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AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Top News of the Week, Alliances, Agreements, Acquisitions, Announcements, New Products, Around the Web and Upcoming Events.

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Industry News
A Visit to Autodesk AEC Division Headquarters
By Susan Smith

Held at Autodesk's AEC Division Headquarters located on Trapelo Road in Waltham, Massachusetts, Autodesk Technology Day was an invitation-only event for media and bloggers. This was my first time visiting the building, which earned Platinum LEED-CI certification and incorporated many new trends in the building industry including integrated project delivery (IPD), sustainable design, BIM and digital design-to-fabrication.

The 61,000-square foot building has an unassuming box-like exterior which does not hint at the extent of sustainable design that characterizes the interior. Inside, there are spacious training rooms and conference rooms with 90% natural daylight, as well as a “Telepresence” room where global meetings can be held and everyone “present” can be interacted with virtually on a wall-sized screen.. Phil Bernstein, FAIA, vice president, Industry Strategy and Relations for the AEC Solutions Division, said this technology has cut down on their travel expenses as they can now hold virtual meetings. KlingStubbins was the architectural firm and Tocci Building Companies the contractor on the project.

Technology Day was intended to kick off the AEC 2011 Product Portfolio. High level executives spent the day talking about and presenting products as a workflow, which is what customers have been asking for. It is also a handy marketing spin for a company that has slimmed down its product line to focus more tightly on its core competencies in the area of AEC.

Jim Lynch, vice president of the Building Product Line Group for Autodesk's AEC Division spoke initially about buildings and BIM and the “I” in BIM - information. Information created at the design level is utilized throughout the chain and is happening across the whole product portfolio.

Senior vice president of Autodesk's AEC Solutions division, Jay Bhatt, said that feature functionality is big in this release and more focus is on driving future capabilities. Because there is not a lot of new building going on, Autodesk customers are focused on retrofit projects which require more performance analysis, deeper visualizations and collaboration, which lead to a more effective use of BIM.

“There are things we do on multi year cycles that aren't very visible year to year,” said Bhatt. Being able to share large models across workflows, the ability to do more custom work with products, and visual graphics are among those line items. BIM represents a process change.

The environment informs people's behavior, and buildings have a responsibility to sustainable design as building industry products and transportation contribute more to global warming than any other creative processes.

Jim Lynch said the company's focus on renovation and retrofit extends across the globe

In 2002 when they first bought Revit, “BIM was all about design productivity,” said Lynch. “It is now expanded to engineering and continuing to expand to building owners, fabricators, civil, operations and maintenance.” Now BIM customers follow a familiar trajectory - from wanting to know about it, to wanting to learn it, to adoption.

Cloud Computing

Autodesk promotes their Project Butterfly and Project Dragonfly, still in Autodesk Labs, and Green Building Studio (GBS) as their cloud computing offerings. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have been around in various incarnations, but what do they offer?

Lynch said they offer customers a new way to purchase and deploy technology. Autodesk Labs, where much of this technology resides, is about anticipating customers' needs. Project Butterfly shows where Autodesk is going with cloud computing. See Project Butterfly previewed

Reality Capture

Laser scanning and photogrammetry have been around, but have been considered cost prohibitive in the architectural industry until recently. With lowering prices and the demand to retrofit and renovate buildings, AEC professionals need to capture existing conditions. The new release of AutoCAD allows users bring in cloud points directly. The future plan is to be able to capture points, bring them into Revit and do feature recognition and turn those points into objects such as walls, ductwork, etc.

Mobile computing

Although nothing is offered yet, attendees were encouraged to check Labs, as this technology is “on the way.”

Social networking

While currently it remains to be seen how valuable social networking will be in real work settings, Autodesk feels that this is what the next generation is all about. Clearly, the number of teens texting and spending hours on their Facebook accounts suggests that this is a wave of the future. Autodesk Bluestreak is the company's social networking offering and may represent new ways to collaborate with modeling.

Autocad Architecture and MEP

Senior technical marketing manager for MEP Engineering Solutions Armundo Darling, gave an energetic presentation on AutoCAD Architecture and MEP. One of the more exciting features of Architecture is the ability to show features as renovation. In the demo Darling showed how he could move a door and demolish the area where the door had been located. Constraints allow the user to rotate the entire room, geometrical constraints make all features change accordingly.

