“Architectural visualization is an art form,” said Csanád Meszes, ArchViz Director, DVM Group, Hungary. “With Archicad and all the connected offline and real-time rendering tools, the sky’s the limit!”

Additionally, Graphisoft announced important new updates to BIMcloud, BIMx, and DDScad, the Norwegian MEP software that came into the Graphisoft fold when the two companies merged recently. Covering the launch event live from Budapest, Architosh heard directly from company leadership about Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud and other product technology and its roadmap directions. We will be covering those items in more reports next week. Below is a highlight of what is new the company’s flagship BIM product.

New in Archicad 26

While there are dozens of new features, some key highlights include new integrations with DDScad for a more fully integrated MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) design experience, plus new connectivity between BIMcloud and Autodesk BIM 360.

Graphisoft’s latest BIM software Archicad 26 was announced yesterday with numerous updates across design, visualization, documentation, and collaboration functions of architectural BIM practice.

The BIM leader also announced an upcoming Apple Silicon version of Archicad for the Mac. (note: Architosh will report more on this soon!)

Design

In the areas of design, Archicad 26 offers multiple new improvements, importantly including smart parametric object creation with graphical editing methods (requires Graphisoft Forward subscription). Other items include:

• More intuitive navigation and management of attributes through a structured hierarchy.
• Fast finding of, and navigation to, specific views and layouts in the design project.
• Faster modeling and documentation of surface openings.
• Quick and easy customized kitchen cabinetry that meets local standards and requirements.
• Improved 2D editing for circle and ellipse Radial Stretching.

“Thanks to the powerful enhancements in Archicad 26, users can focus on their designs while increasing productivity through smoother design, documentation, and collaboration workflows, and their increased productivity translates into more time for design,” said Zsolt Kerecsen, Vice President, Software Success at Graphisoft. “Beginning with Archicad 26, our newly unveiled Adaptive Hybrid Framework approach helps us bring new technology to market faster,” he added.

Visualize

For more powerful visualization technology, this year, Graphisoft has offered users not just a free year of popular real-time rendering tool Enscape, but improved visual technology for the rendering project modes in BIMx implementations (app and desktop). Plus:

• Powerful 3D model publishing with a simpler, more informative workflow and easier control over texture, file size, and export time. BIMx Web Viewer and BIMx Desktop Viewer have new, more realistic visualization with on-the-fly rendering, reflecting project orientation, and a Camera View Cone in the 3D model.
• Fast and easy client approval enabled by fresh content added to the Additional Surface Catalog. (Available for Graphisoft Forward subscribers only.)

While Enscape has recently become available for the Mac in a public beta version and is available now for users to try for SketchUp, it is not yet available for the Mac version of Archicad. The estimated planned release for the first Mac version for Archicad is later this year, but Graphisoft was not specific.

Collaboration

New features that improve Archicad in the areas of collaboration boast new out-of-the-box energy and CO2 building material data, which will greatly aid architects with ongoing accurate building lifecycle analysis and reports on sustainability.

Graphisoft has further enhanced Integrated Design SAF-based technologies for better architect to structural engineer workflows, enhancing collaboration between architectural design and structural engineering teams.

That feature, however, will be available for select localizations of Archicad 26, says the company. GRAPHISOFT has also continued to boost SAF-based connections between Archicad and structural analysis packages, among other features below that improve collaboration for users:

• Faster, automated interoperability between architects and structural engineers in Archicad 26 saves time and increases access to detailed information in the model.
• One-click direct connect feature saves time when working with FRILO.
• One-touch information exchange between Archicad and Structural Analysis applications keeps architects and structural engineers in sync and on track.
• Greater accuracy of Structural Analysis calculations with multi-profile analytical elements that better describe complex segments.

“We collaborate using Graphisoft’s solutions and get feedback from everyone on the team. Not just top down,” said Robert Harris, Senior Associate, Pappageorge Haymes, USA.

Documentation

New documentation improvements include the ability to import multiple pages from a PDF with a single click as well as the following new capabilities:

• Save time and reduce errors with faster, more accurate documentation thanks to new autotext in automated layouts.
• Find and add multiple rules to combinations at once without unnecessary scrolling.
• Using the information already available in the model in multiple ways makes documentation fast and easy.

Commencing 14 July 2022, the International, US, UK and Ireland, German, Austrian, French, and Italian localized versions of Archicad 26 are available for download. Users and those interested can contact their local Archicad resellers through this link, for specific language information and shipping dates for each of the 29 localized packages coming later in the year.

For more info about all the news, visit www.graphisoft.com/archicad-26

Architosh will follow up with additional reports in the days ahead and inside details from press events here in Budapest. So stay tuned and read our analysis and commentary below.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

The Graphisoft 2022 Launch Event for both public and press included, for the first time in the company’s recent history, a detailed look at the future of Graphisoft’s technology and product roadmaps out to the year 2025. While Architosh will have a detailed feature report next week on much of this information, what we can say briefly in this article is that the company has a comprehensive vision for its Graphisoft ecosystem with both Open BIM and Integrated Design technology options for its users and their digital toolchain particulars, which vary among regions around the world. 

Archicad itself, now at this version 26 release, has new foundational technologies. For example, OpenGL has been stripped out and replaced with low-overhead graphics APIs from both Apple and Microsoft. By using Metal on macOS and DirectX12 on Windows, Archicad 26 can tap the underlying power of these more powerful core graphics technologies from the underlying operating systems and leverage the more modern capabilities of GPUs. 

Of course, the company has also announced its Apple Silicon support, leveraging ARM-based chip technologies from Apple on macOS. Coy about speed gains in yesterday’s presentations, our private press time did reveal impressive numbers, which Architosh can talk about later. The truth is, Graphisoft aims to finish their Apple Silicon support in the second half of the year, so talk of performance gains now is premature, even if they are impressive. 

The post GRAPHISOFT announces Archicad 26 appeared first on Architosh.

It was good to see vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook participate in sessions to add their expertise along with motion picture and visual effects professionals as content pipelines are changing. Autodesk still hosts its Vision series of presentations. Side Effects returns to do their Hive presentations and classes to illustrate features in Houdini.

Metaverse, virtual production, and the cloud are discussed a lot in presentations. We have a lot to cover so this year Architosh’s Siggraph virtual show floor coverage comes in Part 1 and Part 2—plus other news and special reports—from this day into next week. Be sure to stop by Architosh frequently to catch our latest in-depth information.

The Metaverse

The Metaverse was initially conceived as a dystopian future where virtual universes provided an escape from the dark, dreary worlds of crumbling societies. The word “metaverse” was first used in the 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash.  Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and pizza delivery guy, uses the Metaverse to escape his life in the book. He lives in a virtual world inside a 20 by 30-foot storage container in a world with a government corrupted by corporations. You ask, how does this affect me as an architect working in CAD?

Modern tech companies have devoted a ton of financial resources in creating and investing in the future of the Metaverse. NVIDIA had a video demonstrating Omniverse with four artists working together in their “Architecture Demo with Live Sync on Omniverse.” In this demo, NVIDIA had four artists connect in the Omniverse by the Nucleus Server. The four artists were using Revit, 3DS Max, Substance Painter, and Omniverse View. The four artists worked simultaneously together on the same project at the same time. All done interactively in real-time using NVIDIA’s RTX technology without ever having to do a test render.

In this video about the making of the NVIDIA GTC keynote one gets a good overall look at what at the chipmaker’s process. We have more videos below from them (and images too!)

NVIDIA, Epic Games, Autodesk had sessions discussing the Metaverse and how it would change the way we connect in our lives, not just for fun but also for working together. Advocates for the Metaverse see the implication of a growing digital economy on the web and the ever-increasing benefits for how humans interact using technology. Companies also expressed concerns about how the Metaverse could be abused by people like the issues on social media. A couple of sessions discussed the need to set standards so that the software to create these digital worlds could work seamlessly without interruption to the user.

In a call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook discussed his company’s quarterly results while putting much of the focus on “The Metaverse.” He explained his vision of Facebook turning into a Metaverse Company. A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company is building an “enterprise metaverse.” In April, Epic Games announced a billion-dollar funding round to support its metaverse ambitions, pushing the Fortnite maker’s valuation to nearly $30 billion. People are already connected to metaverses in games like Fortnite and Roblox. Architectural firms use Omniverse and Unreal Engine in real-time scenarios working on large-scale projects with teams from other locations.

Global Production

Global Production kicked into high gear with the pandemic. The shift to the cloud will stay with us as cloud solutions increase with remote working. Companies want to have access to more creative talent worldwide through remote working expanding their talent pool. AWS delivers cloud solutions that allow artists in different locations to connect via the cloud to a single pipeline. Software developers created applications accessed through the cloud creating solutions without having to install anything on your workstation. Rendering and storage were some of the first things to migrate to the cloud.

Netflix has 36 productions using global production technologies to enable access to more creatives around the world. Cloud technologies allow companies like Netflix to have a pipeline on the cloud that creatives can access no matter where they are in the world. Large architectural firms are exploring using Global Production for projects to expand their talent pool while simultaneously reconfiguring or eliminating their offices.

Virtual Production

The Mandalorian is one of the projects receiving huge attention for its work using Virtual Production. Virtual production uses a suite of software packages to mix live-action footage with computer graphics in real-time. Filmmakers and other creatives working in the pipeline across multiple locations can deliver feedback across digital and physical environments where actors are physically working on the set. Unreal Engine by Epic Games is at the forefront of this technology, leading creatives on the cutting edge as the global environment changes in every aspect of production. Epic Games’ partners in virtual production include Digital Domain, ILM Lab, FOX VFX Lab, Halon Entertainment, Method Studios, and NVIDIA.

MORE: The Future of Filmmaking is here

SIGGRAPH 2021 didn’t have many new announcements, so we will talk about what they presented at SIGGRAPH this year.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA is one of the leaders in the world of Metaverse technologies. Over 500 companies are evaluating Omniverse.

NVIDIA announced on 10 August 2021 the expansion of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. It is the world’s first real-time simulation collaborative platform delivering a foundation for the Metaverse. Blender and Adobe will open up Omniverse to millions of users, creating artists’ ability to collaborate in these packages interactively.

NVIDIA Omniverse is a technology platform leveraging a next-gen file format invented at Pixar and shared with the industry, plus the convergence of emergent technologies in cloud computing and hardware-accelerated real-time raytracing hardware combined with openly shared APIs for developers to plug into.

Omniverse gives artists a way to work together in real-time across different software applications in a shared virtual world. A key to Omniverse’s early adoption is Pixar’s open-sourced USD file format—the foundation of Omniverse’s collaboration and simulation platform. USD is being called the “HTML of the Metaverse.” Omniverse has a quickly growing ecosystem for supporting partners. Some of the early adopters are SHoP Architects in NYC, South Park, and Lockheed Martin.

A chart showing the technical formation of the Omniverse platform as a technology pipeline for production. (click to enlarge)

“The ability to make decisions quickly and accurately across our interdisciplinary team is core to SHoP’s process,” Geof Bell, Associate, Digital Design and Delivery at SHoP Architects. “Omniverse will enable us to bring data from multiple experts together in a single authoritative way, curating it to present the right information at the right time, paired with high-quality visuals for intelligent, evocative design.”

Apple, Pixar, and NVIDIA have collaborated to bring advanced physics to USD embracing the open standard to give 3D pipelines to billions of devices. Blender and NVIDIA have teamed on bringing USD support to the upcoming release of Blender 3.0. Adobe offers artists a way to work in real-time using the Substance Designer Collection of tools in the Omniverse.

3D research from NVIDIA Toronto unveiled GANverse3D Image2Car extension for Omniverse Create shown at SIGGRAPH 2021, and updates for the Kaolin library and Omniverse Kaolin App. NVIDIA research also announced research was addressing two of the most challenging problems in graphics—real-time path tracing and content creation using neural radiance cashing for global illumination.

Millions of people will work and play in the Metaverse, living through ground-breaking visual experiences that blur reality and virtual reality. What makes so much of this possible is the ability to render to screens life-like realism in real-time and to virtual headsets that provide stereoscopic 1:1 scale virtual experiences.

