. Our final speaker was a special guest who literally flew in from New York for the day. Marc Fornes and his practice ‘THEVERYMANY’ have been using computational design and digital fabrica-

Melike Altınısık, MAA

tion to make extremely thin, complex, self-supporting forms. The design team appears to be constantly experimenting with form generation, pushing the limits of the current technology while creating their own vocabulary and design aesthetic. A must see for all geometry explorers!

Conclusion For those that missed the event, I think you get the gist that there was an amazing array of inspirational presentations. For an industry that is much maligned for being technologically backward, or lacking investment in technology, NXT BLD proves that this is no longer the case. In many respects, the level of investment and experimentation has become infectious, with many firms now evaluating digital fabrication and off site workflows. While generating complex forms and using the new methods of production may seem highly risky, the use of computational

methods helps minimise that risk and even improve the quality. In many ways, while SketchUp and BIM adjusted the course from 2D to 3D modelling, the key deliverable is still a set of 2D drawings. The next step for the industry will be to embrace digital fabrication as the core output. You can rely on NXT BLD 2020 (London, 9 June 2020) to bring you the best of these early adopters and the latest in research. ■

nxtbld.com

Save the date NXT BLD 2020 NXT BLD 2020 will take place at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London on 9 June 2020. More info at nxtbld.com over the coming months

Watch NXT BLD 2019 on demand Tal Friedman Foldstruct

Michael Perry Boston Dynamics

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Richard Harpham Katerra

Missed a talk or would like to see a favourite again? The good news is you can now watch all of the presentations from NXT BLD 2019 (and our 2017 and 2018 events) on AEC Magazine’s YouTube channel. tinyurl.com/YouTube-AEC

July / August 2019

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Case study

Taking BIM out of the ‘specialist-only’ zone At Wilmott Dixon, visual collaboration software Revizto is bringing projects to life for wide groups of stakeholders, generating ideas, opinions and insights that will help them run more smoothly, writes Jessica Twentyman

t UK construction company making them accessible to more people, so Wilmott Dixon, the fusion of that they can understand a project site and BIM models with reality-cap- what’s happening there and you can beneture data is transforming fit from their ideas and opinions,” he says. project planning and review meetings, “We don’t want to restrict anyone with a sparking new insights and driving new useful point of view from seeing what we see. Revizto helps us take BIM out of a conversations. That’s what happens when ‘specialist-only zone’.” the results of this powerful Comments raised in meetcombination can be presented ings, especially those that to even the most non-technifocus on issues, can easily cal of users in a compelling, be captured, stored and understandable visual forshared through Revizto’s mat, delivered directly to mark-up tools and subsetheir familiar mobile device quently tracked through to or via an immersive virtual resolution. The system’s reality (VR) experience, search engine, meanwhile, according to Antony Brophy, makes it easier to locate senior digital manager at these issues (and all inforWilmott Dixon. mation relating to them) The technology at work further down the line. here is Revizto, he explains, It’s a democratic approach We don’t want which fuses multiple data that works very well in disto restrict sources together in one colcussions with clients, anyone with a according to Brophy. “We laborative environment to useful point make it simple for all stakecan show them what they’ve holders to understand a projof view from got on the site already, what ect, to help spot issues and to will be new there, and we seeing what track them through to resocan take them on a guided we see. Revizto tour around the model,” lution. In Wilmott Dixon’s case, helps us take says Brophy. “They can float the BIM data comes largely into a Revit model, take a BIM out of a from Autodesk Revit; the look around, and where reality-capture data of the site ‘specialist-only we’re incorporating that zone’ is from 3D scanners and drone data, they can look drones, imported into Revizto out the windows, see what as point cloud and mesh data. the view will be like - and The end-user viewing device is most fre- this could be a year or more before we quently an Apple iPad, although a wide even build anything.” range of other mobile devices are used too, While Oculus Rift headsets have proved as well as Oculus Rift head-mounted dis- a popular way to showcase planned projplays (HMDs). Either way, the aim is the ects to clients, in a recent technology pilot, same, says Brophy: clients were walked through a virtual “It’s about opening up 3D models and model of their project projected onto the

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interior wall of a Sublime Dome from Soluis Group, for an ultra-immersive, joint exploration. “It was a superb experience for everyone involved and it’s really got me thinking about using that kind of technology more in future,” says Brophy. “It’s a great way to take people out of the silo of a VR headset.”

Internal collaboration time Revizto is proving equally valuable for overcoming internal collaboration hurdles, especially in conversations that involve office-based workers and onsite teams. It was used, for example, on a recent hospital project, which involves a lot of refurbishment work, as well as some rebuilding. Plant room refurbishment is an important part of the plan here, making it vital to understand before the project began what equipment was already installed in three different plant rooms across the site. The best way to capture that information was via 3D scanning, in order to create a point cloud that was brought into Revit and then shared via Revizto to various MEP and design teams involved in the planning stages. Says Brophy: “This allowed us to basically have the discussions around where we needed to put the handling units, the pump sets and so on. We also needed to understand which pipework could and couldn’t be stripped out, because obviously, this is a hospital that needs to be kept running, so we needed to find ways of doing that. And then we looked at where the new work should start and how the rip-out should begin, so we could plan that all ahead of time,” he says. “It was a big eye-opener for the team to realise that we’ve got a model designed in Revit for MEP, plonked in the middle of a point cloud, allowing everyone to clearly www.AECmag.com

