BIM and Real Time Sense-Making

The importance of Real Time Data to imporve efficiency.
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I just stumbled upon this post and video from Jeff Jonas from IBM.



I think it is important for the construction industry to keep track of these new methods and ideas being developed by other industries. BIM, as a process, can help implement in the Project Life Cycle what Jeff Calls "Real Time Sense-Making". No more having the MEP engineer working on an old outdated version of the project, no more calculating costs on lasts months design. If we manage to achieve a full collaborative process, we will be able to share the information right away and be much more efficient.

The process might take a while, I recently talked to my cousin who just finished a big project in Germany, (one of the first projects done entirely with Revit in his company) and he told me that they found a out of limitations and performance problems due to the size of the project. At his office, apparently they found that over 5000 square meters, Revit still has problem handling files (even with 16Gbs of Ram and 64bit machines). For better performance, they had to split the files. The whole BIM idea of ONE central model with all the info was then broken by hardware/software constraints.

I guess it is just about time that computers will be able to handle almost any project size, detailing will be easier and more features an functionality will be added to BIM software packages. By then, Architects, Engineers and Contractors must be already familiar with BIM as a process, because those who don't will be left behind.


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Le Corbusier and SketchUp

Le Corbu recommends SketchUp...
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This is just a silly funny piece of work put together by Paul from Viewsion (Sketchup Ireland blog) to promote the use of SketchUp. I thought it was funny enought to share it here. Enjoy




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SketchUp Plugins: 4D Construction Simulation Plugins

Two Plugins to link Sketchup models with schedules and simulate the construction process
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I was looking around for Plugins to use in sketchup to easily simulate the construction process. I am following a schedule management class, and would like to do a bit more than just the schedule part, but try to link it with a visualization of the construction model based on a simple SketchUp model. I came across two three plugins that seem to do the trick.

The first one, and the only free one, is called onTime5D. On the video below you can see a very brief preview of its functionality. The plugin seems to be in process of development, you can follow up on this on the author's website.



The first second one is called xD Virtual Builder, developed by D-Studio. It can be found at their website: www.4dvirtualbuilder.com. I tried it a bit, but didn't have the time to properly test it. As described in the features, it allows you to import schedule files in xml format from MS Project, Primavera and Asta Powerproject. You can check the Getting Started Tips, and take a look at the video below to get an overview of the Program. Unfortunately, it is not free, there is a free trial, but the cheapest version (without XML import) sells at $59.



The second third one is called Synchro Project Cosntructor. It is not just a Plugin for SketchUp but a full Scheduling and Project Controlling Tool. This is the reason why it is much more expensive, over $800. Nevertheless, it allows to import SketchUp Files and to then use its features to create a 4D simulation of the construction process. It imports MS Project and Primavera Files and seems more complete (it has to for the price!). Find more info on the Product Website and on the following video.


Any insights on these Plugins? Do you know of any free Plugin to create 4D simulations in SketchUp based on Schedules? Please share!


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Barcelona in 3D on Google Earth

My hometown is oficially launched in 3D in Google Earth. Go visit it.
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I normally don't repost this things, but being my hometown I couldn't skip it. Barcelona is officially launched as a 3D city in Google Earth. Go see it. It's worth it. Here a brief video. Unfortunately we've been stereotyped again with some "flamenco-like" spanish guitar song. What can i say, this is not us, but in any case, and as we say in Catalan: Benvinguts a Barcelona!! (Welcome to Barcelona).



via Official Sketchup Blog.

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AutoCAD: 90 Tips to Work Faster and Smarter

This is the Lynn Allen lecture at Autodesk university 2009
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Lynn Allen Lectured at Autodesk University 2009. The Lecture contained 90 quick tips to work faster with AutoCAD. The tips range from things you might find very obvious to little pearls that will open your eyes to a new and quicker way to do what you had been doing somehow differently for so long. You can find the video here. It is a long one (around 90 minutes) so you might wanna watch it in little sessions to be sure you get the most of it.


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ArchiCAD: New Found website and Tutorial video

I found a website that aims to specialize on ArchiCAD tutorials.
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Just came across this blog called ArchiCADMonkey by Apollo Spiliotis. It has some good tutorials to learn how to use ArchiCAD.

I´ll just post the latest one here as an example. For more videos, check ArchiCADmonkey.


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Free Tools: Sweet Home 3D

A tool to model house interiors quickly, free and "cloudy"
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Just got this forwarded from a friend. A free tool to model your home interiors for free, with an interactive 3D view to visualize what you are easily modelling in plan. See the following video.


