ASCON, of St. Petersburg, Russia, has announced its new Renga Architecture and how its beta testers are reacting to its new AEC CAD/BIM solution. ASCON makes KOMPAS 3D, a leading MCAD product used in the Russian market and elsewhere.
ASCON has also been making news with its own developed geometry kernel—the type of 3D software engine technology that powers CAD and 3D software applications. Architosh has written about the ASCON C3D geometry kernel a few times, in the recent past, as it has new Mac OS X native support.
Renga Architecture: A New Russian BIM
ASCON made news recently announcing that its open beta-testing for its new Renga Architecture software came to a successful close. The new AEC 3D CAD is due to be released soon.
MORE: Mac 3D: Russian based C3D Labs adds Mac OS X support for its geometry modeling kernel
The name Renga is based on a hieroglyph from the Land of Rising Sun, meaning “brick”—the oldest aspect in construction—but also the name for an ancient genre of collective poetry. Add poetry and brick together and you can see the connection to the world of architecture and hence the name!
01 – A view of the new Renga Architecture 3D AEC CAD software from Russia’s ASCON. It is technically in post late beta but not available as of yet. We assume Windows support but Mac OS X support may be in the works as well. (image: ASCON. All rights reserved.)
More than 550 people beta tested Renga Architecture, from all over the world, from Russia to Aruba in the Caribbean Islands. Designers, architects, university professors and students in architecture and construction had the chance to review it and share their impressions with ASCON.
Renga Architecture appears to bear some familiarity with SketchUp in that it is very 3D surface oriented. On their website a beta tester named Ekaterina Fedoriheva of Moscow wrote:
“Renga has interesting method of working: It begins with 3D surfaces, and then after it develops plans and facades, and not vice versa. The program is intuitive to understand; you can learn it in several hours. This system is good for placing several projections on one printer sheet, such as facades, sections, and plans. It shows lines with the correct thicknesses; this is very convenient, as we don’t need to adjust thickness of lines.”
Beta testers have praised its ease-of-learning (matter of hours) and its direct modeling features whereas users can simply focus on modeling versus switching back and forth between building families. Besides the image above and the images you can find here, you can check out Renga Architecture in a YouTube video below and see it in action.
It is not clear if this product was developed for OS X in addition to Windows; we have made contact with ASCON to find out about their plans. We also do not know any more about product availability (what countries), costs and support and other matters. What we can safely assume is that the Mac OS X supported ASCON C3D geometry kernel is likely very much behind this product, but a compatible kernel doesn’t necessarily make the program code base cross-platform.
We will keep Architosh readers posted on more news about Renga Architecture and all things ASCON related to its geometry kernel.
Architosh Analysis
There is not much to say about Renga yet but it is warranted to qualify the statement “US & Germany dominated Architectural CAD/BIM market” used in the title. That would roughly equate to the big four AEC software houses (Autodesk, Bentley, Trimble and Nemetschek AG). Nemetschek AG owns its Hungarian subsidiary ArchiCAD, one of the global leaders in AEC BIM software, as well as its US-based Vectorworks and German local app ALLPLAN.