20/07/2019 11:08

1 Drone scan of school site 2 With a context model of the surrounding site stakeholders can get a feel for a building from the very earliest planning stages - from the outside, from the inside, looking out of the window 3 Point cloud overlaid with BIM model 4 360 degree photos attached to their respective rooms as a 360 stamp

see where the issues were likely to be. It allowed us a bit of forward-thinking before anyone even got to the site.” More recently, as part of that same hospital project, drone data has been integrated with Revit, in order to capture an accurate record of the condition of the roof where work will be taking place, so when it comes to handover, Wilmott Dixon will see what dilapidation was evident when the project began, compared to what was handed over. Reality mesh data captured by drones has also been integrated with design data from both Revit and AutoCAD in the case of an entirely new building, intended as student accommodation. “The idea here is can we get a feel for a building from the very earliest planning stages - from the outside, from the inside, looking out the windows. The fact that you can experience a building in its context and its surroundings before it’s even begun is amazing.”

Moving forwards Wilmott Dixon currently has an allocation of 250 licenses for Revizto and regular usage now accounts for around 200 of these. These include employees working on the planning and construction phases of projects, as well as employees in the field and construction managers at the handover stage. Members of Brophy’s technical team are among the heaviest users, he says. “As the firm wins new work, projects come in through the doors and we’ll generally push them up into Revizto to show a wider audience in the business and get them talking about the project. From there, the specific project team takes over, taking ownership of pushing their models to Revizto as and when required. So we get them started, but they take it from there.” www.AECmag.com

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July / August 2019

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Case study

Antony Brophy, senior digital manager, Wilmott Dixon, exploring a reality model with Revizto in an immersive Soluis Dome

More recently, the firm has started loading images captured on a Ricoh Theta V 360-degree camera for the aftercare process. The data lacks the detail of a laser scan, but it’s much quicker to capture and doesn’t require specialist skills. One example of this is in the installation of fire doors in a new school, for which a checklist needs to be created to ensure the right seals and door furniture are in place as the installation progresses. A 360 photo was taken in every room in the school, taking just two days to complete the task for three separate buildings. Each photo is attached to its respective room in Revizto, as a 360 stamp, and for hidden behind walls or under floors. compatibilities, but that’s where ideally I’d each stamp, a task is created for the afterIn terms of VR, Brophy is now toying like the technology to go.” care team. Subsequent progress on the with the idea of creating stereoscopic For him, it’s the perfect counter to the installation can be captured in incremen- views for groups of stakeholders. The idea downside of VR, in that participants are tal 360 photos and attached in the same here is to equip them with 3D glasses that immersed in their own experience and cut way, creating a complete record. they would use to watch a walk-through off from those around them. In short, VR “This is still in the R&D stage at the together on a large screen. “So if we had a can be a highly individual, but potentially moment, but the question isolating experience. The 3D we’re looking to answer is, glasses approach, he believes, ‘Can we do this as the It was a big eye-opener for the team... a model has the potential to make it norm?’,” says Brophy. “And far more collaborative, in a designed in Revit for MEP, plonked in the the comments that we’re getrelatively low-cost way. middle of a point cloud, allowing everyone to ting back from users is that “Given that we’ve already clearly see where the issues were likely to be got large screens on all of the they’re loving it. They can see it in the field, on an iPad and sites these days, it’s a logical that really works for them.” next step,” he says. And He can see this working for many dif- Revizto-enabled stereoscopic view, people another step, it seems, on Brophy’s misferent aspects of construction work. If could sit together at a screen, ten people in sion to bring construction issues - and issues arise some time down the line, the a meeting room, for example, pop on their their resolution - to life for as wide a group firm has a complete record, in the form of glasses and they’re all immersed in it of stakeholders as possible - and benefit these 360 photos, of what was done and together,” he says. “I love the simplicity of from a wider and earlier pool of ideas, when - especially in the case of features, that. There’s obviously technicalities to be insights and opinions as a result. such as services ducts, that may now be resolved around that, in terms of software ■ revizto.com

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www.AECmag.com

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July / August 2019

22/07/2019 16:15

Interview

KPF - moving VDI workloads to the cloud Saif Khan, network manager at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, shares his experiences of moving the global architecture firm’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workload to the cloud

: Tell us a bit about Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) Associates and your role there.

to move that to the data centre didn’t make any sense. Then, as VDI got a little better, we tried it about three years ago as a pilot with a A: We’re a global architecture firm with very limited implementation, specifically six offices around the world. Our head- for Revit, which is a collaborative BIM quarters are in New York, app where everyone works with offices in London, off the same file across officShanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, es. We tried VDI to fill that and Abu Dhabi. need, but it had its own We’re known for our design issues and didn’t really catch on supertall buildings, really on. The performance wasn’t high-profile projects, master that great. There was jitter. planning, and interior work. When moving things around We do everything from airit wouldn’t be as smooth. So ports to educational campusthe solution ended up being es. The Abu Dhabi airport is a remote tool that people one of our biggest projects could log in and use whenevA lot of our now... one of the biggest airer they wanted to. We had ports in the world by square people use Xi that setup for a while, and footage and number of flights still use it. The probFrame when people that go through. lem is, we have limited hardthey’re onsite ware and can only support Q: What drove KPF’s use of or at a client’s 12 users at a time. virtual desktop infrastruc- office or other Then we ran into Nutanix, ture (VDI)? and by that point we were times when much more into the cloud. they’re A: In our industry, as you can We had started using imagine, the workloads are Panzura for file sharing and travelling huge and the workstations had migrated as much of our are high-spec. To get that sort infrastructure to the cloud as of horsepower on a server and distribute possible. We have a Panzura controller it was really challenging. So early on, we (cloud gateway), which sits in every office kind of ignored VDI. It didn’t make and connects to an S3 bucket in AWS. sense for us because everyone had these Panzura manages it as a single file sysreally high-powered workstations, and tem everyone can see and work off.

