Snaptrude has built an Excel-like interface directly into its BIM authoring software, to make architectural programming simpler and allow architects to quickly generate data-backed design concepts with views, renders, and drawings.

With the new ‘Program’ mode every row, formula, and update is synced live with the 3D model, and vice versa. According to Snaptrude, this means architects don’t need to juggle separate spreadsheets, ensuring real-time accuracy and eliminating the need for manual cross-checking. Users can define custom formulas and rules to fit their specific building program needs.

‘Program’ mode works alongside Tables, which is billed as a new home for all kinds of structured information inside Snaptrude.

Tables includes an AI wizard, so users can ‘quickly generate’ or refine their program with an AI co-pilot.

“Over the last 18 months, we’ve started spending a lot of time with mid to large sized architectural firms across the US and globally as well. And one thing which we constantly kept hearing is Excel is everywhere, and it’s a huge part of everyone’s workflows, and it’s quite understandable,” said Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, Snaptrude.

“From programming to construction, everybody knows how to use it, it’s very easy to use, and everybody relies on it. So instead of fighting it, we said, let’s just embrace it, we built an Excel like interface directly into Snaptrude.”

Snaptrude Program mode is currently in early access.

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Trimble SketchUp 2025 features better interoperability with Revit and IFC, and new visualisation capabilities, including photorealistic materials and environment lighting options.

To improve interoperability the 3D modelling software now includes more predictable IFC roundtrips, greater control over which Revit elements and 3D views are imported, and improved support for photorealistic materials when exporting USD and glTF file formats.

“The IFC import feature is incredible,” said Lucas Grolla, architect and owner of Grolla Arquitetura. “It has greatly improved the coordination of different project models with the architectural design. Plus, the new material editor and HDRI styles open up countless possibilities for the visual representation of projects.”

According to Trimble, the new visualisation features enable designers to apply photorealistic materials, turn on environment lighting and see how they interact in real time without hitting a ‘render’ button or waiting to see changes.

For enhanced environments, 360-degree HDRI or EXR image files now act as a light source, reflecting off photoreal materials. Meanwhile, dynamic materials are said to more accurately convey texture and represent how real-world materials absorb and reflect light, with a view to producing richer, more realistic visuals within SketchUp. Finally, the introduction of ambient occlusion adds visual emphasis to corners and edges, adding perceived depth and realism with or without having materials applied.

“Accessing high-quality, realistic materials directly within the platform has made it so much easier to quickly present designs that resonate with clients,” said Kate Hatherell, director of The Interior Designers Hub. “This feature is a game changer for accelerating workflows, and I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve.”

Elsewhere, LayOut, a tool for creating documents from SketchUp models, has been updated to provide a user experience more consistent with SketchUp. 3D Warehouse, a vast repository of 3D models, also now offers curated photoreal materials, environments and configurable 3D assets in the SketchUp content library.

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Zenerate has launched Zenerate App, an AI-powered design automation software designed to quickly generate and identify optimal design schemes, and eliminate the need to redraw floor plans to fit a unit mix.

With a few inputs, architects, developers and brokers can use the software’s AI engine to generate various building and site plan options in real-time that meet specific project objectives.

Users can optimise designs by maximizing floor area ratio or density, or specify a unit mix, as well as quickly test diverse massing, building layout and parking options (podium, structure, surface).

Designs can then be edited, by dragging and dropping residential units, stairs, elevators, retail/office space, drive aisles, parking stalls, etc.

The software can also be used to assess financials (net operating income (NOI), construction cost, project cost, yield on cost or residual value).

Finally, it can generate PDF reports, export data in Excel, or download floor plans in CAD or Revit to further develop the design.

Zenerate App is available for a free two-week trial.

Find this article plus many more in the Sept / Oct 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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SketchUp for iPad can now take advantage of the iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner to capture scans of buildings and transform the data it into ‘clean, organised 3D geometry’ as a starting point for conceptual design.