I wouldn't use it for serious stuff, but I think it can be a nice tool to play with to introduce kids to 3D or for those who feel themselve 3D challenged but want to give it a first try. Very simple to use, with many options and you can use it without even installing a single piece of software. It can be run from your browser on the cloud.
Try it here. Thanks Chait for the link.


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Google Building Maker: Model for Google Earth without SketchUp

Model Buildings for google earth using your web browser.
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Google has a new tool to crowdsource the 3D modelling of the earth. It is called Google building Maker, and it allows users to model Buildings from pictures that Google itself provides. See this video to understand the process.


It seems a pretty brilliant idea on the path of making the modeling of buildings available to everyone. Of course Google will get cash out of your free labour, but still, it is worth a try just for fun. Try Building Maker Here.


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SketcHup Plugins: Component Stringer

Place components along a path with this awesome plugin from Chris Fullmer.
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Placing components along a path is now a piece of cake with this Plugin from Chris Fullmer. The components allows several options like rotating the components as they are placed, scaling them etc. It is a very useful tool. I usually had to do this sort of task in AutoCAD using the MEASURE and DIVIDE commands. Now this can be done direclty and very easily in SketchUp. See Chris's video to get a better idea of what this does.



The plugin can be downloaded here. Big thanks to Chris for another great Plugin!

Chek here how to Install SketchUp Plugins.


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SketchUp: Exporting an animation with Good Quality.

SketchUp animations exports are pretty bad in quality, how to improve that?
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I had to export an animation for a recent project at school, and the regular exports from SetchUp were way to bad in quality. So I set myself to try to find a better way to do that. A bit of research on the internet showed me that if you export the animation as individual images and compile them on a movie file, the results should be better. Following some of the advice from Colin Holgate on this thread I exported my different scenes as series of JPEGs (I didn't realise it was better to export as PNG, I read the thread to quickly). The export resolution as 2048 x 1152 for a 16:9 widescreen format. Colin on his post explained he exported at 4096 x 2304 px, but my machine is old and I was time pressed to finish this, so i had to sacrifice quality for time.
Also, the methodology is slightly different, since he was exporting from a Mac and I was doing it from a PC. In any case, the steps I followed were these:

1. Set up the animation scenes using the FlightPath Plugin
2. Configure the Animation so it does not pause on each scene (see this post about it)
3. Export the Animation ( I used export as JPEG and quality 2048x1153px, ideally you want to export a bit higher quality and PNG format)
4. Reduce the Exported Images to a lower resolution (I reduced them to 853 x 480px)
5. Compile the images in a Movie file using Quicktime Pro
6. Combine the different scenes and add credits + music using Adobe Premiere Pro

This is the video after following these steps.


As you can see, the quality is still not impressive. This is due to several reasons:

• I exported as JPG by mistake instead of PNG
• I should have exported the original images in higher quality to reduce the flickering of lines
• It was my first time using Premiere, so I had no idea which settings I was using.

As you see, I am still a newby on this, I just wanted to share the work done. Anyone who has some advice on how to better attempt to get a high quality animation out of SketchUp that is still manageable in size, feel free to comment.


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SketchUp Plugin: Geometric Curve Smoothing

Another free form editing plugin for SketchUp. Who said sketchup could only handle boxy geometry??
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Editing curves and so called free form geometry is something important when we want to design buildings that are something more than a set of boxy shapes. Slowly, the ruby programmers are coming with more and more plugins to do this, turning SketchUp slowly into a great tool, too, for free form modelling.
The latest one I came across with, is the Geometric Curve Smoothing. What it does is better explained on the video below.



The plugin is still under development (currently version 1.1 is out). You can download this version via the author's page.


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AutoCAD: Offset Ellipses and keep them as Ellipses

Tired of getting SPLINES when you offset you ellipses? Maybe you want to try this quick video tutorial.
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One of the biggest issues of working with ellipses is the fact that if we offset them using the OFFSET command, they become Splines. Splines are entities that are hard to work with, especially when we need to trim parts and later we want to extend them again. Tired of toggling the PELLISPE system variable many times, i wanted to see if there was a way to offset an ellipse but keep it as an ellipse. I did found the way to do it. It is a bit slower than using the OFFSET command, but if you think you might need to edit the resulting ellipse maybe you want to give it a try. See the video below.