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July / August 2019

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Overall, we wanted to minimise the amount we spent buying and maintaining new hardware. Moving our VDI workload to the cloud seemed like a natural step. Another reason this was a hot topic for us, was that we were about to buy more VDI servers in New York, Asia, and London, and were going to have all these additional infrastructure costs. Then Xi Frame came along, and we said, “Why even bother, when we’re moving our data into the cloud and it makes sense to move our compute to the cloud as well?” Disaster recovery was another driver. We had a snowstorm this past winter and other outages where people were trying to work from home and couldn’t because we could only support 12 concurrent users. Our board wanted us to elaborate or expand our remote capabilities, so Xi Frame fit into that as well. We have 350 people in the New York office. We were ready to drop some money to buy more VDI servers and get another 12 sessions, but it just didn’t make sense when we could use Xi Frame and pay as we use the service, and have as many sessions as we want, instead of having all this infrastructure sitting here going to waste because it’s not being used. And then, honestly, seeing Xi Frame was amazing. Just the performance, the refresh rate, the ability to smoothly move things around the screen. I remember sitting in front of it, saying to my boss, “You have to try this.” www.AECmag.com

20/07/2019 10:42

Abu Dhabi International Airport Midfield Terminal

Our on-premises VDI systems are already outdated — the graphics processors, even the CPUs — and it’s only been two years. We had started throwing more horsepower at this stuff because that’s the only thing you can do. The HDX tech the on-prem system uses hasn’t really evolved. No matter how much power you put in the back, that’s all you get. When you compare it with Nutanix, you can easily see the difference in how the on-prem system lags and stutters. Q: Who at KPF gets access to VDI? A: Everybody. The majority of time people use their own desktops, so VDI is mostly for when they’re away from the office. Q: How important is remote access? A: Very important. A lot of our people use Xi Frame when they’re onsite or at a client’s office or other times when they’re traveling. It’s very important they be able to get to their applications and data. They can either run apps natively on laptops, or if that’s not available, they have the option to go to Xi Frame and use them that way. Q: Are small offices another use case for you? A: For sure. When we open a new office, traditionally the first thing we do is set up a WAN and start sharing things that way. www.AECmag.com

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But in theory, with Xi Frame, all we need is a browser and a good internet connection. So that’s definitely something we would try in the future. Overall, working with the cloud, we’re focused on getting better internet connections and reducing our WAN usage, so Xi Frame fits into that model well. Q: Did security considerations influence your use of VDI? A: It was definitely a factor. With any sort of VDI setup, you don’t have to worry about security as much. Everything is saved behind the firewall, and users come into the sessions over a secure connection. With Xi Frame it’s even better in the sense that the machines are ephemeral, and once you log off they don’t exist anymore so it’s even more secure. That was definitely a plus point. Q: What services have you plugged into Xi Frame? A: We have single sign on through Azure AD, so people use their username and password to log into Xi Frame and that works great. We use Office 365, so our identity is already running in Azure. We’ve connected all our storage in Panzura. And we did a bit of a network integration so the Panzura controllers in the cloud could talk to our on-prem controllers. Also all licensing for the apps in Xi Frame happens here in New York for North American users. We

have a network license server that feeds into systems running in the cloud. Q: How does managing Xi Frame compare with on-premises VDI? A: Basically, it [on-premise VDI] involves a lot of updates and tweaking that we don’t do anymore. With our on-prem system we have to update the VDI software and applications on every single machine we have. With Xi Frame we just install whatever we’re installing on the main image and hit publish, and it pushes the app out. The 12-session limitation with our onprem VDI was a huge drawback for us as well. If people forget to log off or don’t the close session properly when they log into the on-prem environment from home, you have to close the session so someone else can get on. That’s something we deal with because we have a small VDI environment, but now this is no longer an issue with Frame. We can scale out to 1,000+ instances if we need to. Q: What’s next for desktop virtualization at KPF? A: We plan on setting up Xi Frame for our other offices in the near future. The great thing about being in the cloud is the ability to chose the nearest data centre based on office location and being able to easily replicate the current setup. ■ nutanix.com/products/frame

July / August 2019

20/07/2019 10:42

Feature

VDI: on-premise or in the cloud? Many AEC firms struggle to fully understand the different options for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and whether to go cloud or on-premise. Adam Jull of IMSCAD Global explores the benefits and costs

o, you have taken the decision to invest in VDI to run applications like Revit and AutoCAD and to offer your staff flexible working and mobility. Now you need to decide whether to deploy in the cloud or onpremise. This a question we get asked regularly, as well as which is the more cost-effective solution? In truth, there is no right or wrong answer, no one size fits all. It depends on what you define as being critical to your business. I think we can all agree that performance for the users is essential. Whatever solution you go for you need to provide your users with the tools they need to maximise productivity. This is especially true when looking at graphicalbased VDI. An important aspect to a successful VDI project – cloud or on-premise - is choosing the right partner. Virtualising graphical applications requires skill and an intimate knowledge of the applications. No one customer is the same; understanding your user workflows is paramount to a successful end-to-end solution. So, what are the key differences between an on-premise solution and one in the cloud?

