Between the Lines

A Glimpse Into the Future of Revit

The Revit team regularly publishes the roadmap for Revit which details in a very transparent form what they are working on so that you can expect and prepare for including the request for 2D PDF printing and better collaboration between structural and analytical models on the roadmap. Read: Revit Public Roadmap – July 2019 “HOW DO I GET INVOLVED? There are a variety of other discussions and work related to connecting workflows from design to fabrication and beyond. If you... Read more →

Revit Users – We Need Your Feedback on 3D Export

Do you need to export your Revit models into other 3D formats? We would like to invite you to take this short survey to give us feedback on your experience with “3D Export Functionality in Revit”. https://autode.sk/2LhYf1j Your feedback on the products you use helps us build better products for you. You can also sign up for providing feedback on future Autodesk product feedback at the Autodesk Feedback website. https://feedback.autodesk.com/ Read more →

Meet Project Discover for Dynamo

My colleague Kean Walmsley announced on his blog Through the Interface on the new Project Discover for Dynamo out of Autodesk Research and is ready to be tested. It is a tool that we used to perform generative design in the AEC design for our Autodesk Toronto office including predicting the natural light rays into offices to assist in office location based on employee preferences (video Generative Design for Architecture: Autodesk MaRS Office). Read Kean’s overview in his blog post... Read more →

Got My Bags Packed for My Mars Condo!

A great story of smart young minds tackling a challenge put forth by NASA helped AI SpaceFactory Win NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge for additive constructed habitats. NASA awarded AI SpaceFactory $500,000 for the successful construction of a 15 foot Mars habitat with three windows named MARSHA. Read more →

Realtime Revit BIM Models in Unity in Just One Click

Today, the awesome fi9ne folks at Unity announced the collaboration with Autodesk for a Revit importation product named Unity Reflect. Unity provides a platform for all sorts of immersive 3D possibilities in AR/VR and more that have bent my mind at times. Now with Unity Reflect you can import your Revit BIM 3D model in one click. Get a hands on look at Autodesk University London in just two weeks! https://unity.com/event/au2019 “Announcing Unity Reflect, a new product for architects, building... Read more →

Civil Engineers Can Save the World

Here is a great article about thinking about things differently and how engineers can help create a better world and future. 3 Ways Heroic Civil Engineers Can Save the World Through Resilience Planning https://autode.sk/2EFfBAg Read more →

Reimagining the Eiffel Tower Landscape Using BIM

“At an event in Paris’ City Hall this week, Gustafson Porter + Bowman was named the winner of a competition to redevelop the Eiffel Tower’s “grand site”—an area which includes the Trocadéro Gardens and Champ de Mars, as well as the Tower and its esplanade. The announcement was made by Paris’ mayor, Anne Hidalgo, along with Jean-Louis Missika, and Jean-François Martins, Deputy Mayors of Paris.” “Autodesk worked closely with the teams over the last year to help them visualize their... Read more →

Machine Learning Unleashed to Aid in Construction

Machine learning has been a growing in this ever growing world of growing data. It has been in your hands surfacing tips and reducing tasks on your phones, in your bank statements, everyone and now in construction. Autodesk has released a preview of Construction IQ after several years of research and testing to help customers identify risk, Construction IQ Preview available for Quality and Safety for customers using BIM 360 Field. Using machine learning can surface insight into your construction... Read more →

Builders Herald the Coming Wave of Mass-Timber Construction

In Portland, Seattle, and around North America we are seeing more and more beautiful wood being used in building construction, and it has been more common in Europe for years. There is a massive tall timber project is in the planning stages for Toronto by Google’s Sidewalk Labs. These buildings using solid wood or engineered woods are commonly called Mass Timber. Most commonly you see CLT (cross laminated timber) and increasingly some CLP (cross laminated plywood). The use of the... Read more →

Revit IFC v19.2.0.0 Open Source Code Released

Autodesk’s Angel Velez mentioned on Twitter the Revit IFC 2019 source code was just released with many bug fixes and 2020 is coming. “The long awaited Autodesk Revit IFC v19.2 released ((link: https://bit.ly/2PKzt9C) bit.ly/2PKzt9C)! Lots of bug fixes, and working on getting 2020 open source out the door also (with even more fixes, many of which will be back-ported to v19.3). App store soon.” RELEASE NOTES 19.2.0.0 General: • This is generally a bug fix release with some new IFC... Read more →

AEC Hackathon in Seattle was Amazing and Inspiring

The 41st AEC Hackathon event was held in Seattle this past weekend and was great and filled with many smart and inspiring people and several new friends and connections. First, the Seattle weather was amazing and I got in a morning run and flight in South Lake Union area. The AEC Hackathon was held in the University of Washington campus Department of Construction Management CERC. Friday the event began with introductions, speakers including Damon Hernandez the AEC Hackathon Executive Director,... Read more →

Power of AI & Machine Learning in Construction

Subscribe to our BIM 360 Newsletter and get access instantly to this PDF report on AI and Machine Learning in AEC Construction, and much more. AI and Machine Learning will be a big part of all of our future from how our personal phones process our photos, provide navigation, and deliver data tips from the massive amounts of data we use daily to make it beneficial and personalized and AI and Machine Learning will also have a great benefit to... Read more →

AEC Hackathon This Weekend in Seattle

Starting tomorrow, another (41st actually) AEC Hackathon will be held this time in beautiful Seattle Washington and I will be participating. The AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) Hackathon was created to give those designing, building, and maintaining our built environment the opportunity to collaborate with cutting edge technologies and its developers and designers. It has quickly become a community of innovators that include all elements of the built environment, not just AEC all around the world. Please join all of us... Read more →

Shaping the future of construction using BIM tools and an innovative design approach of DfMA

