In-Depth: The New and Dynamic formZ 8

[title image credits: Subdivision study of UNStudio’s Museum of Middle Eastern Art, by John Alexander. All rights reserved.]

 

For several years AutoDesSys, Inc., the makers of the famed formZ 3D software, were quite busy with a little sister application named bonzai 3D. Bonzai grew partly in response to the emergence of the application SketchUp, which expanded its user base dramatically by deploying smart viral marketing approaches and building a robust eco-system for third-party developers. During these years formZ took a bit of back seat as the company focused on what became a very strong SketchUp alternative.

When the company reached a point where bonzai 3D was quite mature they had innovated in areas that now needed to get back to formZ. The work of formZ 7 was the target for a lot of this renovation and the new release was so strong that formZ 7 won the Architosh AIA BEST of SHOW honors in the desktop category at the AIA National Convention last year in Denver.

READ MORE: Architosh awards 2nd ‘BEST of SHOW’ awards at AIA National

Still, while AutoDesSys at one time ruled the roost in the 3D modeler department, and included a very good rendering package, over the past decade and a half many newcomers emerged with focuses that led to particular market strengths. formZ found itself surrounded with challengers like Rhino, SketchUp and even modo.

In this latest release—currently in late beta—formZ 8 continues with what started with formZ 7 and begins to address several of its challengers directly with a set of new features and technologies.

Addressing the Future: formZ 8

formZ has long been a top-shelf Class-A NURBS modeling software package, based on its own modeling engine reinforced by Spatial’s ACIS geometry modeling kernel. And while this latest version continues the deep underpinning coding work undertaken to generate formZ 7, it keeps its eye on its user base. “formZ 8 is a progression of formZ,” says David Kropp, Vice President of Development at AutoDesSys, who continues, “that includes some relative new areas for us as well as incremental improvements in a lot of features that our user base has been wanting for awhile.”

64-bit

One feature that its user base on the Mac side has been asking for has been a true 64-bit code base—something that has existed on the Windows side for several versions back now. New in FormZ 8 will be a 64-bit code base for Mac. Now Mac users can really push the size of models and file sizes to dramatic limits. “It’s not an exciting feature from the point of view of something to show,” says Kropp, “but it is an important feature.”

I asked Dave Kropp how long this work in 64 bit conversion took and he explained something that many formZ users may not be aware of. And that is that the company had a working 64-bit version of formZ back in the days of the special version of Windows that ran on the 64-bit DEC Alpha workstations. That was a short-lived period but the company had plumbed its core code base then for 64-bit. This partly explains why when 64-bit came around for Windows the company was already ahead of delivering that capability for its Windows user base.

Additionally, Kropp adds, “it’s a different implementation of 64-bit for the Mac and of course we also had to rely on our partners and their technology who needed to push out 64-bit for Mac on their side.”

Re-wrote OpenGL 

AutoDesSys also re-wrote all of their interactive renderers for formZ 8. Interactive rendering utilizes OpenGL technology so in other words this was a bit of a ground-up rewrite of much of their OpenGL technology. This includes wireframe renderer, shaded work renderer, and shaded full renderer.

“These were all rewritten to new OpenGL standards that allowed us to bring in new features,” says Kropp, “such as soft shadows, bump mapping and real-time ambient occlusion (AO)—which is a really nice addition to the display, especially with architectural work because it gives you a lot better sense of depth into the renderings.”

next page: New SubDivision Tools

New SubDivision Tools

“formZ 8 strives to create tools for creating design through, solid modeling, surface modeling, NURBS modeling and now subDivision modeling,” says Kropp.  “It is giving a new tool for creation and exploration.”

The new SubDivision modeling technologies introduces a whole new suite of tools and new ways of accomplishing things. Knopp notes that while SubD modeling isn’t often thought of as a modeling technology for architecture, per se, it does open up a new avenue for way of creating some smooth forms very quickly.”

In a workflow sense you can actually start with a boxy type of form, use the SubD tools to create smooth forms and then convert those back to NURBS. (see image 01 above)

The advantage of SubDs is that it allows you to create shapes very quickly—more so than what you can do with NURBS—but you can go back to NURBS. “In essence SubDs allow you to do somethings best done with SubDs and then convert to another type of object like NURBS and take advantage of the functionality that formZ offers for manipulation, and export of NURBS objects,” says Kropp.

Product designers will find the SubDs the most useful but so will some architects and other types of users.

The Basic Workflow with SubDs

With any polygon shape you can convert it to a SubD. Like pretty much any other SubD tool behind the scenes you still have the faceted polygonal object but with SubDs you get a scaleable curvature-based form in a editable, draggable cage. (see image 01).  A very nice tessellation of those surfaces actually lends itself very well to 3D printing. “An excellent side benefit to some of this technology—is the excellent meshes it creates,” says Matthew Holewinski, Product Specialist at AutoDesSys.

FormZ is known not just for having the tools to create a form but also to go back and edit a form. We always want to have some ability to go back to the original cage of the SubD and pick points to move or increase or decrease the mesh’s grid points making things smoother or less smooth.

What SubD’s are really good for are organic modeling. Users will have the ability to grab any face and move it, stretch it, increase its size, et cetera. In essence SubDs allow the user to truly sculpt a form. The SubDs tools include a bridge tool that allows a user to bridge a form across two separate forms—and this is useful for various reasons. (see image 02 above)

Using SubDs for Architectural Forms

In our online meeting Matthew Holewinski demoed all these new features and showed some architectural forms that one could imagine being used on some ceiling application perhaps. In looking at these organic forms I couldn’t help but think of the award-winning work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.