On-premise solution

hosts all of your data and applications. You gain access through a portal over the internet. The costs associated with the cloud are typically billed monthly and spread over the term of the contract so can be attributed as Operating Expenditure (OPEX). Before breaking down the costs of each solution and giving some examples and cost comparisons, let’s highlight the pros of each.

Why on-premise? •

•

With an on-premise solution, you are committing to purchasing the hardware. Everything will be run on servers you • own, on your premises. You are responsible for the management and running costs. There is a sizeable upfront Capital Expenditure (CAPEX). •

The cloud

p43_44_AEC_JULAUG19_VDI.indd 43

•

• •

hardware refresh or failure. Security – shifting the responsibility of security to the CSP can reduce nervousness. Smaller businesses benefit from enterprise grade security. Ready to use instances – instances that have been pre-configured with licensing and should be ready for use immediately. Deployment – cloud solutions typically take less time deploy. Project-based deployments, spin up your environment then close it down, on demand.

Both solutions offer the key benefits of mobility, flexible working and centralisation of your data.

The costs Below outlines the hardware and software required to run 24 concurrent users using Revit and AutoCAD in an on-premise VDI solution. Required infrastructure (1 x server with 24 x virtual desktops) • Server, processors, RAM, 2 x Nvidia GRID GPUs, SSDs • Licensing - Microsoft Windows Server 2016/9 + Windows 10 and Citrix/ VMware licenses • SQL express and Active Directory • Remote access SSL VPN (Netscaler) • Nvidia GRID vDWS licenses Financial Estimate • Hardware £30,000 approx. • Software £20,000 approx. • Consulting / deployment services £15,000 approx.

Why the cloud?

With a cloud solution, the CSP (Cloud • Service Provider) owns the hardware and www.AECmag.com

CAPEX – often viewed as a negative, but a one-off, upfront expense can actually keep operating costs down. Security – keeping data securely on your own infrastructure, protecting your IP. Customisation – owning your own hardware and having full control over your choice of processors allows more scope for provisioning of resource to users. As opposed to pre-configured, cloud instances that don’t always provide the best performance for resource hungry graphical applications. Deployment – more control over deployment; the what, when, where and how are in your hands. ISV licensing – most ISVs do not take issue with this method and is considered no different to your current workstation licensing agreement. Data – all your data is kept in one centralised store, when running alongside your current workstation environment. Designed to minimise latency.

•

Total approx. £65,000 one off, OPEX – predictable ongoing costs. plus an annual renewal of licensing No surprise, large capital expense for and support. July / August 2019

20/07/2019 10:43

Feature

‘‘We see many AEC

businesses wanting to provide flexible working to their workforce and [on-premise and cloud] offerings will give mobility with excellent performance, if set up correctly

’’

On-premise VDI, per user per month cost 1 Desktops (VDI)

Physical servers

One off solution cost including first year software and support

Annual renewal of software and support

Per user per month cost over 4 years

Up to 12

1 x server (1 GPU)

£45,000

£10,000

12 users - £130

Up to 24

1 x server

£60,000

£15,000

24 users - £92

Up to 48

2 x servers

£120,000

£30,000

48 users - £92

Up to 96

4 x servers

£240,000

£60,000

96 users - £92

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) VDI, per user per month cost 2 Desktops (VDI)

Infrastructure Cost per user per month

One off solution cost including first year software and support

Annual renewal of software and support

Per user per month cost over 4 years

Up to 12

£325 per user per month

£20,000

£10,000

12 users - £412

Up to 24

£225 per user per month

£30,000

£15,000

24 users - £299

Up to 48

£225 per user per month

£60,000

£30,000

48 users - £290

This does represent a substantial Capital Expenditure (even without failover) but how does this differ from a cloud-based solution? With the cloud, there is no upfront hardware cost but there are still software and consulting costs, plus additional costs for extra provisioning such as file storage, data migration / bandwidth. Setting up an environment with a public cloud provider is still complicated, so you will need an experienced partner to ensure the deployment is a success. In the tables to the right you can see the per user, per month cost of an on-premise solution compared to both a Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution and a public cloud solution over a four-year period. Each table gives an approximate cost to run Revit and AutoCAD. The servers in the DaaS offering are provisioned exactly as the on-premise servers have been and both solutions give 24/7 access to your users. The public cloud offering is running on instances utilising Nvidia M60 GPUs. The cost has been calculated on a per instance, per hour cost for a 40-hour week, working 50 weeks of the year. For every extra hour worked on top of this, there will be extra cost. 44

The monthly figure inclusive of all hardware and software you would need to purchase from the outset

July / August 2019

p43_44_AEC_JULAUG19_VDI.indd 44

Costing based on The IMS Cloud DaaS offering with Nvidia P40, 32GB RAM, SSD storage based desktop

Public cloud solution, per user per month cost 3 Desktops (VDI)

Instance Cost Per user per month

One off solution cost including first year software and support

Annual renewal of software and support

Per user per month cost over 4 years

Up to 12

£260 per user per month

£20,000

£10,000

12 users - £347

Up to 24

£260 per user per month

£30,000

£15,000

24 users - £325

Up to 48

£260 per user per month

£60,000

£30,000

48 users - £325

3 Costings based on the AWS pricing tool https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing [23/05/2019] Includes Windows licence, 8vCPU, 15 Gb Memory, 1 GPU - 4Gb (Nvidia Tesla M60), 100 Gb Root volume, 100 Gb User volume Hourly - $23/month + $1.97 per hour it’s switch on (1 USD equals 0.78 GBP)