The steps are simple:

1. Draw two lines from the quadrants of the ellipse. Their length should be the distance you want to offset the ellipse. (To be able to Snap on the qadrants, turn them or access the quadrant osnap with through the OSNAP contextual menu)
2. Select the ellipse, move one of the grips next to one of the lines to the other end point of that line while holding the CTRL key.
3. Move the grip next to the other line you previously draw to the other endpoint of the line

That´s it, your resulting parallel ellipse is still an ellipse and not a SPLINE.


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AutoCAD Architecture: AEC Modify Tools

This awesome Tools make editing 2D objects really quick. It is like having Boolean Tools for 2D.
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AutoCAD Architecture has some great tools that help working way faster than with plain AutoCAD. Some of them are logically specific to Architecture, but others like the AEC Modify Tools I think should be standard to any AutoCAD version. They are actually like having Boolean operators for 2D Objects. See this quick video to understand what they do.


Sorry for some of the Tools Selection beeing cut on the video...I am still working on getting this video recording figured out. The order of the tools used is the one on this image. I skipped the ones on the bottom, after the spacer, since I don't find them very useful.



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AutoCAD Architecture: Editing AEC Polygons

AEC Polygons can be very quickly edited using grips. It's a zillion times faster than editing polylines.
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Somemonths back I wrote a post about Working with AEC Polygons in AutoCAD Architecture.
I thought I would add a video to that post, but since it is old and I rather have all of you subscribers seeing the video I decided to create a new post and link both of them.
So here is the video, it basically shows how you can edit the AEC Polygons by simply clicking on the grips and pressing CTRL to toggle between different editing modes.


Other editing tools, the AEC Modify Tools will be described in a post soon.

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AutoCAD: How to Modify the XCLIP Frame Without Redrawing it

You can easily edit which part of an XREF is clipped without redrawing a new polyline.
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A few months back a wrote a post about the XCLIPFRAME system variable. What I didn't know back then is that the frame shown with this system variable could actually be edited.

For those who don´t know what an XCLIP is: with the XCLIP command, we can clip (hide) part of a Block or XREF. This will allow us to keep the Block or the XREF unexploded while showing only the part of it that we want in our drawing. As I already mentioned before, I hate people who explode blocks as a hobby, but I understand they do so because they don´t know they have these options.

So back to editing the XCLIP Frame, if we set the XCLIPFRAME system variable to 1, we will be able to see the frame that is used to hide part of the Block or XREF. This frame can be modified by selecting it and moving its grips. In many cases, when we have created a very complex XCLIP Frame, this becomes extremely useful so we don't have to redraw the polyline we used to clip de Block or XREF while still allowing us to hide or show a different part of the object. I made a quick video showing the power of the XCLIPFRAME system variable. Check it out below.



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AutoCAD: Select Using an Irregular Shaped Polygon

It is sometimes easier to select objects if we use an irregular polygon instead of the standard rectangular selection. And it is very easy to do.
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When yo have a drawing with a lot of objects sometimes selection multiple objects becomes tedious because using the rectangular selection window might select a lot of objects that we do no want to select.
The solution is to select using an irregular shaped polygon. This option, generally unknown is very easy to access. When AutoCAD prompts us to select objects, we enter CP and click enter. This will trigger the "Cross Polygon" mode, which means that instead of a rectangular selection window, we will use an irregular polygonal one. See this quick video to see this option in action.


It is one of those options that it is unbelievable how many of us didn't know about it. Remember Socrates, "all I know is that I know nothing".

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SketchUp Plugins: 1001bit Tools

A Plugin with a full set of tools for Architecture to build your buildings way faster and easier
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The commercial Plugin 1001bit Tools is an awesome set of Tools to streamline your modelling of buildings. It includes tools to do almost anything you would expect to need when modelling a building. We just purchased it at work and I couldn't wait to share it here. The tools sells for only 29 dollars, which I think is a pretty good deal for the amount of features that you get with it. See this video to check some of the features of this awesome plugin.


You can download a trial version for 30 days or purchase a license for 29 dollars.

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SketchUp Plugins: Unfold your model

Do you need to build a paper model of your Sketchup Model? There are Plugins to Unfold the model.
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If you want to build a physical model of your SketchUp model, you can do it using the Unfold.rb Plugin. This free plugin can be downloaded here and what it does is exactly what its names says. It unfolds the faces of a model to a plane that you decide.
It is a bit tricky to use, and you have to plan ahead if your model is complicated to be sure that the faces are build in a way that can be unfold. But once you get the sense of how it works you will be able to "deconstruct" your model to transform it in a series of faces laying on the same plane. See the following video for a quick reference on how to do this.


There is also a commercial plug-in called Waybe that automates this process to a single click, but it sells at $50, which I find way overpriced.

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