This method uses NVIDIA RT Cores for ray tracing and Tensor cores for AI acceleration. The neural network can adapt and learn how the light is distributed through the scene. NVIDIA research addresses texture difficulty to efficiently store and render, for example, the texture of a carpet or blades of grass through NeRF-Tex. NeRF-Tex approaches the use of neural networks to represent these challenging materials and encode how they respond to lighting. NVIDIA researchers have also developed a new approach to seeing the same geometry close-up or from a distance keeping the look realistic with the “inverse rendering method.” Creators can generate simpler models that are optimized to appear indistinguishable from the originals with drastic reductions in their geometric complexity.

NVIDIA also showed a documentary, “Connecting in the Metaverse: The Making of the GTC Keynote.” NVIDIA used the Omniverse to create the GTC Keynote. They made 21 versions for CEO Jensen Huang. The amount of technology NVIDIA used to develop his kitchen, which was 6000+ objects and hundreds of thousands of polygons, demonstrates the power of RTX rendering in the Omniverse.

All its amazing work in Omniverse leverages NVIDIA RTX technologies. Watch this special Siggraph 2021 presentation by Richard Kerris (formerly of Apple and Lucasfilm) and Sanja Fidler, both of NVIDIA. 

The kitchen had thousands of photographs that were put through a photogrammetry program to create a photorealistic kitchen. Jensen was scanned in a truck that came to his house to get an accurate model while adapting minimal data to animate him. Facial animation was driven by audio to gesture tools, and his body was animated with motion capture from an actor who imitates Jensen’s moves from past keynotes for these sessions. Also shown was how BMW used Omniverse to create and configure a vast factory and Drive Sim using Render RTX to display real-time driving in a Mercedes after building realistic backgrounds using point cloud data imported into Omniverse. NVIDIA also spoke about the latest version of PhysX delivering true Physics in simulations in Omniverse.

Omniverse is changing the way we work, create, and socialize. I can’t wait to see how architects use this technology in the future.

NVIDIA GPUs

The NVIDIA RTX A2000 was released during this SIGGRAPH, an inexpensive, low-cost entry-level solution for workstations delivering RTX for artists and other content creators.

The new NVIDIA RTX A2000 card is on the far left, along with other latest next-gen NVIDIA GPUs.

At 495 USD estimated retail value, the NVIDIA RTX A2000 has boasts:

• 13.25 million transistors
• 26 RT (ray tracing) cores
• 104 Tensor cores
• 3328 CUDA cores
• 8 TF (32-bit / single-precision)
• 15.6 TF for RT core performance
• 63.9 TF for Tensor core performance

More details and more pictures can be found at Architosh’s specific news report here.

Hewlett-Packard

HP showed off their Z solution in their workstations powered by NVIDIA RTX technology with ZCentral Remote Boost, a remote calibration software that just won HP an Emmy. HP did a white paper on HP ZCentral and NVIDIA Omniverse collaboration. ZCentral is a solution that allows creatives to connect to the powerful Z Workstations by HP, remotely and securely.

An example architecture using HP’s ZCentral and NVIDIA Omniverse.

The white paper describes HP ZCentral and Omniverse concepts, applications, and workflows supported—typical HP ZCentral based configurations and details for setting up Omniverse deployment. The intended audience is creatives, studios, and IT professionals.

You can download the Omniverse Beta here.

Epic Games

Epic Games announced billion-dollar funding round for the Metaverse in April. Content will be a driving force in creating these worlds, and Unreal Engine will be one of the leaders in developing this technology. Epic Games’ Marc Petit VP & General Manager and Patrick Cozzi CEO at Cesium co-hosted a Birds of a Feather session, “Building the Open Metaverse,” featuring technical presenters from various organizations. They discussed their hopes for standards in the Metaverse and want people to support a safe space.

What is Virtual Production? Epic layouts it out around their Unreal Engine technology in this diagram.

Epic Games gave us a preview of the upcoming release of Unreal Engine 4.27 for virtual production. VFX takes a giant leap forward in 4.27. New features will improve the ease of use, efficiency, and quality expected by filmmakers that involve game-changing techniques that are now more accessible and practical than ever. Unreal 5.0—still a bit out on the horizon—is in pre-release with limited features.

Epic Games also announced that Ariana Grande is stepping into the Metaverse as the headliner for the Fortnite Rift Tour.

Epic Games discussed the new OpenColorIO v2 for color management, a key in modern VFX, animation, gaming, and architectural software.

Amazon

Amazon Web Services presented sessions “Through the Looking Glass: The Next Reality of Content Production” and “The Future of Visual Effects.”

MORE: Varjo Unveils Reality Cloud—Groundbreaking Virtual Teleportation

Jen Dahlman from Amazon spoke about how the AWS internal teams of creatives worked from home to work on the animated short “Spanner” using the cloud. AWS was one of the early cloud solutions providers. VFX companies initially used the cloud for rendering and storage solutions, but access to applications through the cloud has increased due to demand during the pandemic. Software developers had to find a new way to deliver their applications via the cloud so creatives could use those tools in production.

Remote workforces are now a core part of Global Production and how the future of film and television production will change. Amazon talked about how cloud technology is helping professionals in the creative industry worldwide deal with today’s challenges and meet the increased demand for high fidelity content. Netflix has 36 productions currently using the cloud for Global Production. Netflix will increase Global Production for all their future projects.

Learn more about SIGGRAPH in Part 2 after the click.

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CADA AÑO, POR ESTAS FECHAS, GRAEBERT ANUNCIA sus novedades a través del Annual Meeting que este año lleva el número 2019. Si bien la pieza fundamental de esta presentación han sido las novedades que nos depara las versión 2020 de ARES Commander, ARES Touch y ARES Kudo, también han tomado protagonismo otras herramientas como ARES Render, ARES Maps, y empresas asociadas de manera directa como CorelCAD (de Corel Inc.) y Draftsight (de Dassault Systeme).

La dirección del mercado apunta favorablemente a ARES Kudo

Debo reconocer que, aunque ya conocía muchas de las novedades que se mostrarían en Berlín, han superado con creces las expectativas creadas.

Sin lugar a dudas, mi novedad favorita es ARES Kudo, ya que cada nueva versión incluye nuevas características que la hacen cada vez más fuerte, y está por delante de un futuro inevitable, como es el uso de programas de diseño que funcionan directamente en la nube, sin instalación.

Uno de los gigantes AEC de Japón está implementando al completo el uso de ARES Touch “en el terreno”, tras haber abandonado los planos en papel y documentos en formato PDF. (Image: Graebert / All rights reserved.)

ARES Kudo es parte de ARES Trinity (ARES Commander, ARES Touch y ARES Kudo), pero el hecho de que sea un CAD en la nube y que solo se necesita un navegador para ejecutarlo, sin instalar nada, lo hace un adelantado a su tiempo en términos de dónde estará el CAD en el futuro cercano. Según una diapositiva en el evento, los datos de investigación de IDC dicen que el 72 por ciento de los gerentes de TI darían preferencia a una solución SaaS (de la cual Kudo es).

Fue Cédric Desbordes (de Graebert) quien comentó sobre el crecimiento de SaaS y dijo que – según los pronósticos estadísticos – en 2032 las soluciones en línea dominarán el mercado. La tendencia es clara y las funciones futuras inmediatas del software pasan por ejecutarse directamente en la nube. ARES Kudo, junto con Onshape es parte de ese futuro que ya es presente.

Avances en la Tecnología ARES

ARES Touch

ARES Touch también ofrece innovaciones, con soporte para marcas sincronizadas con ARES Commander y ARES Kudo. El nuevo modo “Sólo ver” para ARES Touch se lanzará en breve, pero se habló sobre la necesidad de que los puedan ver archivos muy pesados.

Las “Markups” ahora funcionan por separado y no están integrados en los archivos reales, sino que están vinculados a ellos a través de tecnología en la nube. El dibujo principal permanece “intacto” y el usuario puede activarlos o desactivarlos fácilmente como un hilo de discusión. Esto ayuda a extender la colaboración a los usuarios que no deberían tener negocios para poder modificar el dibujo por una variedad de razones, pero tienen una razón para colaborar y agregar información.

ARES Touch forma parte de la “Trinidad” (Trinity) de soluciones (Commander + Touch + Kudo) y el precio es de 250 euros al año. Sin embargo, ARES Touch como aplicación independiente cuesta € 9 por mes en las tiendas de aplicaciones de Apple o Google.

Wilfried Graebert, CEO de la compañía hablando con los asistentes del Annual Meeting en Berlín. el pasado otoño.

Con respecto a ARES Touch, Graebert presentó el caso de usuario de la Compañía TAISEI de Japón, fundada en 1873. Hasta hace poco, TAISEI traía “dibujos” al lugar de trabajo en papel o en formato PDF. Hoy, gracias a ARES Touch, gestionan todo con la aplicación de Graebert, sabiendo que siempre acceden a la última versión del proyecto. El éxito y la aceptación de TAISEI con ARES Touch de Graebert es una gran victoria para la empresa CAD alemana. El gigante japonés AEC emplea a más de 8.400 personas. ARES Touch cumple así los requisitos de una aplicación implementada de clase empresarial y con gran éxito.

ARES Commander

También pudimos ver paso a paso cómo crear Smart Blocks con ARES Commander, llamados CustomBlocks. Los CustomBlocks no tienen nada que envidiar a los bloques dinámicos de AutoCAD. De hecho, una novedad que se pasó por alto, y no menos importante, ARES Commander ofrece la posibilidad de convertir un bloque dinámico en un CustomBlock con un comando específico. Aunque es cierto que los bloques dinámicos de AutoCAD funcionan perfectamente en las soluciones ARES, otra cosa es que si necesitamos editar su “inteligencia” en ARES, entonces tenemos que convertirlo a un CustomBlocks para que no pierda su capacidad “inteligente”. De hecho, Graebert comentó fuera de la presentación que planean desarrollar el crecimiento de CustomBlocks con soluciones muy avanzadas contra sus competidores más directos en este sentido. En otras palabras, los CustomBlocks están destinados a superar los DynamicBlocks de AutoCAD en el futuro cercano, como parte de su hoja de ruta.

Graebert ha adoptado el mercado BIM sin hacer un ataque frontal a los líderes de creación de Software BIM, sino observando a los usuarios intermedios del mercado BIM y sus necesidades únicas, una estrategia que se relaciona con la forma en que han mirado también el mercado CAD DWG.

Entre las novedades de ARES Commander 2020, podemos destacar la extracción de datos que tiene muchas aplicaciones técnicas. Una de ellas es la posibilidad de crear bloques con atributos como nombre del objeto, número de serie, precio, color, etc. Y así extraer información del proyecto, filtrando específicamente esa información de los bloques dinámicos, ya sea para crear un presupuesto para muebles de oficina , muebles de cocina o para extraer todos los datos de la carpintería existente. Aunque, como dije antes, la cantidad de aplicaciones que permiten esta función es enorme, pudiendo extraer los datos a un programa como Microsoft Excel, por ejemplo.

ARES Render

También se presentó ARES Render, un plugin de Graebert que utiliza UNICORN como motor. Salvo Barberá, jefe de Unicorn nos enseñó cómo funciona el plugin de Graebert, mostrando cómo un simple icono en ARES Commander conecta el modelo 3D con ARES Render. La pantalla es intuitiva y destaca el apartado de materiales que le permite asignarlos a través de capas, objetos o colores. Así como el uso de luces artificiales e incluso luz solar. También es muy fácil controlar la cámara y generar renders de alta resolución. Destacando que en todo momento trabajas con un render en tiempo real de una calidad increíble, respetando el nivel técnico de su hermano mayor Unicorn (stand-alone).

ARES OEM y el crecimiento de terceros

Los Graebert Annual Meeting siempre incluyen actualizaciones sobre los desarrollos de sus principales socios OEM. Cada año, nuevos socios y terceros crecen y amplían el enfoque técnico en la aplicación de las tecnologías ARES.

Durante las presentaciones, hemos visto cómo se puede trabajar con nubes de puntos desde ARES Commander, gracias a Point Cloud Survery, donde Thomas Prinzen nos mostró cómo crear nubes de puntos fácilmente gracias a un único botón ubicado en su escáners de forma muy compacta, por cierto.