Summary IMSCAD has a rule of thumb for customers. If you want a VDI solution for under 12 months, use the cloud. If you want it for over 12 months buy your own kit. As can be seen from the estimated figures above, when amortised over a fouryear period, the monthly, per user cost of an on-premise solution is considerably lower than you might think. It is cheaper than both the public cloud and Desktop as a Service solutions. Of course, firms do not have go all in

with VDI. If you are planning a hardware refresh soon it could be a good time to invest in a solution to sit alongside your traditional workstations. We see many AEC businesses wanting to provide flexible working to their workforce and all three offerings will give mobility with excellent performance, if set up correctly. We all hope costs reduce but as with as with many technologies it is the peripheral products and services that tend to cost the most. ■ theimscloud.com ■ imscadglobal.com

www.AECmag.com

20/07/2019 10:43

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Lenovo ThinkPad P53 [pre-production] In this exclusive review, Greg Corke gets hands-on with the P53, which delivers the kind of 3D performance never seen before in a 15.6” mobile workstation When it comes to mobile workstations, the 15.6-inch form factor is by far the most popular – and has been for years. It’s not too heavy, fits comfortably into most bags and the display is a reasonable size for detailed design work. Specs-wise, most models are ideal for 3D CAD, but when the GPU needs to be pushed harder for real-time viz, virtual reality (VR) or GPU rendering, performance often leaves users wanting more. This is where the more powerful Nvidia Quadro GPUs come into their own. But historically, anyone who wanted a ‘5000’ class Quadro (e.g. Quadro M5000M or P5000) had to go for a bulkier 17-inch mobile workstation. These are OK if you only ever move between desks or from home office to garden, but if you need your machine to be truly mobile, the extra size and weight soon become a drag. On June 11 at NXT BLD (nxtbld.com), Lenovo unveiled a new mobile workstation that looks set to have a major impact on the market. The ThinkPad P53 is the first 15inch mobile workstation from a major OEM that offers the kind of GPU typically only found in a 17-inch machine. The GPU in question is the new Turing-based Quadro RTX 5000 (16GB). Packing more GPU power into a 15-inch chassis gives Lenovo a distinct advantage over the competition. By comparison, Dell and HP can only offer up to the Quadro RTX 3000 (6GB) in their flagship 15-inch mobile workstations, the Dell Precision 7540 and HP ZBook 15 G6. As one would expect, the Quadro RTX 5000 offers more processing power in general. It has more CUDA cores for 3D graphics or other parallel processing tasks

Hands-on with the P53 such as ray trace rendering or Product spec simulation, more RT Cores for The ThinkStation P53 does not ray tracing and more Tensor ship until later in July, but we ■ Intel Xeon E-2276M processor (2.80GHz, Cores for deep learning (You were lucky enough to get hold 4.70GHz Turbo) can learn about the relevance of a pre-production version (6 Cores) of these cores and the with a special test mode build of ■ 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 memory impact RTX is set to have on Windows 10 Professional. For ■ 2 x 512GB Intel SSD rendering in our Quadro RTX those who know their prototype 760p Series SSDs 4000 review at tinyurl.com/ hardware, it’s a System ■ Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 GPU (16GB) RTX-D3D). Importantly, the Verification Test (SVT) model, ■ 15.6-inch 4K (3,840 Quadro RTX 5000 also has which is a very early build. x 2,160) OLED Touch, nearly three times the memory It goes without saying, then, 400nit display of the mobile Quadro RTX that the performance metrics ■ Windows 10 Pro 4000. And for many of today’s quoted in this review should ■ 377mm (w) x 252mm (d) x 28mm (h) GPU heavy workflows, 6GB not be taken as gospel. By the ■ From 2.45kg simply won’t cut it. time the machine ships next ■ Think 3 year Lenovo might currently have month, it will likely have gone on-site warranty one over on HP and Dell, but through several driver and ■ Price on application it isn’t the only manufacturer BIOS optimisations. The 430.63 (from $1,799) to put a Quadro RTX 5000 in Quadro driver installed on the lenovo.com/ thinkworkstations a 15-inch laptop. MSI, Asus, machine, for example, dates Acer and Razer also have back to May. brand new machines with For our testing, we decided to Nvidia’s top-end mobile GPU, but some are bypass CAD entirely, as 3D performance based on gaming chassis and none have the in applications like Solidworks, Creo, enterprise credentials and durability track Revit and ArchiCAD is really a given for a record of the ThinkPad brand. machine of this class. Instead, we focused on workflows that will benefit most from the Quadro RTX 5000 by name… high-end RTX 5000 GPU – in other words, The Quadro RTX 5000 in the ThinkPad real-time viz, VR and GPU rendering. P53 might be built from the exact same silicon as other RTX 5000 GPUs, but Real-time viz: For professional 3D to keep power draw and thermals graphics, applications don’t come much under control, Lenovo has used a Max-Q more demanding than Autodesk VRED Design variant, which is clocked slower Professional. This automotive-focused 3D and is rated at 80W, compared to the visualisation, virtual prototyping and VR standard 150W. tool uses OpenGL 4.3 to deliver very highNaturally, this has an impact on quality visuals in the viewport. To increase performance, but not as much as you visual quality and smooth the jagged edges might think. Lenovo reckons you get of lines, models can be displayed with about 85% to 90% of the performance of a different levels of real-time anti-aliasing standard Quadro RTX 5000, since when (AA), which stresses the GPU considerably. you go above 80W, the performance curve We tested at FHD and 4K resolution flattens off, so pumping more power into with a complex automotive model and the GPU only gives you a small gain. the ThinkPad P53 performed extremely To put things in perspective, 80W is well. It delivered almost identical results still high for any mobile workstation to a Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000-based component. The Intel 9th Gen Xeon and desktop workstation with an Intel Xeon Core class CPUs used in the ThinkPad W-2125 CPU (4.0GHz, 4.5GHz Turbo) and P53, for example, are all rated at 45W. was about 25% to 33% faster than the Dell 1 The ThinkPad P53 features the classic chiclet keyboard, which is solid and responsive