The new Scan-to-Design [Labs] feature uses a combination of Canvas scan technology, Apple RoomPlan technology and Trimble technology to capture interior and exterior spaces. Designers simply scan a room as if they were painting the walls, and choose whether to output textured 3D meshes that are created with Canvas scanning technology or create ‘simplified, untextured planes’ using Apple’s RoomPlan technology –or both.

Once the data has been captured designers can use SketchUp for iPad’s modelling tools to quickly visualize and iterate design options in 3D. For feedback, clients and other collaborators can use Apple Pencil to mark up the model. They can also immerse themselves in the design using augmented reality (AR).

For collaboration, designers can also use Trimble Connect to share designs in the cloud, allowing them to manage projects and teams and invite new collaborators to view 3D models using easy-to-share links.

“Designers want to capture complete as-built conditions quickly and easily without having to switch between multiple tools, and they need to share their conceptual designs with clients in a way that builds both excitement and trust,” said Mike Tadros, director of product management at Trimble.

“Scan-to-Design solves those needs by empowering designers to quickly capture a holistic view of a job site and provides a starting point for creating beautiful conceptual designs that can easily be shared with a client for immediate feedback.”

“Today’s designers are increasingly taxed with having to capture an enormous amount of detail, come up with beautiful designs that will ‘wow’ their clients, and communicate that in a way that easily facilitates feedback,” said Sumele Adelana, senior product marketing manager for Trimble SketchUp.

“Scan-to-Design drastically streamlines that workflow while also making it more visually appealing by enabling designers to easily capture, design, and collaborate – all in one app.”

Scan-to-Design is currently available as part of the SketchUp Labs Program, a public beta that allows SketchUp subscribers to try new features and provide feedback.

SketchUp for iPad review

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It’s available to view now, free, along with all our back issues.

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The dawn of auto-drawings
Several CAD software firms are making real progress in drawing automation in the race to eliminate one of the AEC sector’s biggest bottlenecks.

Enscape: building performance analysis
Enscape is to get a new module, powered by IES technology, that gives instant visual feedback on building performance.

TestFit runs free
The Texas-based design automation software developer releases a free massing tool for architects.

NXT BLD / DEV 2024
AI, automation, digital fabrication, BIM 2.0, data specifications, open source, automation, and lots, lots more at AEC Magazine’s London conferences

Industry news
AEC technologies emerge for Apple Vision Pro, Unreal Engine and Twinmotion get new licensing, Alice uses AI to optimise Primavera P6 schedules, plus lots more

Autodesk to take over VAR payments
New changes to the Autodesk business model could be set to diminish the role of the CAD reseller.

Workstation news
Intel Core Ultra laptop processors, Nvidia Ada Generation RTX GPUs for CAD, plus new workstations from HP and Dell

Prime time for iGPU
Laptop processors with integrated GPUs are now powerful enough for 3D CAD. Dos this mean a cheaper, slimmer future?

Enscape and V-Ray: a collaborative future
Chaos has big plans to enhance workflows between Enscape and V-Ray, boost real time collaboration, and more.

Smart reality capture
A new integrated reality capture solution from Looq uses computer vision, AI and a proprietary handheld camera with GPS, to capture infrastructure at scale.

Treble: sound advice
New software helps analyse and optimise designs for acoustic performance.

Informed Design
Autodesk connects BIM (Revit) with fabrication (Inventor) via the cloud to support modern methods of construction.

Scaling-up on-site digital construction
Facit Homes brings new hope to the need to build houses and digitise fabrication.

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TestFit’s first magic trick was lay ing out apartment units and complex parking lots in a matter of seconds. Its primary developer, architect Clifton Harness, was fed up with late nights and overtime spent manually working on such tasks. With the help of college friend Ryan Griege, he founded a company – TestFit – with the aiming of putting automation tools into the hands of architects that were just as sick as he was of some of the humdrum work associated with residential projects.