La gente de UNDET (Terra Modus), que hace su software de nube de puntos para software líderes en el sector, incluido ARES Commander, también nos mostró cómo crear líneas de corte en un modelo obtenido con diferentes sistemas de escaneo (Drone, Ground Scanner, etc.). En resumen, una nube de puntos que contenía topografía, y después de usar diferentes filtros, los contornos se crean directamente desde el modelo. Fotografías que sirven para crear un modelo 3D a partir del cual obtener planos. Algo que es cada vez más común en el trabajo profesional, especialmente en estudios de restauración o construcción.

En la presentación también estuvo Oboe Wu, en representación del gigante CAD Dassault Systemes y su solución CAD DraftSight basada en ARES Commander OEM. Repasó las novedades de la versión 2020 de DraftSight. También nos explicó que su versión 2D ya ha superado los 2 millones de usuarios y cómo se integra DraftSight CAD con Solidworks.

Graebert ha adoptado el mercado BIM sin hacer un ataque frontal a los líderes de creación de Software BIM, sino observando a los usuarios intermedios del mercado BIM y sus necesidades únicas, una estrategia que se relaciona con la forma en que han mirado también el mercado CAD DWG.

A su vez, también estuvo Klaus Vossen, que en nombre de Corel presentó las novedades de CorelCAD 2020, cuyo motor también es ARES Commander. En este caso, hizo un repaso de todas las herramientas que componen el universo Corel, además de las noticias específicas de su CAD basado en ARES, donde también mencionó CorelCAD Mobile. La fortaleza única de CorelCAD es su relación con CorelDraw, cuyo uso en empresas globales y firmas de ingeniería posiciona de manera única la solución nativa de DWG. Para una mirada más profunda, consulte el artículo especial sobre CorelCAD en el último informe de Architosh INSIDER titulado “The Resurgence of (.dwg)—A Look at its Present and Future Technology.”

Más: INSIDER:  INSIDER: How CorelCAD Continues to Grow—Unique Differentiation and Global Sales Channel

Finalmente, el BIM no podía quedar ausente en un evento de este tipo. El BIM (Building Information Modeling) está en todas las etapas relacionadas con la construcción, y en este caso, ARES Commander está ofreciendo un ángulo único al mercado en diferenciación con sus competidores. Una nueva paleta llamada BIM Navigator le permite explorar un modelo IFC y conocer todas sus propiedades. Incluso le permite extraer los datos de los “objetos BIM”. De hecho, la extracción de datos es una función de usuarios específicos posteriores de BIM, y son esos usuarios quienes darán forma al ángulo único de ARES Commander en el mercado BIM. (nota especial: Architosh publicará una función especial en Graebert y BIM en las próximas semanas).

ARES OEM continúa expandiéndose y el Annual Meeting enseñó a los asistentes sobre las formas cada vez mayores en que las empresas pueden adoptar la tecnología para sus soluciones personalizadas basadas en el motor ARES. En 2020, y probablemente en el 1H 2020, Graebert tendrá más noticias para compartir sobre nuevos socios de sus soluciones OEM.

Graebert, con 40 años en el sector, más que una empresa tradicional se parece más a la ciudad donde está asentada. Hay que conocer Berlín para comprender que es una ciudad única, diversa, con mucho potencial tecnológico, con aire de innovación constante que de alguna manera lo encontramos en el espíritu de Graebert.

El universo de ARES Commander es complejo y emocionante. Un CAD que está sabiendo actualizarse al mundo BIM de manera rápida y efectiva sin perder su esencia. Además, se adelanta a su competencia en muchas áreas como como el uso de la nube a través de su versión ARES Kudo y las tecnologías relacionadas con la nube.

[Editor’s note: In the original article we omitted the monthly standalone price of ARES Touch and we have reshaped the paragraphs around that Touch section in the article to be more accurate and inclusive of additional key details. 18 Jan 20]

The post Evento Anual de Graebert—Berlín se viste de gala para las grandes noticias de ARES Trinity appeared first on Architosh.

EVERY YEAR, AT THIS TIME, GRAEBERT ANNOUNCES its news through the Annual Meeting that this year bears the number 2019. Although the fundamental piece of this presentation has been the novelties that the 2020 version of ARES Commander, ARES Touch, and ARES Kudo holds for us, and other tools such as ARES Render, ARES Maps, and directly associated companies such as CorelCAD (from Corel Inc.) and Draftsight (from Dassault Systeme).

Market Direction Points Favorably to ARES Kudo

I must admit that, although I already knew many of the novelties that would be shown in Berlin, they have far exceeded the expectations created.

Undoubtedly, my favorite novelty is ARES Kudo, since each new version includes new features that make it stronger and stronger, and is ahead of an inevitable future, such as the use of design programs that work directly in the cloud, without installation.

Graebert’s ARES Kudo technology is powered by AWS in the cloud and this year there were again significant news with respect to powerful CAD in the cloud. (image: Graebert / Architosh. All rights reserved.)

ARES Kudo is part of ARES Trinity (ARES Commander, ARES Touch, and ARES Kudo) but the fact that it is a CAD in the cloud, and that only a browser is needed to run it, without installing anything, puts it ahead of its time in terms of where CAD will be in the near future. According to a slide at the event, IDC research data says 72 percent of IT managers would give preference to a SaaS solution (of which Kudo is).

It was Cédric Desbordes (of Graebert) who commented on the growth of SaaS and said that (according to statistical forecasts) in 2032 online solutions will dominate the market. The trend is clear and the software of the immediate future functions by being executed directly in the cloud. ARES Kudo, along with Onshape is part of that future that is already present.

Advances in ARES Technologies

ARES Touch

ARES Touch also offers innovations, with support for markups synced with ARES Commander and ARES Kudo. The new “View Only” mode for ARES Touch will be released shortly but was discussed for the need for users to view very heavy files.

Markups now operate separately and are not embedded into the actual files but rather are linked to them via cloud technologies. The main drawing remains “untouched” and the user can turn them on or off easily much like a discussion thread. This helps extend collaboration to users that should have no business being able to modify the drawing for a variety of reasons but do have a reason to collaborate and add input.

ARES Touch is part of the “Trinity” of solutions (Commander + Touch + Kudo) and the price is 250 euros per year. However, ARES Touch as a standalone app is $9.00 USD per month from the app stores at Apple or Google.

One of Japan’s largest AEC giants is fully deployed with ARES Touch in the field, having moved away from paper plans and PDF documents. (image: Graebert / All rights reserved.)

Regarding ARES Touch Graebert presented the user case of the TAISEI Company of Japan, founded in 1873. Until recently, TAISEI brought “drawings” to the workplace either in paper or PDF format. Today, thanks to ARES Touch, they manage everything with the Graebert app, knowing that they always access the latest version of the project. The success and embrace of TAISEI with Graebert’s ARES Touch is a big win for the German CAD company. The Japanese AEC giant employs over 8,400 people. ARES Touch is thus meeting the requirements of an enterprise-class deployed application and with great success.

ARES Commander

We could also see step-by-step how to create Smart Blocks with ARES Commander, called CustomBlocks. CustomBlocks have nothing to envy to the dynamic AutoCAD blocks. In fact, a novelty that was overlooked, and no less important, ARES Commander offers the possibility of converting a dynamic block into a CustomBlock with a specific command. Although it is true that AutoCAD dynamic blocks work perfectly in ARES solutions, another thing is that if we need to edit its “intelligence” in ARES then we have to convert it into CustomBlocks so that it doesn’t lose its “smart” ability. In fact, Graebert commented outside the presentation that they plan to develop the growth of CustomBlocks with very advanced solutions against their more direct competitors in this regard. In other words, CustomBlocks are aimed to exceed AutoCAD DynamicBlocks in the near future as part of their road map.

Wilfried Graebert, CEO of the company speaking to the attendees of the Annual Meeting in Berlin last late fall.

Among the novelties of ARES Commander 2020, we can highlight the extraction of data which has many technical applications. One of them is the possibility of creating blocks with attributes such as object name, serial number, price, color, etc. And thus extract information from the project, specifically filtering that information from the dynamic blocks, either to create a budget for office furniture, kitchen furniture, or to extract all data from existing carpentry. Although, as I said before, the number of applications that allow this function is enormous, being able to extract the data to a program like Microsoft Excel, for example.

ARES Render

ARES Render, a Graebert plugin that uses UNICORN as an engine, was also introduced. Salvo Barberá, head of Unicorn taught us how the Graebert plugin works, showing how a simple icon in ARES Commander connects the 3D model with ARES Render. The screen is intuitive, highlighting the section of materials that allows you to assign them through layers, objects, or colors. As well as the use of lights, and even sunlight. It is also very easy to control the camera and generate high resolution renders. Stressing that at all times you work with a real-time render of incredible quality, respecting the technical level of its older brother Unicorn (stand-alone).

ARES OEM and Third-Party Growth

Graebert Annual Meetings as events always include updates on the developments of their major OEM partners. Each year new partners and third-parties grow and widen the application of the technical focus of ARES technologies.

During the presentations, we have seen how you can work with point clouds from ARES Commander, thanks to a point cloud survey, where Thomas Prinzen showed us how to create point clouds easily thanks to a single button located on his scanners in a very compact way, incidentally.

The people of UNDET (Terra Modus), who make their point cloud software for leading software, including ARES Commander, also showed us how to create cut lines on a model obtained with different scanning systems (Drone, Ground Scanner, etc). In short, a cloud of points that contained topography, and after using different filters, contours are created directly from the model. Photographs that serve to create a 3D model from which to obtain plans. Something that is increasingly common in professional work, especially restoration or building studies.

Also in the presentation was Oboe Wu, on behalf of CAD giant Dassault Systemes and its DraftSight CAD solution based on ARES Commander OEM. He ran through the novelties of the 2020 version of DraftSight. He also explained to us that its 2D version has already exceeded 2 million users, and how its DraftSight CAD is integrated with Solidworks.

Graebert has embraced the BIM market not by making a frontal assault on BIM authoring leaders but by looking at downstream BIM market users and their unique needs, a strategy that ties into how they have looked at at the DWG CAD market as well.

In turn, there was also Klaus Vossen who on behalf of Corel presented the novelties of CorelCAD 2020, whose engine, like DraftSight, is also ARES Commander. In this case, he reviewed all the tools that make up the Corel universe, in addition to the specific news of his ARES-based CAD, where he also mentioned CorelCAD Mobile. CorelCAD’s unique strength is its tie-in to CorelDraw whose use in global enterprises and engineering firms uniquely position the DWG-native solution. For a deeper look refer to the special article on CorelCAD in the last Architosh INSIDER Report titled, “The Resurgence of (.dwg)—A Look at its Present and Future Technology.”

MORE: INSIDER: How CorelCAD Continues to Grow—Unique Differentiation and Global Sales Channel

Finally, BIM could not be absent in such an event like this. BIM (Building Information Modeling) is in all stages related to construction, and in this case, ARES Commander is offering a unique angle to the market in differentiation to its competitors. A new palette called BIM Navigator allows you to explore an IFC model and know all of its properties. It even allows you to extract the data from the “BIM objects.” In fact, data extraction is a function of specific downstream users of BIM, and it is those users who will shape ARES Commander’s unique angle in the BIM market. (special note: Architosh will be publishing a special feature on Graebert and BIM in the coming weeks.)

ARES OEM continues to expand and the Annual Meeting taught attendees about the increasing ways firms can adopt the technology for their won custom solutions based on the ARES engine. In 2020, and likely in 1H 2020, Graebert will have more news to share about new partners.

Graebert, with 40 years in the sector, is far more than a traditional company and is more like the city where it is based. You have to know Berlin to understand that it is a unique, diverse city, with a lot of technological potentials, with an air of constant innovation that somehow we find in the spirit of Graebert.

The universe of ARES Commander is complex and exciting—CAD that is able to update to the BIM world quickly and effectively without losing its essence. In addition, it is ahead of its competition in many areas such as its use of the cloud through its ARES Kudo version and cloud technologies.

[Editor’s note: In the original article we omitted the monthly standalone price of ARES Touch and we have reshaped the paragraphs around that Touch section in the article to be more accurate and inclusive of additional key details. 18 Jan 20]

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Better Starts Here

This year’s AU theme is “Better Starts Here” and was the framework for Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost’s Day 1 keynote. We will cover the larger theme of the conference after hearing the AEC Day 2 keynote later this morning, but the tone of this year’s keynote struck an optimistic pitch backed up by compelling and energizing guest presenters on the keynote stage.