2 The Quadro RTX 5000 GPU is the star of the show, although it probably doesn’t shine like this is real life

July / August 2019

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www.AECmag.com

22/07/2019 14:01

Review Precision 7720 we reviewed in Jan 2018 (tinyurl.com/D3D-7720). This 17-inch mobile workstation came with a Quadro P5000 GPU, which is one generation behind the Quadro RTX 5000. Next, we turned our attention to Enscape, a popular real-time viz tool for architects. Unfortunately, while the ThinkPad P53 worked fine in windowed mode, whenever we tried to go full-screen, the application crashed, so we couldn’t get any meaningful results.

we ran the game-centric VRMark benchmark. The scores were a little lower than we expected – around 10% to 20% behind the desktop Quadro RTX 4000. However, the ThinkPad P53 was 20% to 30% faster than the Dell Precision 7720. GPU rendering: Momentum continues to grow for GPU rendering in design through applications like V-Ray GPU and Solidworks Visualize. From our testing, however, it looks like Lenovo (or Nvidia) still has some work to do before the ThinkPad P53 ships. In the V-Ray 1.08 benchmark (GPU), for example, we found our machine was about 40% slower than our desktop Quadro RTX 4000 and only marginally quicker than the Quadro P 5 0 0 0 based Dell

Virtual Reality: To test the ThinkPad P53 in VR, we used an Oculus Rift. To get it up and running took a little bit of work. First, we needed to change the BIOS settings to ‘discrete graphics only’. This was to force the Oculus headset to see the Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 and not the Intel integrated graphics that it was choosing by mistake. This is not an isolated issue for mobile workstations with switchable graphics. We experienced the exact same problem last year with the Dell Precision 7720. Second, the ThinkPad P53 only has two USB Type A ports, so we had to buy a USB Type C to USB Type A adapter (the Oculus Rift needs one for the headset and two for the sensors). Of course, adapters won’t be needed for newgeneration HMDs, which tend to use a single USB Type C port. Once up and running, we loaded up a 7 million triangle automotive styling model in Autodesk VRED Professional and enjoyed a good solid VR experience. With anti-aliasing (AA) set to low, everything was very smooth. Even when AA was set to medium, the experience was OK (with only the odd flicker when viewing the model from certain angles). We had a similarly good experience with Autodesk Revit Live. Subjectively, we felt there was a general improvement over the Dell Precision 7720. To get an idea of relative performance,

Precision 7720. It was also off the pace a bit in Solidworks Visualize – around 17% slower than a desktop RTX 4000 workstation.

Beyond the GPU The Quadro RTX 5000 might grab the headlines, but the ThinkPad P53 is certainly not a one-trick pony. It also offers a significant step up in terms of the CPU and comes with a choice of 9th Gen Intel Xeon and Core processors. At the top end, you can get an 8 core Intel Xeon E-2286M with a base frequency of 2.40GHz and a Turbo of 5.0GHz. Our Underneath the service panel you get easy access to:

www.AECmag.com

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Memory and storage The machine offers a maximum of 128GB DDR4, spread across four DIMM slots, which should be plenty for most pro users. Two of the memory modules can be accessed easily through the service panel on the bottom of the machine, as can the M.2 NVMe SSDs. Simply remove seven screws and you’re in. In order to accommodate the more powerful GPUs, Lenovo has had to make some compromises to the storage. When configured with a Quadro RTX 3000, 4000 or 5000, you only get a choice of up to three M.2 NVMe SSDs. If you want a 2.5-inch hard disk drive (HDD) to get the best price/GB

3 Two of the four memory modules 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs 5 90WHr battery

test machine’s Intel Xeon E-2276M is one level down, featuring six cores, a base of 2.80GHz and a Turbo of 4.70GHz. In our single-threaded tests, the machine performed extremely well, standing shoulder to shoulder with the HP Z2 Mini G4 desktop workstation we reviewed in April (tinyurl.com/D3D-Z2G4), which features an 80W Intel Xeon E-2176G (3.70GHz, 4.70GHz Turbo) (6 cores). In multi-threaded tests, however, it suffered a bit because of its lower base clock speed. During our KeyShot render test, for example, it started off with a 3.0GHz Turbo but all cores soon went down to 2.40GHz - 2.50GHz. Render times were significantly slower than the HP Z2 Mini G4, which maintained 3.90GHz for the entire test, but slower ‘all core’ clock speeds like this are typical of mobile workstations with 45W CPUs. At this point, it’s worth talking about cooling. Like many mobile workstations in its class, the ThinkPad P53 features dual fans — one for the CPU and one for the GPU. Throughout all of our tests, there was very little fan noise, much less than we would expect from a machine with such powerful components. By the time the ThinkPad P53 ships, one wonders if Lenovo will have tweaked the BIOS to increase performance at the expense of acoustics.

6 The 230W power supply is 35% smaller than its predecessor but still weighs 0.89kg

July / August 2019

22/07/2019 14:01

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Review you’ll need a Quadro T2000 or below. For those with deep pockets, there’s plenty of storage capacity from the three NVMe SSDs (up to 6TB) and they can also be configured in RAID 5, which gives good performance and protects against drive failure. If one drive should fail, data will not be lost. You just pop in a replacement SSD and it should rebuild the array. Our test machine came with two 512GB Intel SSD 760p Series SSDs and 64GB of RAM.