As it turned out, architects were slow to adopt the tools, mostly due to reasons of cost. But property developers took to TestFit like ducks to a water feature. It is this customer base that has guided development of the tools. (For readers unfamiliar with the scale and speed of TestFit, it’s worth following Harness on LinkedIn, where he regularly posts videos of his application achieving seemingly miraculous things.)

At its heart, TestFit is a massive parametric solving engine. It’s designed to solve for hundreds of preferred site, design, and cost conditions, resulting in a single optimised design option. Because what it does seems like a magic trick, TestFit is commonly assumed to be based on AI. In fact, it’s mostly not AI at all. But even without that ‘secret sauce’, customers generally achieve two to three times as many design iterations per project, the company boasts. And site planning times are around four to ten times faster.

To a European mindset, the kind of multi-family housing on a massive scale that typifies the projects underway at TestFit’s US-based customers may seem alien, but the company still aspires to conquer new markets, and it plans to do so with a broader portfolio of tools. #Up until recently, TestFit’s core Site Solver tool was the only product it sold. It’s a desktop-based application that really makes use of the power of local hardware. Everything is geared around speed. It may not work in actual real time, but it works in as close to real time as is computationally possible.

Many of its competitors are web-based and rely on the ‘fire and forget’ principle, where results are returned after some waiting time. TestFit, by contrast, is about getting one solution, as quickly as possible, that accurately reflects all the input conditions. Historically, that has meant that TestFit’s graphics rendering may have been a little simple or flat, but recently, quality and detail have increased considerably, and without impacting performance.

Spacemaker, which operated in the same feasibility space, was acquired by Autodesk in 2020 and re-emerged as the cloud-based Forma in 2023. While TestFit initially got the cold shoulder from Autodesk, it was eventually invited into the tent and began offering a TestFit plug-in at Forma’s launch. This win for TestFit also introduced its team to the limits of cloud-based applications.

Urban planner

Since the introduction of Forma, the market for conceptual and feasibility tools has become a hotbed of development. A lot of that work is free, or at least bundled up in wider software suites, so that’s practically free to subscribers.

To stake its claim to this space and give the market a taste of what its software can achieve, TestFit has decided to create a ‘free’ version called Urban Planner. This is a desktop-based application that can be downloaded from TestFit’s website.

Urban Planner first brings in site maps or satellite views to start work. Users then create site boundaries and quickly model mixed-use developments with 2D/3D regions in real time. TestFit has included its impressive road creation and editing tool, which is dynamic and generates intersections automatically. Zoning regulations can be defined and applied, and angle setbacks applied to forms. TestFit will then tell you if your massing model meets the code criteria specified.

On the evaluation front, Urban Planner includes quantity take-off, deal editing and deal tabulation, which can be saved. There are direct integrations with Revit and Enscape, and files can be exported to DXF (for CAD software), SKP (for SketchUp), glTF (for saving 3D model views), CSV (for spreadsheets) and PDF. It supports saving to cloud-based storage. What’s missing? The famous parking layout tool is there, but only works in low-detail mode for custom parking stalls, vertical circulation and building core. In terms of building typologies, it will display multi-family, high/low density, core-based buildings, gardens and industrial, but again, at low detail. It doesn’t support unit mixes or custom unit types. For all those features, the full Site Solver is required.

So why would the company develop and give away Urban Planner for free? In response to that question, TestFit CEO Clifton Harness shoots from the hip. Revit’s primary reason for existence, he reckons, is to address documentation. But as far as conceptual design, he doesn’t believe it has been “particularly impactful”.

“Revit never asks, ‘What’s the minimum amount of information that you need to make an apartment building?’,” he points out. “Revit can model everything and do everything, but you don’t really need that when you have ‘commodity architecture’. We are a feasibility company, so we ended up creating a very parametric environment. We wanted to allow a broader range of customers to benefit from TestFit, to input geometry, roads, site splits, et cetera. If you’re an architect, you want that information to be there, but you don’t want to model it. At this point, we had most of what’s in SketchUp as a massing tool already built, plus all these other really powerful parametric real-time tools.”