MORE: Autodesk Ushers in New Era of Connected Construction with Autodesk Construction Cloud

There is so much to report from AU 2019, including some exciting announcements and happenings from their third-party developers here on the show floor. Both game engine companies, Unity and Unreal (Epic), are here in force and their interactive rendering technologies are rapidly evolving. Today at the AEC keynote we are slated to hear more about Unity’s integrations with Revit. Meanwhile, we got to see the next version of Twinmotion coming in Q1, 2020. Visualization, in general, is advancing rapidly and moving downstream to more generalist users, meaning regular architects and designers can do more high-end and animated visuals themselves as part of their workflows.

Some Photos From Day 1

Anagnost spoke about their partnership with Airbus which began with looking at how generative design could weight-optimize the design of elements inside the cabin like the partitions between seating zones and onboard lavatories and gallies. Having seen the advantages of reducing double-digit percentage gains in weight on partitions Airbus began looking at items much larger like the tail on the back of the plane.

Andrew Anagnost, Autodesk CEO speaking at AU2019 about their work with Autodesk customer, aircraft manufacturer, Airbus.

But it didn’t stop there. With each passing success Airbus had working with Autodesk and using their generative design and engineering design software, the partnership deepened. So at AU 2019 Autodesk announced and spoke about how the companies were working together on the design of an all-new factory for manufacturing plane wings. This is an exciting story and one we need to devote an entire article to so stay tuned in the days ahead as we unveil it in detail.

MORE: AU19: OpenSpace Announces New Integrations with Autodesk BIM 360 Software

The AU expo floor, as in other related conferences, now contains two software giants in Unity Technologies and Epic Games (Unreal Engine). These companies are quite large, with many hundreds of software engineers working around the world on their highly competitive gaming engines. Unity and Epic are the Boeing and Airbus’s of the game engine world and both have squarely set their sights on professional markets like AEC and manufacturing.

A view of the upcoming Twinmotion 2020.

On the Unreal Engine side, we got a chance to see the latest upcoming version of Twinmotion 2020 with Unreal Engine. Slated for Q1 in 2020, the interactive, real-time renderer and animation program substantially lowers the barrier to entry for producing stunning visuals for design professionals, working on Autodesk Revit and other software platforms like SketchUp.

We spoke to Marc Petit of Epic at AU about Twinmotion 2020 and the visualization market in general and we can’t wait to share that discussion with folks. But here are some of our critical thoughts now in summary:

Architosh Analysis and Commentary: Both Unity and Twinmotion offer AEC users faster paths to sophisticated 3D visualization directly from their BIM tools. Whether it is Unity Reflect or Twinmotion in the latest ArchiCAD release, the workflow innovation happening means less time and frustration in the exporting and importing processes between design tools and visualization tools. Both Unity and Epic’s aims in this market are substantial, as we’ll discuss later, but the reason why AEC users are flocking to these solutions is obvious: immediacy and ease-of-use. 

Naturally, last year at AU 2018, Unity and Autodesk announced their big partnership on stage and this year while Unity was on stage again in a smaller way their more mature Unity Reflect was further advanced.

Specifically, Autodesk announced that Unity Reflect’s support is coming to Autodesk BIM 360 and in the booth demonstrated the latest build of Unity Reflect. Now the interesting news about Unity Reflect that will bear about a bit on the Architosh audience is that Unity Reflect works on desktop at the viewer level on a Windows-only app at the moment.

Unity Reflect with Revit at Unity booth.

We were told that a Mac version is coming but no other details were provided. We hope it does because if I am a client of an architect on Revit using Unity Reflect and my computer at work, university or at home is a Mac computer, I can’t participate in a Unity Reflect session. I would need an iOS mobile device (which cannot be assumed just because I am a Mac user).

We imagine that the orientation for Windows plus iOS is simply a reflection of the AEC market, particularly in the US and European markets where iOS is strongest in the field. iPads are ubiquitous on construction job sites so Unity Reflect’s client for iOS is the obvious priority. Unity Reflect works as a plug for Revit and provides real-time interactive rendering and support for VR devices as well. We’ll get into deeper details on Unity Reflect in a dedicated report.

Inside NVIDIA’s booth looking at NVIDIA RTX Server-based rendering.

The NVIDIA booth was very busy showing an array of solutions and a primary focus on the virtues of the RTX graphics cards. RTX GPU technology provides astounding visual fidelity in real-time raytracing glory. This type of technology is the domain expertise of our west coast editor, Akiko Ashley, who will be providing some detail and insights on what is happening with NVIDIA’s latest technologies.

Now we heard something really interesting from a third-party exhibitor inside the NVIDIA booth about RTX GPUs that had to do with the new 2019 Mac Pro, which Apple has announced is slated to ship in December of this year. As many Architosh readers may be aware, Apple’s new Mac Pro—the ultra, high-end workstation—is utilizing new AMD GPUs with a unique modular kit arrangement. The question and frustration have been, how to get RTX GPUs from NVIDIA into the new Mac Pro equation?

Architosh Analysis and Commentary: What we heard at the booth was that RTX technology may be coming to the new Mac Pro. We will discuss more once we follow-up on some information from our source. Stay tuned! 

A big part of the latest Autodesk University events has been focus on how robotics is reshaping the AEC industry. We have a lot to talk about with regard to robots and 3D printing. Below is a 3D printed concrete lattice-based arch. Strong and light-weight, such structures are not only printed by machines (see image below) but use generative design software to effectively design much lighter structures that provide similar structural performance as solid concrete structures.

3D printed concrete structure, from the robotic 3D concrete test booth.

At the AU 2019 expo floor, this big robotic arm was printing out various lattice-based concrete forms (see above and below). Watching this work was interesting. If you are an Architosh INSIDER Xpresso newsletter subscriber, you would have enjoyed recently a feature focus on some innovative, generatively designed and 3D printed concrete ceiling and roof structures being built by a university lab in Europe. This kind of technology is being tested around the globe at university, labs and very large AEC firms exploring robotics in design and construction.

The robotic arm controls the 3D-printing of concrete material to form lighter-weighted shapes that are structurally lattice-based like the image above.

Robotic design and 3D printing and additive manufacturing are emerging technologies (emTech) in the AEC and manufacturing spaces. Architosh has a dedicated free monthly newsletter devoted to emerging technologies with a primary focus on computational design, AI and machine learning and robotics and 3D printing, among other things. You can sign-up here and gain access to some industry-exclusive interviews and features.

Again, this is our free monthly newsletter, best enjoyed with a morning coffee and typically delivered on the first Sunday of the new month.

More on AU 2019

Architosh will be publishing a large range of AU 2019 news, gallery and feature articles in the coming days and weeks. So please stay tuned we have a lot to share.

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Day 1

Monday was a beautiful day filled with sunshine as I listened to the Keynote Session featuring Victoria Alonzo, President of Production at Marvel Studios. She was discussing pipelines for visual effects (VFX) production and her first time meeting Katherine Kennedy.

An image from SIGGRAPH 2019 showing attendees in an overflow room watching the keynote talk.

In room 408 AB there are courses and panels on Advances in Real-Time Games, and this year at SIGGRAPH there are overflow rooms like the Geek Bar where you can tune into courses that are full using a headset they provide you. This is really helpful for attendees who can’t be everywhere at all times.

Apple at SIGGRAPH? Yup!

Apple has had Exhibitor Sessions including session titles like: “Modern Mobile Graphics on Metal” and “Apple Inc. Presents Introduction to Reality Kit.”

NVIDIA has a massive booth and presence at SIGGRAPH. On the docket for Day 1, I checked out AMD’s booth to see their next-generation graphics (GPUs) and CPU technologies. (more to come on that).

Look for larger reports on SIGGRAPH 2019 on Architosh shortly.

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On Day 2 the 7:00 am single session was titled “Advanced CineRender.” If it wasn’t for my love of breakfast, I would have attended this session that focused on instructing ARCHICAD users in the use of the rendering engine inside ARCHICAD 20 which comes from sister company Maxon Computer.

Because this technology is relatively new to ARCHICAD, the likelihood that users know it well is small; hence, the value in an in-depth session covering how to setup your scene, add lighting, edit materials, and use CineRender’s surface channels, among other things.

Session Highlights Day 2—GDL for Everyone and VR

Just to give readers a sense of the scope of options, each session time block tended to have six learning session options to choose from.  The good news was several did repeat at other times, so participants didn’t always have to miss something when two compelling sessions competed in the same period.

Surprisingly Popular—the GLD Sessions

One of those repeating sessions that I could not attend on Day 1 was titled “Making GDL Easy—for Everyone,” by Patrick May, BIM Coordinator and owner of 4d Proof. A graduate of the University of Oregon Architecture program in 2008, May was one of the younger architects I had a chance to talk to at BIMCON and proof that ARCHICAD’s use by leading design-oriented practices often serves as a point of first entry to this particular BIM solution.

01 – Patrick May waits patiently as attendees take their seat for his popular GDL Made Easy learning session.

In the case of Patrick May, prior to starting 4d Proof, he passed through the noted San Francisco firm, Walker Warner Architects, helping this well-published practice focused on contemporary high-end residential architecture with the management of their BIM systems. I noted earlier that May’s GDL session—which he initially thought was not going to be accepted for the event—turned out to be extremely popular.

MORE: 2017 BIMCON: Five Disruptive Thoughts Shared at GRAPHISOFT’S User Conference

Patrick told me in a discussion that he mastered ARCHICAD in about three years working for his first firm directly out of architecture school. In general, I have been struck by the number of ARCHICAD experts blooming in the industry who are quite young in years. Anyway, I have an interview on May coming up which delves more into his development using this BIM program and what attracted him to ARCHICAD and GDL.

02 – After the learn session, May had many participants interested in following up with private questions. On the screen there. ARCHICAD’s GDL scripting environment.

Back to the session itself, GLD is similar to BASIC and is the parametric programming language in ARCHICAD. May showed the attendees a process of working with this language simply for the purpose of making custom objects. The goal of the session was making your own custom objects with parametric aspects. He started the session taking an object from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, a popular source for 3d models. Then he showed the audience how to get it into ARCHICAD and clean it up for best use. Participants learned how to save both 2D and 3D appearances for these custom objects and management into a library for easy access on multiple projects.

VR/AR/MR with ARCHICAD

Another highly attended larger session was by Willard Williams. Williams’ session was a somewhat intense (at least for some) walk through of the key technologies necessary to take ARCHICAD models into VR/AR/MR environments through gaming engine technologies.

Williams is another member of what one might call the new, young ARCHICAD super users. For starters, he has a diverse professional background and currently works for one of the largest construction companies in the United States. He also told me over lunch that he also worked at Walker Warner in San Francisco. (same as Patrick May).

03 – I sat in the back of William Willard’s learning session so my apologies as these are not the best photos. Willard is discussing the overall pipeline for taking ARCHICAD models to game engine environments to get them into VR/AR/MR device experiences.

Back to the session, the key takeaway was the use of the Unity game development platform as the hub for where you go next after you get your ARCHICAD model into it. Williams noted that whether you are interested in AR/MR with Hololens or VR with Vive or Oculus, you need to target a gaming engine from whence to go next. The path to the gaming engine looks like this: ARCHICAD to Cinema 4D (also a Nemetschek SE company) and out to FBX (a file format that is highly used within the M&E markets that Autodesk owns.).

Williams also noted the value of Rhino for optimizing the FBX files. For users working with the Rhino-Grasshopper-ARCHICAD Connector, they are already setup to plug Rhino into this process of optimization.

This session was more of an advanced user session on multiple fronts. The discussions about the gaming engine technology, use of external GPUs with a mobile device like the Razer Blade, and the like, put the tech talk quite up there for the average BIM user. Unfortunately, this particular subject is nascent in the industry, and early adopters must cope with tech details like this. My personal view was this was highly valuable for those users who have the more advanced tech skills to put it all together.

Closing Thoughts on Sessions

Overall, there was an appealing mix of learning sessions at this small user conference. For practicing architects, they had a chance to gain AIA CEUs while learning subjects that went beyond the digital tools at hand. That’s where the “rubber hits the road” as they say.

For example, even a session by GRAPHISOFT itself focused on ADA compliance techniques earlier in design work. I’ve already noted the learning session on envelope design and Orcutt Winslow’s team session on sustainability practice.