The chassis The machine itself is classic ThinkPad — solid and extremely well-built. In this respect, it can’t be faulted, but in terms of aesthetics, it’s starting to look a bit dated, lacking the premium look and feel of the Dell Precision 7540 or HP ZBook 15 G6. The 377 x 252 x 28mm, 2.45kg chassis is larger and heavier than the Dell and HP, though this comes as little surprise considering it has a much more powerful GPU. To get an RTX 5000 mobile workstation from any other major workstation OEM means a 17-inch chassis which is significantly bigger and heavier. The ThinkPad P53 is exactly the same size as the ThinkPad P52 it replaces. The datasheets are a bit confusing as they show an increase in thickness from 24.5mm to 28mm, but this is simply because Lenovo has changed the way it measures. Externally, the chassis looks and feels pretty much identical to the ThinkPad P52, bar some changes to the I/O ports. It has more USB Type C ports (one on the right and two at the rear with Thunderbolt 3) and fewer USB 3.1 Type A (two on the left). There’s also an HDMI 2.0 port (left) and an RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet (rear). For wireless connectivity, the machine includes Intel WiFi 6 AX200 (Gig+), which is designed to give a better experience in environments where multiple WiFi networks co-exist — which, if you live in a major city, is pretty much everywhere these days. The backlit ThinkPad Precision keyboard is identical to the P52 and has a CADfriendly numeric keypad to the side. In use it feels great – the keys are responsive and there’s virtually no flex in the middle. There’s also the classic three- button Touchpad and Trackpoint and a touch fingerprint reader. Sound is vastly improved, thanks to a new Dolby Atmos speaker system. It might not deliver pumping bass (can there ever be enough bass?) but the richness and fidelity is superb.

design viz, is the new optional 15.6-inch OLED 4K (3,840 x 2,160) 400nit touch display. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode to give it its full name, is relatively new to laptops, but is already used widely in phones, tablets and TVs. OLED is different to IPS panels traditionally used in mobile workstations in that it lights each pixel individually, rather than filtering an always-on backlight. As pixels can be shut off completely, you get incredibly deep blacks and much better contrast ratios. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a top class IPS panel to do a side-by-side comparison, such as the UltraSharp IGZO4 4K Infinity edge display in the Dell Precision 5530 2-in-1. But we were exceedingly impressed with what we saw. Our render output from KeyShot looked particularly stunning, especially with low-lit scenes. Compared to a budget IPS panel, the blacks were significantly less washed out. 3D CAD models and 2D drawings were also super sharp. Notably, when viewing the display from an angle, colour and brightness remained very consistent. The OLED panel is only available at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution. If you want FHD (1,920 x 1,080), there’s an optional IPS. Alongside the new display, Lenovo has made a tweak to its ThinkShutter webcam privacy cover, which is now integrated behind the screen with a small slider above. It’s a much more elegant solution and feels more solid.

Power and battery

With the combined power requirements of the Quadro RTX 5000 GPU and Xeon CPU coming in at well over 100W, it will come as no surprise that the ThinkPad P53 needs a 230W power supply. This weighs in at fairly substantial 0.89kg complete with US plug, more than one third of the weight of the actual machine (2.45kg), so it’s an important consideration if you travel a lot. However, Lenovo says the slimline power supply is 35% smaller than the previous generation 230W unit, which came with the 17-inch ThinkPad P72. The Li-ion battery is rated at 90WHr, the same as the ThinkPad P52. However, with the Quadro RTX 5000 drawing more power than the ThinkPad P52’s Quadro P3200, battery life is likely to be shorter in GPU-heavy workflows, but only if the GPU is running at full speed. In the quick tests we did running off battery, the GPU clocked down considerably, even when Windows and the OLED 4k Display BIOS were set to high performance. This had Arguably the most significant change to a huge impact on 3D frame rates and render the chassis, particularly for those into times. We imagine Lenovo will address this www.AECmag.com

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by the time the machine ships. There was nowhere near as much throttling of the CPU. The OLED panel can also have a big influence over battery life. Theoretically if what you view on screen is dark — say a white CAD line drawing on a black background — it should conserve energy as the dark pixels do not need to be lit at all. The battery itself is located under the service panel and can be changed by the user. But this is not something you’d do on the road, only to replace at end of life. Like most modern laptop batteries, it charges quickly. From empty it took 29 minutes to reach 50% charge and 50 mins to reach 80%.

Conclusion With the ThinkPad P53, Lenovo has broken the mould for the 15-inch mobile workstation. Over the years, we’ve seen them become thinner, lighter, more stylish and shiny. But, generation on generation, we’ve never witnessed such a big leap in 3D performance — at least from a major workstation manufacturer. There are better machines out there if you only do 3D CAD, but none come close for more demanding 3D workflows. For Lenovo, the timing couldn’t be better. In design and engineering firms, historically it’s only been viz specialists that need high-end GPUs in their mobile workstations. But with viz software getting easier to use, VR becoming more embedded within design and GPU rendering more prevalent, architects and product designers are starting to hit the limits of their current CAD-focused machines. Of course, it’s too early to pass judgement on the ThinkPad P53 – after all, we’ve only had a very early pre-production unit. But we really like what we’ve seen so far and, once Lenovo brings its GPU rendering performance up to the levels we would expect, it should offer a great blend of performance and portability. But even with the anticipated optimisations and tweaks, it’s important to set a realistic level of expectation. Because of its Max-Q Design, the ThinkPad P53 will likely perform more like a desktop workstation with a Quadro RTX 4000, than one with a Quadro RTX 5000, albeit with 16GB of GPU memory. One thing we haven’t mentioned is cost, which is still to be finalised. The ‘from’ price of $1,799 is almost certainly for very entrylevel specs. A fully loaded Quadro RTX 5000 version will cost significantly more, but then the ThinkPad P53 does have the potential to truly be the only workstation you need for GPU-heavy workflows – on the road and in the office. July / August 2019