TestFit is commonly assumed to be based on AI. In fact, it’s mostly not AI at all. But even without that ‘secret sauce’, customers generally achieve two to three times as many design iterations per project, the company boasts

Harness says that Snaptrude, Skema and Arcol – along with a long list of other new companies – are currently developing features that he and his business partner built in their mid-twenties, “because we had to build them anyways, to get to where we wanted”. But since these companies are now headed towards TestFit’s space, “we wanted to put out a TestFit product for free that we’re not ashamed of – a free tool, but with better features than all the others,” he explains.

“This is just the first release. We have a whole year of updates planned for it to make it even better.”

Due to its history of focusing on the US market, the TestFit team has been busy adding some more euro-centric basics, like support for the Euro, metric measurements, and so on. As TestFit wins more customers in Europe, its product should be able to accommodate more European use cases and reflect the variables required in European massing and site planning.

Conclusion

I get the distinct impression that Harness has been taken by surprise when it comes to the extent to which a whole group of BIM start-ups are seemingly focused on the industry’s early massing needs.

The reality is that creating a BIM tool is a marathon. In the early stages of development, massing tools can be useful to show off their relevance and potential to would-be customers.

For TestFit, then, Urban Planner is a flag in the sand, designed to chase off these start-ups – but I really don’t see any of them even contemplating providing the kind of detailed feasibility analysis for which TestFit is known. Few would-be competitors are on the desktop, either. The chances of their cloud applications being able to demonstrate comparable dynamic, real-time performance is for the birds.

Meanwhile, the team at TestFit is now working on generative design. It’s purposely not referring to this as ‘AI’. Instead, it’s a goals-based solver. The user sets the goals and, in real time, TestFit will hit “any target you want”, according to Harness.

In other words, it will provide a solution and populate thousands of other solutions, based on key performance indicators (KPIs) specified by the user. Once they have that single solve, the user can manipulate site constraints and TestFit will resolve continuously based on the changes. It will be fascinating to see how fast TestFit’s real-time AI will be.

Clifton Harness will be talking about the benefits of automation at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences on 25 and 26 June 2024 at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre.

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Codesign, the architectural-focused concept design tool for the iPad, now has BIM integrations for Archicad, Forma, Revit, and Vectorworks.

With these Codesign Connections, architects can take their initial concept designs into the BIM system of their choice and continue developing and evolving their design.

Codesign is a creative tool specifically for the conceptual design part of the architectural process. It allows users to sketch freely, envision concepts, and explore possibilities while incorporating downstream data such as areas, massing, sun studies, carbon, context, and material implications.

“We partnered with the software teams at Graphisoft, Autodesk, and Vectorworks to ensure seamless integration of the different BIM systems,” said said Campbell Yule, founder and CEO of Codesign.

“After a tremendous amount of beta testing, Archicad, Forma, Revit, and Vectorworks are all compatible.”

Version one of the Codesign Connections are complete, and regular release updates will follow. All subscribers to the app can enjoy the BIM integration feature free for one year.

“We will continue to evolve our performance features based on user feedback and industry trends. When an architect gets into the core of concepting, we want to be the go-to tool that pushes their imagination, fosters their creativity, and produces distinctive one-of-a-kind buildings.” Yule concluded.

Find this article plus many more in the January / February 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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Kolega, a new site feasibility software that uses genetic algorithms and machine learning models to generate spatial urban layouts and floor plans, is gearing up for its beta release. The software is available both as a standalone tool and a Revit add-on.

In terms of workflow, the user provides geometrical data, target site parameters and architectural preferences, then the software performs the ‘time-consuming and detailed analysis’ for architects and site developers.

Solutions are generated in real-time, calculating sun access, obscuring results, and creating geometrical output. Solutions can be calculated up to five seconds each, allowing the user to finish the process at any moment.