MEP 2011 introduced parallel conduit routing which was in 2010 for pipes and is now offered for other conduits. It also allows selection of different routing solutions.

Annessa Piper, senior industry marketing manager, made the point that with sustainable design, customers want to implement analysis as early in the process as possible.

BIM for New Design and Construction

Philip (Chico) Membreno, technical marketing manager for Architecture and Sustainable Design and technical marketing manager Paul Walker talked about the Romulus Center, which needed to be a mixed use building. In the early massing stages, the design team did early shadow studies and animations, to get a better idea of the building in context. Membreno used Sunpath tools to manipulate sunpath on screen, whether by entering numbers or dragging the sun. Based on GIS, this tool gives range of motion across the user's sight.

The ability to animate solar onscreen with rich data in the models can be now communicated out to others. The user can click to apply mass floors and can add volume of air per floor, floor area, floor perimeter, and can make decisions based on real information, which will affect the glazing system used.

Although in 2010 Autodesk introduced a whole environment for massing, there were a few elements customers wanted to complete the workflow.

One such new feature is Dissolve form which will bring down the form to parametric to the bones of the form. Sketches can be edited without destroying the form, right in place. A massing model can be taken to the design development stage model in a few clicks.

One click seems to be the magic way to get things done: the building model and parametric model are dynamically linked and it takes one click to get all those walls updated to match the new design.

Now the structural engineer comes in and links into the architect's model, which is a 3D model rich with data upon which to do structural design.

The structural engineer can control the visibility of the model and see load bearing information. He will go to the visibility dialog, into worksets, turn off the furniture in order to view just the core and shell. It is also easier to make curved beams or columns in this process. At this point, the structural engineer may want to take the BIM model out to Robot Structural Analysis.

Architects generally want their sheets to look a certain way, and there a custom guide grids which allow users to snap information right in a model viewport, to achieve a custom view. With the custom elevation tag, users can switch between various graphics and control views referenced on a given tag. Tags can be placed on a host model or on a shell model.

Users can also achieve increased productivity in Revit with the removal of the full core rendering engine. It has customized procedural textures. The tool allows users to place models from any source inside the model, and in the demo a building was plopped into Boston Commons.

In the past, in order to share these files it was necessary for designers to export the entire Navisworks, but now they can just export a wfc Navisworks file. This is packaged in a standalone utility distributed to the whole team at no cost so as designers change their file, they can export the wfc which automatically goes to Navisworks.

Navisworks platform

Navisworks is used to look at information from various other sources. The new Navisworks interface is similar to Revit in that it is more intuitive and seamless. Viewpoints are a great way to record different areas of building and be able to share them with project members. User workflows can also be analyzed and users can walk through models and experience the building before it is built.

Sarah Hodges, industry marketing manager, BIM for Energy Efficiency, quoted Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in saying, “Buildings are no more efficient today than they were 20 years ago.”

There is $5.6 billion spent in energy research, according to Pike Research.

Four specific areas that are causing the energy industry to boom: energy security, seeing building mandates around the need to look at building efficiency, vacancies - much retail space vacated, stimulus funding - stimulus funding is flowing from design into construction.

Autodesk developed the Rapid Energy Modeling workflow which starts with reality capture, and a digital photo or cloud point data that is used to create a 3D wireframe, that can be used for faster in-depth energy analysis. This makes it possible to understand how a building is performing, and the user can look at different design scenarios to see what would work best.

Armundo Darling talked about using Revit MEP to create this workflow for simple BIM models. Architects and engineers could use this information for gbXML to use in energy analysis. He also said that Google Earth is now in GBS, and weather data can also be used in GBS.

Lighting information can also be brought into Revit MEP. A new feature this year is the ability to edit conduit and cable tray and model conduit.

In Navisworks clashes can be grouped together for approval, and individual items with the group can be audited.

Speed

One of the recurring requests from users is for greater speed of Revit and compaction of file sizes. Nothing has been done on file size compaction.