In another example Matthew showed something that was a base for a table, a truly organic form that was biological and lively. The new SubD technology, as mentioned earlier, makes ideally clean meshes for 3D printing from which formZ has long been able to support out to the STL file format for 3D printers. During the presentation some sample printed output coming from SubD forms in formZ 8 direct to 3D printers were shown. The results looked excellent.

In fact, one of the items shown was a piece of furniture at the scale of say 1/2 inch equals a foot. Immediately I wondered: this would be great for creating furniture for architectural models—physical models—all printed out and ready to be utilized inside an architect’s model.

Clearly the addition of the SubD technology will be put to good use for all kinds of product and industrial design uses by formZ users. But beyond that it also seems to be valuable in architecture for curved bodies structures, fanciful roofs, organic building shapes, including trusses and columns and even for decorative screening elements on buildings. (see images 03 – 05)

Before we leave the SubD technology and move onto other things let’s address some questions that readers may be wondering about. Taking a look back at that table structure or the rib-like structure above, those elements are solids. They started as SubDs and remain so until you translate them to something else but even if you cut through them in section, what you have is a solid. As David Kropp stated, “that’s why we can print it, first of all, and if we wanted to take it to some other application or technology. Those are solids.”

And as stated before you can also take out these SubDs to a NURBS object where either in this application or another app the solids objects from the SubDs can be taken to a higher level of accuracy and be hulled, shelled, thickened, or all the things you can typically do with NURBS tools.

It is important to note that if you start with a solid primitive and turn it into a SubD you end up with and maintain a solid despite your SubD operations. If you start with a non-solid object and work with the SubD tools you will also keep things as a surface. (see image 06 on the next page)

New Rendering Features

The new rendering technology based on the updated OpenGL adds things like soft shadows and real-time ambient occlusion, as mentioned earlier. In formZ 8 the user will have new controls for dialing up or down things like the soft shadows for instance. The new full shaded render mode is dramatically improved.

In the sample image below you can see a rough approximation between the difference in rendering in formZ 7 and the new formZ 8. In the first image all shadows are turned off which is a bit different than true formZ 7 rendering. But importantly, bump mapping isn’t on, and ambient occlusion is also off. In the second image all these features are turned on—specifically the ones that are brand new due to new OpenGL improvements. (see images 07 – 08 below)

Bear in mind that this is the full shaded rendering mode not the working shaded rendering mode.

next page: Other Improvements, BIM and Something Exciting about Computation Modeling

Other Improvements and Discussion

Another key improvement that users have been wanting to see is grouping within the materials palette. This new grouping structure will really help users to organize their project’s materials creating groups such as woods, glass, stone and tile, et cetera. Matthew Holewinski says this will save the user time—they will not have to sift through hundreds of materials.

The wireframe rendering improvement mentioned earlier isn’t one that presents itself visually. The user will see the same thing but performance wise this mode is much improved. In formZ 8 file sizes can be reduced dramatically in size through both new engineering improvements and the user’s ability to dynamically reduce data with new user controls.

formZ 8 now has a more built in pathway to SketchFab, which is a community website where visitors can view models using WebGL technology in the browser.

BIM Workflows and Options

During the presentation I asked Mr. Knopp how formZ users typically think about their models in relationship to BIM workflows. I asked in particular about the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) file format. Mr. Knopp said that typical users are using formZ in the front end of the design process for the most part—implying that a lot of this work doesn’t lend itself to a BIM workflow stage just yet. But importantly, he said, formZ data can be brought into all kinds of tools including BIM authoring applications. Sometimes users bring is discreet pieces they have created in formZ.

“One of the major limitations of BIM,” says Kropp, “is trying to represent or generate free-from shapes.” “The strength of BIM is actually one of its weaknesses when it comes to design. There are often design details and features that cannot be fit into the formal structures of the BIM representation,” adds Kropp. “Users therefore utilize formZ to bring in special shapes on architecture and then build the rest of the building around it using the BIM authoring tool’s built-in features.” As for IFC support in formZ 8? Kropp only said that while formZ supports a wide variety of file formats, they recognize that it [IFC] is important and are working on it.

Computational-based Modeling

Another aspect that AutoDesSys recognizes in the market is the popularity of modeling tools that enable scripting or mathematically driven form making—such as in the case of Rhino with the Grasshopper add-on software package or Bentley’s Generative Components.

Kropp stated that they have something in development that will hopefully be put into beta later this summer. This will address the area of computation-design. “formZ has a powerful SDK that supports script and plug-in development but its really a programmer’s tool, thus we are developing a new visual scripting solution,” stated Kropp, “and we are really excited about it. We have said in our forums that we are doing work in this area.”

What is exciting about this development and acknowledgement is that formZ will be the only native Mac OS X application that will support architects and designers who have felt ignored by the batch of Windows-only computational-design modeling solutions on the market (eg: Rhino + Grasshopper, Generative Components and Autodesk Dynamo). This is not to say there are zero tools like this available for Mac, just not at the level of formZ—which competes at the highest level with the most advanced modelers in the world.

formZ version 8 is due on the market this early summer.