All the results are analysed and presented. The user can then select the preferred design and export geometry, data (DXF, Revit, and .BIM) and reports (PDF and HTML) to continue work on the project and take informed and data-driven decisions.

With Kolega, all data is stored locally. Designbotic, the developer of the software, explains that it does not have any access to any project information.

The software is currently in the alpha testing phase. Users are invited to join the waiting list for beta testing, starting at the end of January 2024.

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Rhino 8, the latest release of the flexible Mac / Windows CAD tool from McNeel, is now available. The new version introduces new modelling tools, a speed boost for Mac, PushPull workflows, SubD Creases and better drafting tools. There’s also a more customizable UI, a faster render engine, new Grasshopper data types, and more.

Rhino 8 includes several new modelling tools that can help architects create simple rectilinear models for conceptual design. This includes PushPull, which appears to work a bit like SketchUp by allowing users to grab a face and push or pull it, extruding or extending, Auto CPlanes, which is designed to make it easier to draw on the face of an object, and Gumball, a new direct modelling tool.

Gumball allows users to quickly move, rotate, scale, copy, cut, and extrude geometry without typing commands or clicking a toolbar button. McNeel says Gumball can be used for concept modelling interior and exterior architectural forms.

Rhino 8 has also introduced a number of clipping and sectioning enhancements to help support various drafting and fabrication workflows.

ShrinkWrap creates a watertight mesh around open or closed meshes, NURBS geometry, SubD, and point clouds. According to the developers, it is ideal for creating meshes for 3D printing, but has many other use cases.

For more complex forms, SubD Creases allows the user to create a feature between a smooth and a sharp edge, without adding complexity to the SubD control net.

The Cycles Render engine has also been updated for faster, GPU-accelerated raytracing on Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs using AMD HIP.

Rhino 8 for Mac, which runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, features a new dis-play pipeline powered by Metal that is said to delivers a 3D performance boost that’s as much as 24 times faster than Rhino 7. The user-interface on Mac is also now closer to its Windows sibling.

Finally, Grasshopper, the visual programming language and environment has been enhanced with new Rhino Data Types. According to McNeel, this allows users to bake geometry with custom attributes, import more file formats, control blocks, use native materials in the display pipe-line, create hatches and annotations, and many other expanded workflows.

There are many other new features. See New in Rhino 8 for a complete list.

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In the AEC industry, much of the frustration associated with BIM relates to a lack of innovation. The process of moving models to documentation remains fundamentally unchanged from ten years ago. Year after year, existing features simply get enhanced. But with AI and a wealth of new start-ups on the horizon, this is set to change. In fact, there are already a number of BIM 2.0 revolutionaries looking to hotwire the process of design to documentation.

Skema is one of them, just out in beta. This is a quietly revolutionary tool for conceptual design that stands alone, but also seamlessly integrates with Revit. To the uninitiated, it may look like just another cloud-based conceptual massing tool. But underneath lurk some outstanding knowledge reuse ‘smarts’, which will allow conceptual designs to leap into Revit (or any other BIM tool) as fully detailed models.

Skema empowers architects, enabling them to recapture the best elements from past design successes, while simultaneously giving them the freedom to adapt those design components to fit fresh concepts.

In short, Skema is a ‘knowledge reuse engine’. Its first public demonstration was given by founder Marty Rozmanith at AEC Magazine’s NXT DEV event in June 2023 and can be viewed on-demand.

What Skema offers is nothing short of a major productivity benefit. For certain types of buildings, it could squeeze project timelines from months to weeks.

It also allows architects to remain longer in the conceptual phase, carrying out more analysis, trying out more concepts, confident in the knowledge that the detail modelling phase will be automated by at least 50%. Skema also allows more flexibility should a design need to change. As it progresses, typically more work and data is added to a BIM model. This escalating effort over time typically means rework or moving back a few stages and comes with higher costs — but Skema aims to flatten the cost/time impacts of making changes.