However, Revit zoom, pan, orbit, refresh, navigation, once data is cached, is 30-70% faster. The model opening is said to be 2-3 times faster depending upon what types of systems are being used. Obviously 64 bit is faster. Curtain wall performance is 2x faster.

Plant

Autodesk's entry into the Plant & Process market five years ago, was a big undertaking but answered a need for  easier to use Plant tools that are compatible with AutoCAD.

Director, Industry Relations for Plant Robert Shear said a lot of offshore platforms are located in politically charged locations, and there are major challenges trying to complete capital projects there. The choice is a prefabricated workflow that doesn't have to be built onsite. Plants require constant rework, “it's a large facility but also a large machine, and this has been a model based workflow for twenty five years,” said Shear.

The reason for this is that it was imperative that parts fit. P&IDs are the most important document for the plant, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. 3D support is available for deliverables in mostly in AutoCAD orthographic and isometric.

2010 Worldwide active plant project count:
2,909 Greenfield, 5,135 Brownfield
8,000 projects $2.8 trillion investment

Facts:

• $40% of 2009 ENR 500 revenue is plant relevant
• 23% was directly related to buildings almost as much as in building space.
• 1 million AutoCAD plant designers
• AutoCAD in use by roughly 90% of EPCs worldwide
• Most are using plain AutoCAD and Excel.
• 75,000 users of AVEVA, Intergraph, Bentley
• 57% of respondents view 3D as critical to company competitiveness (Daratech 2D/3D Plant Study 2008)
• 73% of respondents view 3D as critical to their career.
• 200 days to learn PDS
• AutoPlant 140 days to learn
• Keeps people back in 2D workflows
• AutoCAD products addressing the Plant industry include:
• AutoCAD, P&ID 2011, Plant 3D 2011, Navisworks Manage 2011
• 2/3 of projects are modifications to existing plants.

A case in point is StatoilHydro in Norway, with 30-40 offshore plants, constantly being modified. Navisworks has brought in a simple viewing tool that allows the company to view information they have had for years. The company has over 1,000 Navisworks users accessing information in AVEVA for which there are eight users.

Geospatial Underground

At AU it appeared that geospatial had an uncertain future at Autodesk. Senior director, Infrastructure Modeling Product Line Paul McRoberts stated at AEC Technology Day that geospatial is the underlying component for all of Autodesk products. The FDO platform is extensible open source software that can be noted in transportation, water and waste water, land development power and energy.

McRoberts said that 24% of the gross revenue collected by AEC firms is for planning, according to an American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) study. It might appear that the role of geospatial at Autodesk is visual in nature: modeling and visualization for water, transportation, energy and water and wastewater, where getting public approval is primary to getting projects off the ground. What is needed here is a way to show a workflow including location and geospatial data. The technologies spoken most about - 3ds Max for visualization and Dynamite VSP are for showing how problems can be solved, and being interoperable, and being able to migrate information to others.

The laser scanning environment and lidar data play a part in this. McRoberts said that surveying may become a thing of the past. With the need in many places for ground truth data, particularly in areas that aren't readily accessible with laser scanning equipment or lidar, it may be a long time before this is realized.

“Digital cities,” a hot buzz term of a year or two ago, will now go by the name “sustainable cities” as one part of a greater vision including extension of assets such as transmission lines into rural communities. It is part of the scope of LandXplorer, in its quest to address large scale projects and visualization. McRoberts said LandXplorer holds a GIS layer underneath that contains real data.

Roads and Highways

Karen Weiss, P.E. technical marketing manager, AEC, formerly with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, said that in her time there, “We gathered information and stored it and when we needed it we couldn't find it or it was in a format we couldn't use.”

With BIM centered around Civil 3D, DOTs like this one can focus on an entire project lifecycle.

In a project example, Weiss looked at a section of state highway that needed to be evaluated. First they assimilate data using Map3D, using different types of data. The data shows traffic accidents in a particular place, which offers a good case for making roadway changes in that location. FDO providers in the 2011 release make it possible to access more types of information.