Kushner Closing Keynote

At the end of Day 2, prior to an evening of networking and food, GRAPHISOFT had one more amazing keynote lined up for the hundreds of architects and design professionals in attendance. Marc Kushner, architect, and CEO and co-founder of Architizer.com was the closing keynote speaker.

Kushner’s talk—which I understand was close to his popular TED Talk—had one over-arching message that architects needed to hear: “there’s a revolution going through architecture…a media revolution. And it’s sitting in your pocket.” Those were intriguing words from Kushner and they set the tone nicely.

Kushner’s talk encouraged architects to understand this media revolution and how it is transforming how the public—and by extension clients—are coming to both evaluate, judge, comment, reject or accept the world of architecture that professional architects plan for them. He noted the importance of high-end photorealistic visuals and the new social media landscape and how for the first time the public can come to bear witness to new works of architecture and socially engage with them before they are even constructed.

04 – Kushner is both a practicing architect and CEO of Architizer.com. His closing keynote was extremely well received by the audience at BIMCON.

Noting the evolution of the architectural style Brutalism and its determined rejection by the public as a whole, Kushner casts the profession’s response to public concern in a negative light. On the one hand, architects either retreated into esoteric and philosophically driven modernism like deconstructionism or went the other way and devolved into popularism in the form of commonly understood architectural memes and tropes.

Putting up a slide of the Greek Parthenon and then one of a horrendous classically inspired library in his hometown in New Jersey, he decried: “Symbols are cheap; instead of building places we build memories of places.” But the contextualizing and symbolic placemaking of the 1980’s had a sudden usurper in its midst. In the wake of the post-modernism gone awry in the ’80’s, Frank Gehry bust onto the architectural world with the Bilbao Museum in Spain.

“Bilbao fundamentally changed how the public perceived architecture,” Kushner noted. Rhetorically he asked, “how did that happen?”

05 – Kushner spoke about the power of symbols in architecture as proxies for places long since gone. “Instead of building places we build memories of places.” he decried.

It happened by way of three core changes. Firstly, big media fell in love with it and claimed it great. This attraction, in turn, drove sales at the museum, buttressing the argument that critically risky architecture can be profitable. Thirdly, the news of this virtuous cycle of acclaim and financial success spread quickly.

Ultimately where Kushner was taking the audience was to the point that today’s feedback loops in global society have collapsed in time. And dramatically. In noting the work Gehry was doing for Mark Zuckerberg (for Facebook’s headquarters), and how it got posted to Facebook first, the news world got turned on its head when it was the New York Times asking for permission to repost a picture of the news and not the other way around.

06 – Gehry’s Bilbao Museum represents a tipping point in the world of architecture. It gave birth to the star architect but also to how the media and public relate to new cutting edge architecture.

Kushner ultimately brings up the reason for why he created a user-generated content platform like Architizer. It was simple. He didn’t have any leverage or influence over the gate-controlled architecture media. “And I didn’t know anyone at the New York Times,” he stated. Unable to get the word out about his young firm’s work, the idea for Architizer was hatched. The purpose was simple. Give architects the world over a platform to show off their talents and accomplishments.

Now Architizer is a huge worldwide site where architects learn about other architects but more importantly learn about the materials and teams that help create the buildings they are looking at. More than just a place to post your firm’s work into a beautiful gallery, Architizer is also an “implicit recommendation or endorsement marketing” engine. People—the public and the professionals—can “like” your work just like they like your Facebook photos.

Kushner’s point is that “transparency and getting your voices heard can change how architects are valued.” And this is important because the industry is constantly painted with concern that they are not.

Closing Thoughts on 2017 BIMCON

It is always nice to see the results of professionals just like you, fighting the good fight, using the same tools, battling the same battles. And so, it goes without saying that user conferences the world over, across an array of industries, tend to showcase the most accomplished among their corps.

Certainly, in the case of Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a partner at BIG, his keynote fit that bill perfectly. BIG not only uses ARCHICAD as its main BIM platform in their Copenhagen headquarters, the firm is arguably the biggest star architecture practice in the world today. The way he demonstrated and spoke about the firm’s projects was both entertaining and instructive.

So the big surprise in the BIMCON event, at least for this architect and writer’s eyes, is that Kushner’s closing talk demonstrated the alternative path—bring in a “thought leader” who is, at a bare minimum, tangential to the industry and the concerns of those in attendance. But Kushner—while fitting the bill as a thought leader—goes beyond the minimum; he lives and breathes the same problems all architects do. And this was the delight in his keynote. He brought both thought-leadership coming from a view outside the field but at the same time being among the field.

GRAPHISOFT will have a hard time equaling a pair of keynote speakers for future events like this one. I attend many industry events, including AIA Nationals, and it is easy to judge this event’s headline speakers as topping even the AIA’s national conferences, which recently have devolved into the use of Hollywood celebrities or former US presidents.

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On many levels, 2017 BIMCON was a textbook example of the popular user conference format these days. Find a fabulous location, time it exactly right during the year, line up amazing keynote speakers and great conference sessions, roll-in great evening networking events, and watch it unfold. And apparently it did—larger than ever before.

Here is an interesting fact. I was told by company officials that GRAPHISOFT has purposely kept this event smaller and more intimate. But for reasons that may become clearer further down into this article, BIMCON this year exploded in growth. When I asked people why they came many said they had wanted to come to this event in the past but couldn’t make it. Part of the boom may have been pent-up demand from folks like this. Repeaters came because they said they had enjoyed this event in the past because they learn so much about ARCHICAD.

Even if you are not an ARCHICAD user, as an architect, you would have probably wanted to be at this event just for the two outstanding opening and closing keynote presentations. In any case, if you missed this event or are just curious, let’s take a stroll through some photo galleries with some detailed notes of the going on’s at 2017 BIMCON.

Day 1—A Little History and Denmark Fame

The Hungarian software company chose a great hotel to host this event. The M Hotel and Resort is on the western edges of Las Vegas. Both modern, spacious and sophisticated, the self-contained resort provided the conference with both room-to-breath, good service, and pretty amazing guest rooms.

01 – GRAPHISOFT held the 2017 BIMCON at The M Resort and Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada.

On day one (day zero featured registration and a welcome reception) the conference truly kicked off with Suzanne Oldweiler of GRAPHISOFT North America, setting the stage for the event running us through a compelling new video story of the history of the company by its founder, Gábor Bojár. There were two points made during this video (which you can watch below) that are extremely important to mention.

The first is that before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungary didn’t have access to computers from the west. They, therefore, programmed earliest versions of ARCHICAD on essentially advanced calculators and USSR era computers. This is worth mentioning because these devices had puny memory compared to Apple I’s and early PCs in the west. So GRAPHISOFT’s programmers had to write extremely memory efficient code due to this constraint, which took considerable mathematical expertise, which the company still retains to this day.

02 – A recent film documentary on the forming of GRAPHISOFT was shown to the audience. Here Gábor Bojár, its founder gazes over to the early Macs that made the company possible on many levels.

The second point from the video worth mentioning was this. Gábor Bojár noted that Apple’s early support of the company provided them moral support, computers on which to develop on, and a reseller network. These three things, he says, substituted for what startups today generally have but they did not—venture capital.

Keynote 1 – BIG

During an hour-long talk, Kai-Uwe Bergmann took attendees through the BIG’s history and evolution, discussing specific projects but most importantly the strategic thinking behind their design work. At the moment the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has three offices now and around 460 people, with 220 in the New York City office and nearly all the rest in Copenhagen. They have a new London office now because of their client Google, who requested one.

03 – Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a partner at BIG, delivered a compelling keynote presentation on day 1 of 2017 BIMCON, talking about the firm’s evolution and unique perspective to the world and architecture and the architect’s role in it.

Of the three projects which Bergmann discussed, Mountain was perhaps the most central innovator as it cleverly fused competing program elements in parking and housing into one monolithic form that was then sloped like a mountain for views and daylight. Bergman stated that the project successfully merges densification goals “with what we like with suburbia.”

MORE: How BIG’s influence can reframe the role of BIM in Architecture

It seems that in each of BIG’s projects a clear and simple thesis drives forth compelling new forms because foundational assumptions about building types, programs, and site constraints are turned on their head. The common thing to do in the case of Mountain project would be to put in 2-3 parking floors (flat) across the whole site and place all the housing directly on top. The other common thing to do would be to orient units toward all four sides, giving many units shadow orientations. Mountain challenges all of these assumptions radically overturning them.

04 – Kai-Uwe Bergmann, discussing data driven design during his 2017 BIMCON keynote talk.

The developer for Mountain was the developer for the M-V House, next door, and also the A-House development, which Bergmann showed next. In my private interview with Bergmann (which will be published as an article later), he revealed why this particular residential developer hired the firm and what his assumptions were of the firm. But he is still working with BIG because he found this about them:

“If you look at the work that was done by him previously it was pretty vanilla and typical,” said Bergmann. “What he then saw in the progression of the V-M House, the Mountain, and the A-House was the ability to build affordably but generate generous places, giving the person that enters into them the feeling that ‘this is different.’ “

By now the world knows that BIG’s architecture work is different and it has generated huge demand for the practice and critical acclaim. This led to the firm working all over the world and the formation of its New York City office. After the A-House the firm moved to a BIM workflow with ARCHICAD in its Copenhagen headquarters. BIM forms the basis of what Bergmann referred as “data driven design.”

05 – Showing the Amager Bakke Energy Plant project in BIM model image.

It is also important to conceptual accuracy helping test assumptions and concepts more definitively during the concept stage, something that would be important for the firm’s more ambitious projects moving forward. “How we see the software,” says Bergmann during his talk, “is it makes our arguments to get the project built.” Referring to another project back in Denmark, BIM helps test concepts such as daylighting—and “in Denmark daylight is precious.”

Obviously, this is just a snap-shot of some of the early key moments in Bergmann’s talk, but it sets the tone essentially for many of the expectations behind why ARCHICAD users came to the conference, to begin with. Users want to innovate on their architectural projects, and a whole host of sessions led by some award-winning ARCHICAD based firms was on hand to share their methods and workflow pipelines.

ARCHICAD 21 PREVIEW

Just after the BIG keynote, GRAPHISOFT showed users a sneak peek of some of the highlight new features in the upcoming version ARCHICAD 21. Naturally, this stuff was exclusive for the conference attendees only and has been embargoed for the press as well. I can show a photo or two showing just how many attendees were at the event. I quickly hand-counted the seats in the main ballroom at around just north of 340. As you can see it was a full house.

06 – All the big keynotes took place in the main ballroom. Here Graphisoft is talking briefly about upcoming technology coming in version 21.

I sat down with global marketing director Akos Pfemeter to talk about ARCHICAD 21, and he expressed that the company is excited to deliver this next version of their BIM platform. The announcement of the next version of ARCHICAD is coming in May, so users and the market will not have to wait much longer to get the details and Architosh will have the story behind the story.

Back to BIM as Platform for Data Driven Design: The Sessions

On Day 1 afternoon sessions started out strong. There was one by Ken Huggins Architect, LLC, titled “Building Enclosure Modeling: BIM Techniques, Climate, and the Smaller Firm.” I was interviewing Kai-Uwe Bergmann during this session, but I wanted to mention it because it was the kind of deep dive session of great practical relevance to architects everywhere using BIM.

Building Enclosures

Huggins is an expert architect from Charleston, South Carolina, a place known for hurricanes and water infiltration in buildings. A member of the Building Enclosure Council, an instructor at Clemson University and past presenter at both the AIA National Convention and 2015 Graphisoft BIM Conference, Huggins is extremely well qualified to discuss building enclosure failures and what architects can do to make sure they don’t happen on their projects. With today’s more layered, glassy, and material rich and performance-oriented facade driven design, building enclosure design is more important than ever.

This session (taken from the session descriptions) taught key principles of building science first show users how to use tools within ARCHICAD to model and illustrate thermal characteristics, drainage planes, air barriers, and vapor retarders within building enclosures. Specific ARCHICAD concepts such as Building Materials, Priority Based Connections, Composites, Custom Overrides, Selection Criteria, and Energy Evaluation, were all tied to this building science driven session on building enclosures. Like I said, I, unfortunately, missed this session, but it was a prime example of the technical knowledge one needs to approach doing the type of advanced and inspiration work shown by BIG partner, Kai-Uwe Bergmann.