Regular AEC Magazine readers may be aware of another start-up covered here, called SWAPP. This takes very simple space layouts and promises the complete automation of detail modelling and full production of all BIM drawings using AI. Skema, by contrast, was born from the idea that architects still need a space to ideate and experiment before kicking off the BIM modelling and documentation process. So, while SWAPP is about crushing the time between concept and documents (which works well for highly standardised designs for the likes of hospitals or student accommodation, for example), Skema is more about saving time during the detail modelling phase. However, like SWAPP, Skema is somewhat limited to particular building types – ones that are pretty rectilinear and repetitively created. And it doesn’t claim to handle all the detail modelling.

In conversation with Rozmanith in March 2023, he told AEC Magazine that the software didn’t rely on AI so much, but instead takes a procedural approach to model generation, on the basis that AI output can be a tad unpredictable. Since then, I note with interest that Skema’s new website does now mention AI. I presume that this is a result of the general blurring of what computer scientists define as being AI, and what the AEC industry is adopting as AI, which can also include solvers and procedural automation (for example, TestFit). As a start-up, if you don’t say you have it, then everyone assumes there’s no automation at all.

Normally, an engagement with the Skema team involves the sharing of two typical past projects for any firm, so not huge amounts of data. The knowledge that has been encoded in those models is used by the Skema team to derive bespoke rules-based automation of detailed modelling for that firm, and for that building type. While firms remain concerned about sharing project information, the service appears to be bespoke and is not driving the creation of a generic architectural tool.

Rethinking BIM

Skema, at first glance, looks to be focused on expanding conceptual design – but here, it will come up against a huge number of new applications, especially from Autodesk Forma. But the real judo move for Skema is to reuse knowledge from past projects in order to populate the detail design phase. This means that architects can spend more time on what they entered the profession for in the first place – design work. And that’s far better for them than acting as a firm’s CAD jockey, a curse that has blighted the profession since the 1980s.

Skema empowers architects, enabling them to recapture the best elements from past design successes, while simultaneously giving them the freedom to adapt those design components to fit fresh concepts

Looking ahead, traditional BIM tools and traditional BIM workflows face a conundrum. There are new software companies emerging intent on disrupting each and every phase of the BIM playbook. Those architectural firms that work on repetitive schemes and simple geometry will have access to a wide choice of cloud tools that automate downstream processes, such as detail modelling and documentation, as well as collaboration capabilities for which current desktop apps just weren’t built.

In a world increasingly populated by AI-driven tools, BIM applications that support a completely manual process will look increasingly antiquated. They will be productivity black holes. This is especially true in the design of functional buildings. Signature architects, who pride themselves on following less predictable pathways and pushing back boundaries will probably have to create and train their own subset of tools to achieve automation.

Find this article plus many more in the November / December 2023 Edition of AEC Magazine

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It’s not only the BIM process that faces dismantling, but also the applications. As more applications move to the cloud, the choices for tech stacks expand. At the moment the market is dominated by Autodesk Collections, with users mainly deploying AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks and 3ds Max.

Revit is a single environment for concept to documents — but even here, Autodesk is disrupting Revit on the conceptual side with cloud-based Forma.

In future, practices will be able to pick and mix applications from many providers, knowing their data will flow from application to application through APIs. For example, a firm could use Skema for concept, then divert into Snaptrude for detail modelling, which could in turn link to an AI-driven service for automating documentation. At the same time, all of the data involved here could be managed in Autodesk BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud.

The future is workflow automation and ecosystem change. I hope emerging business models enable customers to make these kinds of choices.

The beta features

The beta version of Skema runs in a Chrome browser (and not in Safari on my Mac). You start off on a projects page, which lists your Skema projects along with images and location information. Here, you can create a new project or relaunch an earlier one.