Laser scanning was also used to bring into Civil 3D in a LAS file. In the detailed design phase, transportation industry respondents said 3D modeling will have the greatest impact on the future, as it offers model based design with intelligent information.

What is needed for roadway design:

• Rule based, intelligent objects that work together.
• Super elevation allows the driver to travel at speeds, and standards are set by states according to weather. The software walks the user through calculation.
• Different options for how it is computed.

New features include -

• Location of full super elevation
• New graphical editing -
• Corridor editing -
• Modify frequencies, also can match parameters
• Ability to work with DGN files, ability to work more seamlessly with information in DGN files.

Civil Visualization Extension for visualization is used to sell projects. “Intersections and interchanges and drainage are all difficult to design without visualization,” said Weiss.

Dynamite VSP exporter is used for Civil 3D. Also Navisworks 2011 provides project review, real time environment for how the project will look. 3ds Max can be added to the Civil 3D model.

Summary

With 20% unemployment among architects this year, it is not surprising to see some of the changes in Autodesk's line of products. Although Autodesk had good Q1 results, they have suffered a drop in subscriptions and are making an effort to boost those numbers, particularly with offering free products with subscription.

The company's vision of some years ago seems to be coming to fruition, at least in the minds of decision makers - a focus on workflow rather than on individual products. Products such as Navisworks, 3ds Max, FDO, Revit, Map 3D and Civil 3D are looping their way into various industry sectors that they may not have previously touched. It's still unclear how much growth one can attribute to individual products other than basic AutoCAD, as the company doesn't have figures on just how many seats of other products there might be in their customer companies. Yet new case studies confirm the use of multiple products in productive workflows, showing promise …and significant savings.

Top News of the Week

Autodesk, Inc. announced that several Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) members have released companion solutions for Revit Architecture 2011 and AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011. ADN developers reconfigure Autodesk software for niche industries, providing customized products that streamline design efficiency, innovation and sustainability.

ShareNow is a group of add-ins for Autodesk products. These add-ins publish a design from AutoCAD, Inventor, Inventor LT, Revit, or Design Review to the Project Freewheel server. With one click of the ShareNow icon, your design application publishes a DWF file of your current design, uploads it to Project Freewheel, and invokes your browser with a view of your design. You can then leverage all of the benefits that Project Freewheel has to offer - without installing additional software. Collaborate with your team members on Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh OSX, or Linux.

In a project that exemplifies the genius of great design and the power of great design software, the $68 million Theory and Computing Sciences Building at Argonne National Laboratory was designed by just two architects using ArchiCAD Building Information Modeling (BIM) software.

Alliances, Agreements, Acquisitions

Meridian Systems, the Plan-Build-Operate technology solutions leader for project-based organizations, announced a new Independent Software Vendor (ISV) relationship with BuildSite, a single source of product, technical, procurement, and green building product information for the construction industry. BuildSite also provides software that allows the creation of fully electronic project submittals to be tied directly to construction specifications.

GRAITEC, a major worldwide developer for analysis and detailing software Tehnicke Konstrukcije announced a new strategic distribution agreement with Tehnicke Konstrukcije d.o.o., a Croatian civil engineering design company headquartered in Zagreb. The partnership agreement signed between the two companies entitles Tehnicke Konstrukcije d.o.o. to promote, distribute and support the Advance Suite product line in Croatia.

BASF SE has renewed its Global Alliance Agreement (GAA) with Intergraph for SmartPlant Enterprise engineering software over the next three years.

Announcements

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced that it has added six new documents, including three sub-contractor forms, to AIA Documents-on-Demand™, bringing the total documents available through this service to 22. AIA Documents-on-Demand is a Web-based service for both PC and MAC users that grants easy online access to download, electronically fill out and print 22 of the most popular AIA Contract Documents anytime, anywhere with access to the Internet and a printer.

A majority of firms are considering a possible merger or acquisition in the next five years, according to ZweigWhite's 2010 Merger & Acquisition Survey of Architecture, Engineering, Planning & Environmental Consulting Firms. While the percentage of firms reporting that they are currently considering an acquisition, sale, or merger declined from 2009, the report also finds that three-quarters of firms responding to the survey say that that their strategic plans involve a merger and/or acquisition within the next five years.