While you can visit the BIMCON website to learn more, here are a sampling of just the 4 o’clock sessions on Day 1—”ARCHICAD 102: The Next Step on the Road to Becoming a Power User,” “Beyond Design: How to Manage Construction with ARCHICAD,” and of course a really key session for many participants, “Collaboration Between ARCHICAD and Revit,” not to be outdone by “BIM Managers: How to Become One—Or Learn to Think Like One.”

Orcutt Winslow: Toolkit for Sustainable Design

But the 4 o’clock session that caught my eye was from the crew from Orcutt Winslow, award-winning star architecture practice in Phoenix, Arizona. In a session titled, “Creating Your Technology Toolkit for Sustainable Design,” the four professionals from this largish mid-sized practice explained the various other tools they use in conjunction with ARCHICAD for evaluating energy use in buildings and creating the most energy efficient buildings they can for their clients.

07 – Orcutt Winslow is one of the premier US architecture practices out west using ARCHICAD for award-winning work across a small array of specialties.

The Orcutt Winslow group presenting was led by Ashley Mulhall, AIA, LEED BD+C and each member of the group ran through various tools and procedures for sustainable design. One of the first tools they spoke about first was one from the US Dept of Energy called Climate Consultant. Its use is to better understand the local climate for a given project based on, obviously, its location. It uses annual 8760-hour EPW format climate data that is made available at no cost by the Department of Energy for thousands of weather stations around the world.

What Climate Consultant does is translate this raw climate data into dozens of meaningful graphic displays, providing the architect a high-level dashboard-like overview of data. The Orcutt Winslow team also praised Sefaira noting that with its online tool an architect can evaluate key things like when adding a better u-value to glass becomes not useful.

Other tools in Orcutt Winslow’s sustainable design toolkit included things like ARCHICAD itself with its thermal transmission sectional tools, plus Velux’s software for daylighting, a tool called FLIR which adds a thermal camera to your iPhone, and ATHENA, a carbon analysis life-cycle software tool, among others.

After the 4 o’clock sessions ended BIMCOM participants had a small break before boarding buses to downtown Vegas for an evening of fun at the Stratosphere Las Vegas.

An Evening at the Stratosphere

Good events have fun nighttime activities, and when you are in Vegas, of course, there is no shortage of that. While some participants did seem to get away to see shows on the strip, GRAPHISOFT hosted a compelling evening mingle with catered eats and free rides at Vegas’ version of the Seattle Needle known as the Stratosphere.

08 – Stratosphere in Vegas. This is where Day 1 ended with networking and food.

09 – Quite a lot of ARCHICAD users braved up to this 108 story leap. Here they watch fellow jumpers get ready.

10 – There were amusement park rides on the top of this building. This one shown here was a four-sided set of harnessed chairs that shot people up to the top of the needle.

It seemed most participants attended this fun event, which included the option (with the added price of a ticket) to bungee jump off the 108 story building itself. Yeah! Not my kind of thing either. One lucky raffle winner from the earlier GRAPHISOFT keynote won a ticket to do just this.

Closing

So Day 1 started with two compelling keynotes and an afternoon packed with AIA-credit worthy and interesting sessions. During the evening at the Stratosphere, I had a chance to network more deeply with some participants I planned to interview on Day 2.

In Architosh’s next report on 2017 BIMCON, I’ll review Day 2’s activities, discuss sessions, recap the closing keynote by Marc Kushner, and reveal a bit more about the detailed interviews and features related to this event coming down the pike.

The post 2017 BIMCON—Day 1 Recap: Bjarke Ingels Group Keynote, Sessions Talk and More appeared first on Architosh.

Event Details

The event posting reads: “Tight budgets, quick project turnarounds, and the emergence of BIM technologies all mean that landscape professionals need to work smarter, not harder. Learn how in a one-hour webinar from industry professionals Eric Berg, RLA, ASLA, and Robert Anderson, RLA, ASLA, as they discuss how their firms overcame the obstacles to (and are now benefiting from) transitioning to information modeling workflows from traditional CAD platforms.”

The webinar takes place on Thursday, 16 March 2017, at 2:00 – 3:00 PM, EDT (Boston). Continuing educational credits equal 1 LA CES PHD. To register for the event click here.

01 – If you can’t make the live event users who register will get a link to the recorded event.

If you can’t make the live event the company encourages you to still register anyway. Vectorworks, Inc., will send you a link to the recording once it’s available on demand.

The post Event News: Vectorworks Webinar on “Transitioning to Information Modeling Workflows” appeared first on Architosh.

Last month we highlighted the company’s announcement on its star keynote speakers (see, Architosh, “GRAPHISOFT Announces Keynote Speakers For Its North American User Conference,” 19 Jan 2017). Now below we can share some detailed information on what lies ahead for actual conference sessions and other facts.

ARCHICAD Conference Session Notables

Here are some key highlights from the sessions at the BIM conference:

• ARCHICAD 102 – The Next Step on the Road to Becoming a Power User — This session is part of the ARCHICAD basics series. BIM Consultant, Monte Chapin will teach participants ways to streamline the ARCHICAD workflow, get them familiar with the Publisher features of ARCHICAD and improve presentation and communication of design ideas with BIMx.
• Beyond Design: How to Manage Construction with ARCHICAD — This unique session for intermediate users highlights the many powerful uses of ARCHICAD outside of A&E design. We will hear from John Hallgarth, founder of 3DConstructor, LLC, examine a project’s lifecycle from the perspective of a general contractor so that the power of ARCHICAD as a CM (construction management) tool can be realized.
• Creating Your Technology Toolkit for Sustainable Design — This session for intermediate/advanced users of ARCHICAD intends to document how the firm Orcutt | Winslow built a comprehensive toolkit for sustainable design using BIM as a platform and ARCHICAD-complimentary. It explores LEED v4 and Living Building Challenge as well as the correlation between a high-performance building envelope and energy reduction.

AIA Credits Plus Power Networking

Earning AIA credits is something all architects have to do, and GRAPHISOFT’s annual event will enable architects to do exactly that.

The conference gathers what GRAPHISOFT likes to call ‘Power Users’ and lets them tell the other attendees how they get it done every day. Some of this year’s Power Users were regular attendees just a few years ago so GRAPHISOFT likes to tout the educational value gained by attending the annual BIM event.

01 – Architects from all over North and even South America have attended the GRAPHISOFT North American User Conference. It is the event for ARCHICAD USERS this side of pond–both ponds.

I asked a GRAPHISOFT representative what is so special about their conference in North America. “This User Conference is special because it brings together a passionate group of users who may never have met or interacted otherwise,” said the representative. “That provides value because many ARCHICAD users may face some hurdles in building a reliable network of peers who can support them or provide resources during projects.”

The Keynotes

We already published a story on the keynote speakers some time ago but we’ll recap here by noting that superstar architecture firm BIG and global design and architecture website, Architizer.com, will both field executives or company founders for keynote sessions.

The post Event News: More Details Emerge on GRAPHISOFT User Conference Coming to Las Vegas appeared first on Architosh.

Learn From Visionaries and Power Users

GRAPHISOFT’s clients are visionaries, innovators, and industry leaders demanding cutting-edge technology and tools that help them build and design physical spaces. Presentations from ARCHICAD “Power Users” and GRAPHISOFT experts help conference attendees explore ARCHICAD to push the limits of design and empower them to use building information modeling in disruptive ways.

“Our unparalleled software solution is ideal for anyone who designs, renovates or constructs buildings,” said Steve Benford, Managing Director, at GRAPHISOFT North America. “This is a special opportunity to focus on our users, who are highly passionate and benefit greatly from meeting with like-minded professionals.”

Keynote Speaker Line-Up

GRAPHISOFT this year has truly exciting visionary speakers. The first of two keynote speakers is Marc Kushner, co-founder and CEO of online showcase and industry resource, Architizer. Architzer is a top global online website for the design and AEC community.

01 – Graphisoft’s VIP keynote speakers for its North American BIM conference are big hitters in BIG partner Kai-Uwe Bergmann and Architizer CEO and co-founder, Marc Kushner.

In addition, Bjark Ingels Group (BIG) partner, Kai-Uwe Bergmann will also deliver a keynote. The architecture firm BIG is the most dominant name in cutting edge, innovative architectural design operating out of headquarters in Denmark and a large US office in New York City. BIG’s impact on technology in practice is tremendous (see, Architosh, “How BIG’s influence can reframe the role of BIM in Architecture,” 18 April 2015)

Both Kushner and Bergmann live and breath at the intersection of architecture and technology, where GRAPHISOFT aims to dominate with its cutting edge BIM and design technologies.

As conference attendees learn from the expert course instructors and keynote speakers, the friendly, all-access atmosphere of the gathering gives them time to speak one-on-one about hot industry topics, trends, and technologies.

The AIA-approved course line-up earns attendees up to 15 AIA Learning Units by conference end. The networking opportunities between like-minded, passionate ARCHICAD users and even developers of the software allow for spontaneous brainstorming and problem-solving sessions. No other conference delivers as many chances to forge new alliances, build new business contacts, and discuss implementing a new technology or BIM workflow; the opportunity to interact face-to-face with ARCHICAD developers and power users is invaluable.

More Info and Registration

For registration information, venue details and more on the conference agenda, please visit http://bimconference.graphisoftus.com/.

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In the immediate, the company has no plans for producing a native Mac OS X version of Revit. Bernstein said that obviously things can always change but noted that people today are perfectly happy running Revit on Macs via Boot Camp and Parallels. “I’ve got a Mac and I’m happy running it just fine,” stated Bernstein.

We have more to report on our talk with Phil Bernstein and we’ll spend a whole article on Autodesk shortly.

Autodesk at AIA Atlanta

Autodesk had several official announcements at the AIA National this year. On the Revit side the company introduced Autodesk Revit Collaboration Suite, a new “pay-as-you-go” offering designed to make the BIM workflow more affordable for those who are segueing from a predominately 2D workflow into BIM. Products in the new suite include: AutoCAD 2016, Revit Architecture 2016 and A360 Team, a centralized platform for storing, sharing, and exchanging project files across the team.

01 – Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro features early-stage energy and solar analysis so you can understand performance from day one. (image: Autodesk. All rights reserved.)

The big announcements for Autodesk at AIA were twofold around some of their newer software applications—FormIt 360 Pro and Dynamo Suite. (see image above). Both of these tools actually represent more of Autodesk’ future directions at the technology foundation level.

MORE: AIA: Autodesk launches Dynamo and FormIt 360 Pro in Atlanta

What is happening across the tech industry is that we are moving into a new phase around the disruption caused by cloud plus mobile. This new phase will be very exciting for those who have felt frustrated by the “tyranny of desktop operating systems” to quote Phil Bernstein in our 30 minute talk. (more to come).

Trimble at AIA Atlanta

The Trimble SketchUp folks had an official release of the next generation of SketchUp Mobile Viewer. We wrote our full report on that announcement over here.

In our Trimble talk we spoke with Michael Tadros, Product Manager for 3D Warehouse and SketchUp, who demoed the new mobile app as well as talked us through other items. For example, the Trimble 3D Warehouse will now have STL built-in, making the world’s largest repository of 3D models much more connected to 3D printing. What Trimble has done is partner with Leuven, Belgium-based technology company Materialise.

02 – The Trimble SketchUp booth is always popular and busy at the AIA show, in some ways a reflection perhaps of how common SketchUp is in both large and small practices alike.

Materialise is a provider of additive manufacturing (AM) software solutions and sophisticated 3D printing services. With this new partnership SketchUp users have direct access to powerful technology that facilities the process of validating their models for 3D printing. Models uploaded to 3D Warehouse can now be flagged for Materialise’s cloud services which are capable of analyzing and fixing models to ensure printability on 3D printers. Materialise’s technology then produces high-quality, printable STL files that get parked within 3D Warehouse.

The result of this announcement is that over time 3D Warehouse will become a massive repository of high-quality, ready-to-go, printable 3D model files.

Trimble Connect

Recently Trimble and Nemetschek AG of Germany announced a technology partnership. We asked Michael Tadros to elaborate. “Trimble knows that one company’s solutions will not be enough to get a building designed, built and maintained,” said Tadros. Trimble is a company committed to open standards and interoperability and partnerships allow the shifting and de-coupling of data silos.