20/07/2019 10:48

Preview

HP Reverb VR Headset Professional Edition Greg Corke shares his first impressions of HP’s new enterprise-focused VR headset which boasts a much higher resolution than the competition Price $649 hp.com

No one forgets their first virtual reality (VR) experience. Mine came in 2016, and the combination of an HTC Vive and my irrational fear of heights meant that I failed to walk the virtual plank. But despite being overwhelmed by the sense of immersion, I also recall feeling a bit underwhelmed by the resolution and the clearly visible pixels. Fast-forward three years and we now have the stunning ‘human eye’ resolution of the Varjo VR-1. But while £6,000 for a VR headset of such quality may be nothing for an automotive multinational when it considers the benefits it can bring to product development, for small design, engineering or architecture firms, that kind of price tag is probably asking a bit much. The new HP Reverb offers a welcome middle ground. It boasts an impressive per eye resolution of 2,160 x 2,160 – four times as many pixels as the original HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The Pro edition, meanwhile, comes at a very palatable $649. The Reverb is HP’s second-generation Windows Mixed Reality headset. The first was built on a platform design, so was very similar to other Windows Mixed Reality headsets. The Reverb uses the same Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality ‘inside-out’ tracking, but HP has designed the rest of the headset from the ground up, including its own display panels and optics. With inside-out tracking, you don’t need additional sensors, so it’s significantly easier to set up than the original Vive or Rift. This makes it particularly well-suited to portable VR, which is important if you share devices or want to set it up quickly in the boardroom or a client’s office. I got to try out the Reverb at the recent AR & VR World Summit in London and was very impressed. The first thing you notice is it virtually eliminates the ‘screen door effect’, the grid you see due to unlit gaps between pixels. Then, when you move up close to objects, you start to see remarkable detail in the textures. Edges 50

July / August 2019

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also appear much sharper. For automotive and product design, where form and aesthetics are key, this should offer a massive benefit. For architecture, perhaps less so, but this does depend. At the design/development stage, having a sense of proportion and scale is arguably more important than visual fidelity. But when selling a penthouse apartment off-plan, some will place a huge value on being able to see the grain on the leather sofa or the fabric of the curtains. The benefit of higher-resolution VR goes beyond model fidelity. With the HP Reverb, text also appears much sharper, so you can read smaller fonts. This could be a major benefit for the UI design or for viewing object data. Pro VR may still focus predominantly on the model, but there’s huge potential to expose the underlying attribute information in PLM or BIM applications. I can even envisage it being used to view complex Gantt charts for planning construction projects. Of course, rendering at higher resolution means you need a more powerful GPU. HP recommends a Nvidia GTX 1080, Nvidia Quadro P5200 or AMD Radeon Pro WX 8200, more than the minimum requirements for most other VR headsets, but it really depends on your workflows and datasets. With an HTC Vive, your workstation may have been able to handle texture-rich automotive models in Autodesk VRED, but with an HP Reverb, it could struggle to deliver a flicker-free experience. However, if you only work with simply shaded, conceptual architectural models, the additional pixels shouldn’t present too much of a challenge.

The headset The HP Reverb Professional Edition comes in at $649, which is only $50 more than the consumer version. For this price, you get a leather faceplate that’s both removable and wipeable (as

opposed to washable foam). In addition to the standard 3.5m DisplayPort + USB 3.0 cable, there’s a 0.6m mini DisplayPort + USB 3.0 cable for use with the HP Z VR Backpack. A DisplayPort to mini DisplayPort adapter comes in the box. The headset looks quite similar to the Oculus Rift, with three soft adjustable straps (two on the side and one on the top), as well as built-in headphones. But it feels more comfortable to wear and weighs a mere 498g without the cable. It comes with standard Windows Mixed Reality controllers, which pair to the Reverb headset via Bluetooth. We’ve heard reports that the tracking coverage is limited and doesn’t go beyond the 114° field of view, but we didn’t notice any problems in our brief testing of the product. Theoretically, any limits could be less of an issue for enterprise VR applications where hand movements are typically more controlled than they are in VR games. (My mum playing the first-person shooter ‘Serious Sam’ is a good case in point here.)

Conclusion First-generation VR headsets, including the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, were pretty low on resolution, but they still did an excellent job for many enterprise applications, especially in architecture. Last year, HTC upped the ante with the Vive Pro (1,440 x 1,600) and now there’s the Oculus Rift S (1,280 × 1,440) with inside-out tracking. But neither come close to the Reverb (2,160 x 2,160), which looks set to give HP a significant advantage in workflows where visual fidelity is of paramount importance. Of course, in order to deliver a smooth VR experience at enhanced resolutions, you’ll likely need a more powerful GPU. The impact of pixels on performance is something we’ll explore when we review the product later this year. For now, the device is sold out everywhere, so it could be a while yet. www.AECmag.com

20/07/2019 10:50

P O WE RT O

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