Awards

Deltek, Inc. announced that it has received the 2009 MarketTools CustomerSat Achievement in Customer Excellence (ACE) Award. The accolade demonstrates Deltek's long-standing commitment to delivering unmatched customer service to its diverse, global customer base. Deltek had previously been a recipient of the MarketTools CustomerSat ACE Award in 2007 and 2008. People Autodesk, Inc. announced that Mary T. McDowell, Nokia's executive vice president and chief development officer leading Corporate Development, has been appointed to Autodesk's board of directors.

Intergraph has named Jeff Robertson as vice president and general manager of its U.S. public safety business unit.

Robertson will be responsible for Intergraph's public safety solution sales and services delivery in the United States. Intergraph's public safety solutions are trusted by police, fire and EMS agencies worldwide for coordinated response to emergency and non-emergency incidents.

New Products

To help organizations chart the most efficient course to maximize the enterprise value of investments such as capital projects, software and systems development, new acquisitions and products, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 8.

The new release enables organizations to intelligently govern the selection of the optimal project or other investment portfolios, and successfully execute on all the selected projects and investments.

Enabling organizations to drive business process innovation, Oracle announced Oracle's AutoVue 20.0.

AutoVue Enterprise Visualization is the industry leading solution for viewing, reviewing and collaborating on asset and engineering documents and information across the global enterprise.

The latest major release introduces a new architecture that scales with an organization's evolving enterprise requirements and more efficiently serves the document visualization and collaboration needs of enterprise and desktop users.

A new joint venture between energy software specialists Integrated Environmental Solutions and global construction consultants Davis Langdon goes live to coincide with the new CRC regulations coming into force. The two firms have collaborated in the development of a new online platform - Carbon Assessor - designed to empower owners and managers of large building portfolios with a simple way of gathering and analyzing energy data, and complying with the new CRC (Carbon Reduction Commitment) regulations. Supporting consulting services on associated aspects of corporate carbon management and strategy are also available to organizations.

Autodesk, Inc. announced the availability of the Autodesk SketchBook Pro App for iPad, a new professional-grade paint and drawing application designed exclusively for the iPad. The app is available on the App Store at www.itunes.com/appstore.

The Autodesk SketchBook Pro App for iPad combines high-quality digital pencils, pens, markers and airbrushes with a Multi-Touch gesture-based user interface, enabling users to create everything from quick sketches to high-quality artwork. Geared for both occasional doodlers and professional illustrators, SketchBook Pro transforms the iPad into the ultimate digital sketchbook. Using the same paint engine as its desktop and mobile counterparts, the new SketchBook Pro App for iPad delivers a complete set of sketching and painting tools through a streamlined and intuitive user interface.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced the immediate availability of Power InRoads and Power GEOPAK. These extensions of InRoads Suite and GEOPAK Civil Engineering Suite - the long-proven design standards for departments of transportation (DOTs) across the United States and Canada - include Bentley Map functionality and integration with ProjectWise Navigator V8i and other ProjectWise collaboration services. Bentley Map functionality powers precise geospatial data creation, maintenance, and analysis, while integration with ProjectWise connects people with information and facilitates collaborative workflows. Power InRoads and Power GEOPAK also feature all the drafting and document production capabilities of MicroStation, without the need for a MicroStation license.

A+CAD's native file format is dwg. A+CAD opens, edits, and saves any existing DWG file without conversion or data loss. A+CAD provides API's, such as LISP and supports all of the file formats listed below.

• Save formats (dwg, dxf, dwf, dwt, sat)
• Macro ( lisp, scr),
• Font (shx, True Type),
• Command aliases (pgp),
• Menu (mnu),
• Plot settings (ctb, stb)

Informative Graphics Corporation (IGC) introduced a new, more advanced integration of its Brava! Enterprise product and the IBM FileNet P8 content and business process management platform.

Building upon the initial integration, which debuted in April 2009, this latest release adds significant new features for P8 users, like the ability to pull metadata from the P8 repository into custom stamps and to push information to the repository. It also offers all the advantages of the latest release of Brava, including additional language support and enhanced redaction tools.

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