Tadros said that Trimble Connect is a collaboration platform that is agnostic and it “doesn’t matter what tool chain” architects and AEC professionals are using. The Nemetschek AG partnership expands optionality for tools that can plugin and work within the Trimble Connect collaboration platform. One final tidbit that readers may find interesting is that when we floated the idea that perhaps Trimble is now only missing a true BIM application and that maybe they should just acquire one from a smaller company, Tadros quickly brought up all the BIM-goodness of SketchUp itself and of Layout and the ability to handle complete BIM tasks via all the vast range of external plugins (like Sefaira) that add things like energy and daylighting analysis.

Is SketchUp a BIM platform in itself? It seems that Trimble increasingly sees this to be the case.

Nemetschek Vectorworks at AIA Atlanta

Nemetschek Vectorworks this year had a unique showing. On the one hand, the company was showcasing Vectorworks 2015, its current shipping version. But it was also showcasing its next upcoming Vectorworks 2016 with all its massive amount of new major features. Architosh has two meetings with the company, with a final talk with its CEO Sean Flaherty on Friday. Flaherty shares overall Nemetschek Group strategic direction with Graphisoft’s CEO Viktor Varkonyi.

Given the Nemetschek Group’s superb financial results over the past year (Architosh recently reported on the most recent quarterly results here) the question of continued acquisitions was put forth to Flaherty. The group, he said, is keenly looking for acquisition targets that ideally are similar to the overall metrics of its recent Bluebeam Software buy but perhaps at a slightly smaller level. The Nemetschek Group is particularly interested in the US market, noted Flaherty.

Adding some analysis in at this point in the discussion maybe particularly helpful. For starters, based on projected growth in global economies, the United States is projected to grow its economy by 38 percent from its 2012 GDP to its projected 2020 GDP. On the other hand, in Japan, where both Nemetschek Group companies are very strong, the economy is expected to drop its GDP over the same period by as much as 19 percent. And in Germany, the world’s third largest CAD market and the world’s fourth largest global economy, growth over the same period is projected at a more modest 17 percent. (reference this chart: IMF, World Economic Outlook, at CNN Money).

Smartly, the Nemetschek Group leadership is not only determined to hold and grow its leading share in Japan and Germany, the third and fourth largest economies in the world but is smartly focused on China and Asia in particular. Still, the US economy is expected to balloon to $22.5 trillion GDP by 2020, four times the size of either Japan or Germany. With Bluebeam Software holding such a dominant market share in its domain of large US construction companies, the estimated growth of the US economy looks to favor heavily that company’s contribution to the Nemetschek Group’s overall bottom line in the years to come.

Graphisoft ArchiCAD at AIA Atlanta

Graphisoft has its annual release cycle well timed for the AIA show each year. The company just announced its version 19 for its flagship ArchiCAD BIM program. At AIA Atlanta the booth was filled with people looking to check out the product’s new features, the biggest of which is its predictive background processing.

03 – A view of Rhino and the process of pushing data to the ArchiCAD native format for integration in the BIM environment.

For us, a particular set of questions were focused on the company’s recent announcement of a Rhino to ArchiCAD connectivity, the fruits of a collaboration agreement between Graphisoft and Nikken Sekkei, the 4th largest architecture firm in the world.

The new Rhino-ArchiCAD link converts a Rhino model into ArchiCAD geometry. The container of the Rhino-based model is GDL. There are two elements to this new functionality. There is the option to bring in a single object from Rhino into ArchiCAD 19, and there is also the second option to bring in complex structures into ArchiCAD, which consists of multiple model elements which get converted into a set of smaller GDL objects.

MORE: GRAPHISOFT announces Rhino to ArchiCAD Connection

While this is an exciting announcement given how popular Rhino is as a major design tool within some of the world’s leading architectural firms, the transfer of data is currently one way. The Graphisoft folks said that the company is also working on taking ArchiCAD model data back to Rhino, thereby creating round-trip functionality. While such functionality will have usefulness, the primary pipeline is that Rhino is used as a early design stage modeling and design tool that is, in essence, pre-BIM.

This is our first real show floor report and we have many more companies to cover, including reports on talks and meetings. So much more to report from AIA Atlanta, so stay tuned here on Architosh!

The post AIA: Show Floor Reports: Autodesk, Trimble and Nemetschek Group Companies appeared first on Architosh.

What’s New

SketchUp Mobile Viewer remains primarily a way to view and navigate SketchUp models but in the new version the program adds several more features. The first feature is an improvement on its integration with Trimble’s 3D Warehouse, a vast community site and repository of SketchUp model files where users can view, browse, sort and filter search results for both models and collections.

This latest version of the viewer adds additional cloud collaboration platform support, including connections to Dropbox and Trimble Connect (formerly GTeam), Trimble’s cloud-based collaboration platform. SketchUp files can also be transferred locally from the desktop via iTunes (iOS) or an SD card (Android) and opened directly from other iOS and Android apps (e.g.: if sent as an email attachment).

SketchUp Mobile Viewer in its latest version adds the ability to navigate in “Look Around” mode, adding to existing multi-touch gestures in orbit, pan and zoom. Users can toggle back and forth between perspective and orthographic camera modes and even adjust the field of view (FoV).

01 – Trimble introduced version 2 of SketchUp Mobile at AIA Atlanta, with many new capabilities, including connection to Trimble Connect.

The app also supports SketchUp’s Face Style rendering options, including X-ray mode and a new layer visibility feature that allows the user to control the visible layers.

Availability

The new SketchUp Viewer app (version 2) is available now for $9.99.USD through both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. In addition to English, the app now supports French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Dutch and Polish.

To learn more visit here. http://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-mobile-viewer

[Editor’s note: As of this writing the app update has yet to be approved on the Apple App Store but is imminent.]

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Dual Launches

Autodesk announced two launches during its Autodesk Innovation Forum get-together on Thursday night: Dynamo Studio and FormIt 360 Pro.

Both product launches are very much focused on the front-end of the design process, particularly with the FormIt 360 product line. This award-winning product line brings the power of conceptual modeling to a mobile and cloud-based workflow that also incorporates the desktop. The new Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro offers both cloud-based collaboration among team members but powerful analysis brought up into the design process.

“Conceptual design has always been a necessary and important part of the architectural design process, but it has been disconnected from other parts of the workflow,” said Jim Lynch, Vice President, Building and Collaboration Product Line Group, Autodesk. At the Autodesk Innovation Forum the Autodesk team said that both product launches are focused on extending BIM earlier into the design workflow.

FormIt 360 Pro

The new Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro offers powerful analysis and cloud-based collaboration previously not available in the free version. As with the free version, FormIt 360 Pro is a web and mobile app (that’s two separate app experiences) for early stage BIM-connected conceptual design.

01 – Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro features early-stage energy and solar analysis so you can understand performance from day one. (image: Autodesk. All rights reserved.)

With FormIt 360 Pro designers and architects can understand energy and solar analysis from day one on their conceptual ideas. The tool provides shadow and sun-path studies, and, as been noted before on Architosh, you can import a map underlay of the physical site to your model in FormIt 360 Pro.

FormIt 360 Pro allows architects to work on models concurrently with other team members, whether on an iPad or Android tablet on the go, or on a web browser back in the office. Both the free and Pro version of FormIt 360 support native Autodesk Revit integration. The goal is to extend BIM deeper into the early stages of design, says the company.

SketchUp Importer for FormIt

Also in this release is a new feature called FormIt Converter, which allows users to import SketchUp and Revit data as editable geometry within FormIt 360 and FormIt 360 Pro.

Autodesk Dynamo Studio

Also released at AIA was the new Dynamo Studio that helps designers focus on visual scripted logic for exploring parametric conceptual design models. Dynamo was first created by Autodesk and then taken open source. Now the company has developed Dynamo Studio with some big changes, most importantly, the separation from other applications and thusly creating a stand-alone application.

02- Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro, in this image showing solar analysis. (image: Autodesk. All rights reserved.)

Being untethered, Autodesk hopes Dynamo Studio will extend design into other interoperable workflows for documentation, fabrication, coordination, simulation and analysis to rapidly test and iterate designs to discover more options in less time.

New Connections

Autodesk Dynamo Studio, as a new free-standing solution, is interoperable and compatible with Bentley SAP, McNeel & Associates’ Rhinoceros (Rhino), Microsoft Excel and Tableau—in addition to Autodesk applications in Autodesk Revit, Autodesk Navisworks, and Autodesk Robot.

Autodesk Dynamo Studio comes via an Autodesk Subscription plan at $300.USD per year. You can learn more here.

Autodesk FormIt 360 Pro is available for Apple iOS and Google Android tablets from $25.USD per month. The free version is a quick download. FormIt 360 Pro features unique features in: Real-time collaboration, whole-building energy analysis, and solar analysis. Both programs also work in the web browser.

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What’s cool is that the press can talk about virtually all of it. There was of course one future item that is restricted for the press. How the company intends to keep all its 300 plus attendees who saw that special future feature a secret is anyone’s best guess…?

I can’t talk about it but below is a summary of what the press can talk about. In total, it’s pretty major stuff.

Future of Vectorworks—2016 and Beyond

Rhino + Grasshopper, may I introduce to you Marionette? (I think I got that name right…)

The name is actually insignificant. What is significant is that Vectorworks 2016, coming later this year, will introduce the software market’s first true, cross-platform visual-scripting modeling environment. And an advanced modeling environment at that. If readers have used Rhino + Grasshopper—as some of the architects speaking at the conference have—then you understand the idea and the power of this change for Vectorworks users and for the world of Mac-based architects as well.

01 – Dr. Biplab Sarkar, chief technology officer of Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc., introducing Marionette inside of Vectorworks 2016. This is the first instance of visual scripting based modeling directly native within a BIM environment. It is also the first true, cross-platform visual scripting environment for architects. (image: courtesy Nemetschek Vectorworks Inc. All rights reserved.

The skinny is this. The leading visual scripting modeling tools don’t run natively on Mac OS X. This changes everything.

While Architosh has written about his before, and about upcoming native tools from important software developers, what is truly different is that all the power of Rhino + Grasshopper (in terms of under-the-hood power) is coming fully onboard directly inside a BIM tool. Marionette inside Vectorworks 2016 looks more or less just like Bentley Generative Components, Dynamo and Rhino + Grasshopper—with wired nodes connecting mathematical scripts that tap the underlying modeling power of the tool it touches. (see image 01 – 02) In this case, we are talking about Parasolid modeling kernel plus the new Pixar-based SubDivision surface technology.

02 – Marionette has wired nodes and a python backend direct editing environment, all within Vectorworks 2016. (image: Nemetschek Vectorworks Inc.. All rights reserved)

This brings us to the next feature in Vectorworks 2016. If you are an astute Architosh or other CAD publication reader you may have noticed the trend of tools incorporating SubDs into, and alongside, NURBS-based and polygonal modelers. The new SubDs in Vectorworks 2016 can be powered inside the new visual scripting tools.

Dr. Sarkar also introduced a new built-in energy modeling technology which is aimed at helping architects understand the energy efficiencies of their designs. We will share more information later. Vectorworks 2016 will also, and for many users apparently, at long last, feature new team-work functionality allowing multiple users to work on the same file at the same time. In a nutshell, users will have new role-based permissions, new check-in/check-out capabilities associated with layers and a new file arrangement structure that is server-based or centralized.

03 – Vectworks 2016 will support Point Cloud support onboard. In this image the company’s Clip-Cube feature is sectioning a point-cloud 3D representation in real-time. (image: Nemetschek Vectorworks Inc.. All rights reserved.)

Finally, Vectorworks 2016 will feature the ability to bring in point-cloud data and generate an interactive view and environment with this point–cloud data. This part was actually visually stunning, in almost a sci-fi kind of way. (see image 03)

What’s powering all these changes in Vectorworks 2016, and future versions, is fundamentally global growth of the software platform. At the event Sean Flaherty, CEO, noted that according to one recent study Vectorworks Architect is the leading BIM tool—in use as a BIM tool—in the United Kingdom. And this global growth is leading the company to expand its development offices. But more on this later…

The post Vectorworks Design Summit: What’s Coming in Vectorworks 2016 appeared first on Architosh.