Skema’s interface is very clean. To the left side, there are menu tabs: Layers, Graphics, Key Figures, and Options. Along the top bar, various modelling tools appear, depending on what you are doing. On the right-hand side, you’ll find the all-important Save button, along with buttons for 2D/3D, camera control, terrain settings and various almost-instant analysis tasks (Sunlight, Vertical Sky Component, Daylight). When you hit the analysis buttons, the building geometry seems to pulse, indicating some processing is underway.

Conceptual designs start off with you defining the map location and contextual boundaries of a site. You hit Create and the surrounding site is converted to block 3D. You can then start modelling, either with masses (polyline hand-drawn boundary shapes), or rapid polyline smart creation of buildings. The number of storeys and floor-to-ceiling measurements can be altered. Intuitive tools enable you to grab and edit nodes. Measurements are auto displayed. Roads are drawn in. A variety of options can be generated to quickly flip through and assess.

Key Figures is one of the more important tabs. Floors are manually assigned a use — for example, office, hotel, restaurant and so on — but can also be divided for multiple uses. But what Key Figures does is provide the metrics relating to land and building usage, with areas defining accommodation schedules, developable land ratios, and so on. These metrics are filed in customisable CSVs and reports are generated.

At the moment, the link to Revit seems to be an email, which sends you a RVT model of your project. The aim is to ultimately deliver blocking-stacking at Level of Development (LoD) 350 data.

How does Skema engage with customers?

We asked co-founder, Richard Harpham, how Skema engages with customers to drive detail model generation in Revit

We engage a customer two ways – they can signup on our website (typical retail SaaS – get in-product support – see the website for features), or they can be an enterprise (Pioneer) customer that helps guide our product roadmap.  For retail customers, we don’t ask for their Revit data.  They are using the product mainly in conceptual design, and with our ‘open source’ concept catalogs to test the Revit generation functionality.

When we engage a Pioneer customer, they expect that we will ask for two to three Revit files for completed projects, for whatever building type they are trying to automate (e.g. multifamily, education, healthcare, hospitality).  We sign an NDA (to protect their Revit data) and then they share the files.

Our R&D and services teams then produce the concept catalogs the architects will use in Skema with their particular Revit ingredients inside.  This started as a manual process, and we are now automating it with a neural network that is our IP, trained on recognising patterns of adjacent spaces in a floor plan.

While this technology is currently used internally by our team, our intent is to eventually make it a self-service catalog building tool that a BIM manager can use to organize their firms IP.  I don’t really have a target timeframe for this, but we would expect sometime in 2024 to help us scale.

A few important distinctions on our approach.  First, we don’t share any catalog or Revit data from one architect with any other architect (unless they explicitly give us permission for marketing reasons).  Second, we don’t train our AI on the customer’s data.  The neural network I described is pre-trained on the building type before analyzing the customer’s data. As a result, there are no copyright complications with our approach.

While we are preparing their concept catalogs, the services team will set a date for an in-person 1-day charette in the Architects/Pioneers office.  During the charette event, we do in-person onboarding and train the architects staff in how to use Skema to produce/automate the desired building type by using an actual project brief prepared by the customer.  We typically do 2 charettes with Pioneers to onboard their project teams in applying Skema to their projects.

We charge the company the following way:

We have a user license and a project fee model, with the opportunity to pay a platform fee with lower user and project fees in larger accounts (see diagram below).

• User Licenses: Each user license grants a user all the concept design through Schematic and BIM preview capabilities.
• Project Fee: Once a design is agreed, the previewed BIM file is exported to the user via an email link for downloading to their server/workstation. Only when a project needs to be delivered in LOD350 does the architect pay for the BIM model

We do this to keep the user license cost low, to ensure it is a low financial burden on a phase of design that does not usually generate fees. But when the LOD model is needed, it is available dramatically earlier, to either secure fee payments and cashflow earlier from the client, or to allow more time to create more accurate BIM deliverables. This way the architect gains and we take a share of that benefit… but only when cashflow is available to pay us.

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