The acronym DfMA stands for Design for Manufacture and Assembly and is a growing in popularity process to make sure that the manufacturing and assembly on site is considered in the design phase to save materials, labor, time, and bottom line costs. DfMA is not really what we have known historically as prefab as it is much more like the growing offsite construction for homes and buildings and considering in the design process how to manufacture and install efficiently and... Read more →

Revit 2020 is Here

The latest 2020 Autodesk releases are continuing to be announced, Revit 2020 just announced this morning. See what Harlan Brumm, Sasha Crotty, Ian Molloy, and Pawel Piechnik showed as some of the new features in in Revit 2020. ”The Revit team is thrilled to release Revit 2020, incorporating improvements in Revit 2019.1 and Revit 2019.2. The release year “2020” is epic, and Revit 2020 lives up to the name, reflecting both your requests submitted to the Revit Ideas page and... Read more →

Visit the Eiffel Tower Project in VR

The project was modelled using Autodesk Infraworks. Discover the existing conditions 3D model developed for the City of Paris. The 3D virtual reality model consists of: A 54 ha site 8,200 trees of different species 1,000 buildings 4 bridges 25 statues 560 light fixtures 425 benches 100 trashcans Read more about the model and download the VR experience at autode.sk/2CYz79X Read more →

Autodesk Generative Design Beta for AEC - New Version of Project Refinery Beta

“Project Refinery is an Autodesk generative design beta for the architecture, engineering and construction industry that gives users the power to quickly explore and optimize their Dynamo designs. Project Refinery not only lets you create design options, but it also allows you to set goals and optimize for those goals. When you choose to maximize or minimize designated outputs, Refinery will return the best options. Refinery allows users to leverage the power of the Dynamo package manager and run custom... Read more →

Autodesk AEC 2019 Showreel

Are you ready for some AEC design and construction inspiration? Look no further than this link for a showreel highlighting some of our amazing customers and partners. https://youtu.be/vBJX5e2NEkQ Read more →

Autodesk Launches Construction IQ – AI to Reduce Construction Risk

Increase your project’s intelligence and reduce risks by using some artificial intelligence trained using machine learning models from data from over 30,000 projects. Autodesk just introduced Construction IQ in a public preview where an artificial intelligence service works with Autodesk’s BIM 360 project management platform. ”Formerly known as Project IQ, Construction IQ for quality and safety analysis started in private preview in 2016. Altogether, the algorithm was developed with 150 million construction issues and checklist observations. Subcontractor assignments and historical... Read more →

Interested in AEC Space Analysis for Dynamo and Refinery – Meet Project Discover

Kean Walmsley from our Autodesk Research Team wrote a great blog post on space analysis using Dynamo and Refinery. “For Project Discover we used 2D space analysis to calculate various metrics that scored the individual layouts: Adjacency Buzz Productivity Views to outside Daylight The first two are largely about calculating paths between various locations, while the last three are implemented by ray-casting. These approaches are definitely connected, though: you need to specify boundaries (and barriers) that the various algorithms will... Read more →

Introducing Autodesk FormIt v17

A big update release to FormIt is now available on the web or for Windows. Enjoy a new Dynamo experience, BIM 360 Docs, Meshes, Plugins, Orthographic Views, more Visual Styles, Material placement adjustment, Non-Uniform Scale, and more! https://formit.autodesk.com/blog/post/introducing-formit-v17 Give the web version of FormIt a try, there nothing to install. https://app.formit.autodesk.com/ https://formit.autodesk.com/page/release-notes/#release-notes-web Enhancements Significantly improved app loading time, especially when the app was run previously in the browser and a cache from the previous session exists. A new geometry type:... Read more →

Industrialized Construction Is Growing and Needed

Yesterday I attended the 2019 Industrialized Construction Forum held by Stanford University Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. This was a packed event attended by by not only academia, but industry. The presentations, panel discussions, and conversations with attendees were very good and thought provoking on the impact and changes to construction and our built world in the near term and long term future. Some of the technologies and considerations involved society, AI/ML, robotics, offside prefab, modular construction, skyrocketing costs from labor and materials, and sustainability. My big takeaway is that Industrialized Construction “IC” may be the best solution to solving the limited resources, reducing carbon footprint, addressing the global housing shortage, and overcoming the labor shortage in the construction industry. We at Autodesk couldn’t agree more in doing More, Better, with Less. Read more →

Revit Timeline from 1.0 to 2019.2

Every since I began documenting AutoCAD history and codenames, AutoCAD Command history, and Autodesk history I have been asked to also do the same and publish other products. Today I am adding Revit to that list and reached out to our awesome Revit team for some of the data they had. I have made sense of some of the major branch versions over the years while not all WIP builds are documented at this time. The Revit History Page: https://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/revit-history.html... Read more →

Thank You pdxRUG for Visiting Autodesk Portland

Thank you pdxRUG (Portland Revit Users Group) members and BilT team Bob Bell and Phil Read for visiting Tuesday night to see the new Autodesk Portland office, some good local pizza, networking, and learning about the upcoming BiLT conference in Seattle this summer. It was nice to host the meeting and hope we can do it again, soon. Some Autodesk employees were there to meet you as well some came with questions on how you used our products together. If... Read more →

Thank You Seattle Startup Week

Last Thursday I spoke on a panel How Technology is changing the $10 trillion construction industry at Seattle Startup Week with: Greg Howes - Cofounder, CutMyTimber, AEC Hackathon, Seattle Proptech Amy Hutchins - Founder, Chief Product & Technology Officer, Unearth Technologies Salla Palos - Director of Emerging Technology & Innovation, Sellen Construction Greg Howes opened the panel discussion with a quote on a slide from Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost about AEC and Manufacturing are merging. He then asked the panel... Read more →