This year, the company seems buzzing with excitement—for several reasons representatives say. One of those reasons is because the company is doing something for the first time at the conference—giving attendees a sneak peak at the future of Vectorworks (the subject of an upcoming Architosh report). But there are other reasons for the excitement, including the projection that the company will begin hosting such an event annually.

30 Years: From MiniCAD to Vectorworks

The tenor of the event is very celebratory. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the beginning of Vectorworks, back when Richard Diehl founded the company in 1985 and took out a $10,000 bank loan so that he could buy an Apple Lisa computer, at the time the only computer really powerful enough to actually program a sophisticated 3D CAD program for the then nascent, but stunningly innovative, Apple Mac.

01 – Sean Flaherty, CEO of Nemetschek Vectorworks, Inc. gave the opening Keynote Address (yesterday) at the 2015 Vectorworks Design Summit in Philadelphia. The picture shows the CAD software company’s beginnings with Richard Diehl, founder shown at left and Flaherty.

Flaherty’s keynote address was both informative, thought-provoking and even charming, as he took the audience back through time to the earliest days of the company, back then known as Diehl Graphsoft. He noted that Richard Diehl later admitted some regret about the name MiniCAD, explaining that back in the mid 80’s there were three types of computer systems, mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. None of these terms mean a heck of a lot to most users today, but back then early software firms named themselves with similar reference. Microsoft is one well known obvious case-in-point.

Leo Van Broeck, founding partner of the Belgium architecture and urban design practice BOGDAN & VAN BROECK gave the “design keynote” talk. Focusing on a more global picture of humanity’s environmental challenges, Van Broeck covered topics like percentage of areas without human occupation in order for an ecosystem to be successful and the densification or lack thereof in his home country and countries in general.

02 – Leo Van Broeck, architect and co-founder of BOGDAN & VAN BROECK in Belgium delivers a fascinating design keynote talk.

Spending a good percent of his more than 70 slides in his talk, Van Broeck carefully framed his arguments, including a (perhaps) counter-intuitive assessment that the more densification humanity will accept the more vital the role of the architect in order to foreshadow what is necessary to keep the peace among neighbors and provide comfort and privacy so vital to human life.

Though I have not confirmed this, it is my understanding that the main presentations at the 2015 Vectorworks Design Summit have all been filmed and may be available for broader viewing by Nemetschek Vectorworks at some point in time.

Overall as we head into the last day of this conference, attendees I’ve spoken to say they have enjoyed the format of this conference as it strikes a nice balance between all the core activities and is hosted in a fascinating city. On a personal side note, the hotel, the Sofitel, has a nearly ideal setup architecturally for this event. It’s just the right size.

Stay tuned as Architosh shares more on the news coming out of the Vectorworks Design Summit.

(disclosure: Vectorworks paid for hotel and most meals during the event.)

The post Vectorworks Design Summit: Initial Thoughts appeared first on Architosh.

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01 – Digital Tutors and Architosh offer exclusive free training course on Architectural Visualization. Click on the links above to access the exclusive free tutorial.

If Maya and Maxwell are not your thing, not an issue. This is merely a sample of the type of quality online education to be had at Digital-Tutors. They have instruction on programs such as AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Cinema 4D, V-Ray, Keyshot, Grasshopper and a whole lot more.

Quickly Rendering Architectural Visualizations in Maya and Maxwell: Details

In the above tutorial, Stanislav Poritskiy, guest tutor, will cover the multiple stages of preparing the geometry for rendering, setting up UVs, materials, textures, as well as proper lighting for the scene. The tutorial will also cover camera settings to make your image more suitable for architectural visualization styles. There will be both a day and night time scene setup in this 2 hour tutorial, so readers will learn the important differences between both lighting conditions.

By the end of this tutorial you will have a solid foundation for architectural visualizations. This knowledge can be carried over to all other visualization and 3D programs.

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While we have already covered news of Lightworks and NVIDIA’s partnership with NVIDIA’s iray technology, NVIDIA itself had big news at the show as well in the announcement of its new Quadro K6000 graphics card, the world’s most powerful GPU. This no doubt was a popular visit for show attendees anxious to see what this latest Keplar-based workstation card could do.

01 – NVIDIA announced the new Keplar-based Quadro K6000 GPU… the world’s most advanced workstation graphics card and the company’s latest tech. (courtesy Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved.)

The company was also showing tech inside of an automobile with its Tegra mobile CPU technology. NVIDIA has a dedicated automotive division for this area and this unit was inside of a Tesla Motors Model S instrument cluster. See the image here and below for more.

02 – NVIDIA Tegra CPU driving a Tesla Motors instrument cluster. (courtesy Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved).

Pixologic’s latest ZBrush 4R6 has a tag line of “Ideas born in clay.” The company’s famed ZBrush technology is always an important thing to see at SIGGRAPH and this year was no different. The company was showing live demos and had some top notch talent from Disney and Blizzard for panel discussions and more.

Pixologic also has its Sculptris application which is free. The program is the brainchild of Swedish programmer Tomas Pettersson. If you have an interest in character modeling this is a good place to start. It runs on Mac and Windows.

03 – ZBrush at Pixologic’s booth at SIGGRAPH 2013. (courtesy Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved)

At SIGGRAPH 2013 Unity Technologies introduced Unity 4.2 for multi-platform game development and deployment. Unity 4.2 offers three new platforms for game deployment, including Windows Phone 8, Windows Store Apps, and Blackberry 10.

Unity ships in a Unity free and Unity Pro version and ships with optional add-ons for specific platform development, like iOS Pro, Android Pro, Blackberry 10 Pro, et cetera, which essentially double the price of Unity Pro. Unity Pro 4.2 supports OpenGL ES 3.0 on Android, GPU Skinning, a Stencil Buffer, updated Image Effects and many more features and optimizations.

04 – Unity 4.2 was shown at SIGGRAPH 2013. (courtesy of Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved)

With Unity Pro developers have a complete games development studio on their Mac, Windows or Linux desktop To develop for iOS using an iOS based player you will need Mac OS X and Xcode. There are other similar restrictions for particular platform deployment. But in general Unity makes it quite easy to develop for both mobile and desktop for multiple platforms and devices from the same Unity development environment.

The post SIG: Pictures from the SIGGRAPH 2013 Show Floor – Part 2 appeared first on Architosh.

Before we start off we wanted to mention again that SIGGRAPH shows–like many other conventions–seem to be struggling more and more as the years go on. While there were many excellent companies at this year’s event in California, it was notable that Autodesk decided to not attend and apparently from the word on the grapevine will not be attending SIGGRAPH in the future…at least in booth form.

It has been many years since Apple has been at SIGGRAPH in booth form. In fact, I think that would take us back to the PowerPC days of tank like G5 Mac Pros.  Remember those days?

Apple does show up at SIGGRAPH in behind the scenes fashion to talk to developers and also for its popular Job Fair. Below you can see an Apple Job Fair booth next to the Houdini booth. Now it must be interesting to know what kinds of folks Apple is looking for at a place like SIGGRAPH. But the company is a giant and has far more ranging positions imaginable than one might think. And they always are looking out for talented designers.

01 – Apple at the SIGGRAPH Job Fair. Companies like Pixar, Disney, Apple, ILM, and many leading ISVs in 3D show up each year to attract talented prospects. (courtesy of Akiko Ashley. All Rights Reserved)

Closely related to Apple, Pixar was at SIGGRAPH this year, of course, and their booth, as you can see from the photo below, is quite different. Akiko attended the Pixar invite only event and we will be talking about RenderMan technology later this month as part of our tour of everything 3D at SIGGRAPH.

02 – Pixar at SIGGRAPH 2013. The company also attends the Job Fair and is a prominent participant in conference sessions and major keynotes and talks. (courtesy Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved)

A major announcement this year was Houdini ENGINE by Side Effects Software. Houdini ENGINE is a compact API which extract’s Houdini’s core tech into a powerful procedural engine for film and game studios so they can integrate it into the pipeline applications.

Popular DDC applications like Maya and game development platforms like Unity can be integrated. This means you can load into DDC apps and Unit Houdini assets without having to rely on baked-out data.

03 – The Houdini booth featuring the new Houdini ENGINE. (courtesy Akiko Ashley, All Rights Reserved.)

Although AMD has struggled much with Intel over the past few years the company garnered two major wins with the contracts to supply the GPUs for both of the latest Sony and Microsoft game consoles. Now the big news for AMD with regards to Apple is centered on its supply of the AMD FirePro twin graphics cards inside of the upcoming Mac Pro (2013).

Akiko was deeply curious to find out anything at all about the FirePro inside of the new Mac Pro and visited the AMD booth. While details of the new Mac Pro are very secret and could not be discussed or discovered, the AMD booth help was anxious to show off the top of the line FirePro cards and what they can do for OpenCL acceleration.

04 – AMD’s booth was showing off its top of the line FirePro graphics cards for DCC apps and advanced 3D graphics and CAD. The next Mac Pro will be based on two twin FirePro cards. (courtesy Akiko Ashley. All Rights Reserved)

As noted in our special SIGGRAPH highlights report, AMD was showing off OpenCL acceleration on Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects (AE). We are beginning to wonder if Apple’s decision in AMD was centered primarily on advancements in OpenCL and the company’s attempt to stave off defections in the pro film and video market since the major gaffe with Final Cut Pro X. There are many lingering questions about the new Mac Pro…and we will just have to wait and see.

next page: Booth Pictures for Next Limit, LightWorks, and More…

The post SIG: Pictures from the SIGGRAPH 2013 Show Floor – Part 1 appeared first on Architosh.

The LightWave 3D Group, a division of NewTek, Inc., this week announced new features in LightWave 11.6, the most recent version of its award-winning 3D modeling, animation and rendering software for artists and designers. The Mac OS X and Windows compatible software has a host of new features which we’ll touch on more fully in a later report.

Briefly, LightWave 11.6 includes new ways to animate with a new Spline control tool, plus a new Raycasting technology to make an object aware of its surroundings in an animation. Version 11.6 adds support for FiberFX from the soft-body Bullet Dynamics system.

There are also new tools for streamlining game development, for better pre-visualization and streaming real-time content. Users can now place Normal Maps on 3D objects to make lower-polygon objects or characters display in higher resolution objects. There is also support for Nvidia’s CgFX shader technology. LightWave 11.6 also now supports output to 3D printers and can both export and import files in the popular STL and PLY file formats.

01 – LightWave 11.6 was introduced at SIGGRAPH this week and offers users numerous new features.

There is also new review in full stereographic 3D capabilities utilizing Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology and a whole lot more in this area. Architosh will report more on the new LightWave 11.6 as well as other announcements by the group–and there are several–in a full report dedicated to the company’s showing at SIGGRAPH. Stay tuned.

KeyShot and ZBrush Get Closer

In somewhat surprising news Luxion and Pixologic have announced that the latter’s GoZ™ plugin architecture has been utilized by Luxion to create a means for users to transfer file assets from ZBrush into KeyShot for rendering and further artist work.

02 – An image showing the same model from ZBrush in that program (left) with the same model in KeyShot (right).

Previously, artists could export out of ZBrush into KeyShot using an OBJ file. Now with the direct transfer capabilities of this new integration, users gain the ability to import the geometry into KeyShot while retaining SubTools, texturing and PolyPainting. Models may also be updated from within KeyShot through KeyShot’s LiveLinking capability.

“We’re excited to bring this level of integration with KeyShot to the ZBrush community.” Thomas Teger, Vice President of Products and Strategy at Luxion. “This is the first plugin of its kind that makes a rendering application an integral part of the artist’s process. The artist now no longer has to wait with the the rendering until the design is finished, but start visualizing concepts from its earliest stages. This integration with the ability to update the design inside KeyShot throughout the entire process will ultimately lead to better designs and better images in a shorter period of time.”

“KeyShot has proven to be one of the fastest ways of achieving realistic renders in a short amount of time.” say Dominic Qwek, 3D Artist and KeyShot user, “It’s simple workflow, clean user interface and amazing rendering capabilities allows me to focus more on the art and less on the technical side of things. With the new ZBrush plugin, KeyShot is now able to seamlessly import SubTools from ZBrush, even retaining PolyPaint data in the process.”

The post SIG: In Brief: KeyShot and ZBrush get closer and Lightwave turns 11.6 appeared first on Architosh.