Written by Aaron Perry, Head of Digital Design at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, and Andy Watts, director of design technology at Grimshaw

This must read report details what the AEC industry wants from future design tools, covering everything from data framework, context and scale, responsible design, and modular construction, to user experience, modelling capabilities, automation, intelligence, deliverables and more.

Watch the NXT DEV presentations from Aaron Perry and Andy Watts

NXT DEV 2023 – watch the video on NXTAEC.com

Aaron Perry, talking on behalf of a collective of medium-to-large AEC firms, gives a masterful presentation as he introduces the ‘Future Design Software Specification’.

NXT DEV 2024 – watch the video on NXTAEC.com

Andy Watts gives an important update on the specification, then hands over to Allister Lewis, ADDD, to talk about benchmarking software against the specification.

The post Future of AEC Software: Special Report appeared first on AEC Magazine.

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

Subscribe to the digital edition free + all the latest AEC technology news in your inbox, or take out a print subscription for $49 per year (free to UK AEC professionals).

Autodesk’s granular data strategy
The AEC world is still file based, but the future is databases in the cloud.

7 things we learnt at NXT BLD / DEV
We reflect on some of the key themes to come out of our London events this year.

EvolveLab: bringing AI to architecture
New AI tools, including an AI assistant to automate drawings in Revit and Rhino.

Generative AI for urban simulation
How Urbanly integrated Large Language Models into its CityCompass platform.

Future of AEC Software: Special Report
What the AEC industry wants from future design tools.

Building bold at Maggie’s cancer centre
This complex hospital building demanded an integrated approach for construction.

Sentio simplifies client presentations with 360 VR
Architectural VR solution builds team collaboration around 360 panoramas.

Varjo unveils Teleport for reality reconstruction
XR specialist using 3D gaussian splatting and machine learning to capture reality.

The post AEC Magazine July / August 2024 Edition appeared first on AEC Magazine.

The AEC industry has a reputation for being slow to adopt technology. Some reports even place it behind farming. The reality is, while construction has lagged, design has been on an inexorable path to total digitisation since the 1980s.

3D modelling, the adoption of BIM and innovation in digital fabrication is ultimately going to lead to modern methods of manufacturing buildings.

This is not just a technology play; it’s borne out of necessity. The construction industry lacks skilled labour, many economies desperately need new housing, historic poor productivity needs to be addressed. Furthermore, everything from the design, material choice, and location to the fabrication of buildings needs to reflect the carbon climate challenges that will only become more prescient.

Today’s BIM tools add width to the chasm that separates design from fabrication, as they were created to deliver scaled drawing sets, not detailed 3D models for fabrication

To connect the digital thread, this industry needs new tools, new workflows, new fabrication methodologies. In short, and to coin an overused phrase, we need to rethink construction.

However, it’s not just construction that needs rethinking – it’s everything from what we design, through to how it’s fabricated, and how it’s assembled. We need to rethink AEC.

Buildings should be designed in the full context of how they will be fabricated, broken down into assemblies and a ‘Kit of Parts’. Today’s BIM tools add width to the chasm that separates design from fabrication, as they were created to deliver scaled drawing sets, not detailed 3D models for fabrication.

Find this article plus many more in the July / August 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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When one tries to add that level of detail, the models swell in size and become unusable. Autodesk has arguably done the most to try and connect BIM and manufacturing CAD, but this has taken years and many attempts to get right.

The current solution boils down to proxy swapping of predefined components between BIM software Autodesk Revit and mechanical CAD (MCAD) software Autodesk Inventor, which lends itself to working with a ‘Kit of Parts’ mentality. This solution, while innovative, is a partial ‘band aid on a bullet wound’, trying to overcome the integration limitations of two products that were never intended to work together.

Those who follow the offsite construction market, will know that it has become a bloodbath in the US and UK. Many fabs have shut down. It’s all too easy to find examples of how not to do it, rather than ones that are making it work. But this time of failure will pass, and lessons will be learnt.

The convergence of design and manufacturing in AEC is going to be an ongoing experiment and it’s going to need some projects that require scale to prove out. This is happening, but it’s not necessarily joined up. The future is everywhere, it’s just not evenly distributed.

At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD and NXT DEV last month we brought together some industry change makers, who presented the projects and processes that they are refining to connect architecture to construction and deliver digital design to fabrication. Dale Sinclair from WSP, Antoine Morizot from Bouygues Construction and John Cerone from SHoP Architects were three that stood out, taking us from London to Paris to New York.

WSP – London

Dale Sinclair first started experimenting with design at 1:1 construction detail level while at AECOM. At the time AECOM was working closely with offsite fabrication firms and Sinclair wanted to ‘talk the same language’ as the fabricators. He eschewed Revit for architectural design on modular projects, and instead adopted Inventor to take an assembly approach.

Now at WSP, Sinclair has continued his research into the convergence of construction and manufacturing, developing new processes and looking at the whole workflow from the construction end of the telescope, bringing ‘systems thinking’ to design.

At NXT BLD, he pointed out, “Construction in its current form, cannot continue, because we have all tried but we haven’t moved the dial. We haven’t reduced the cost. We haven’t reduced the time to deliver buildings. The quality is variable, and productivity is static.

“How do we change? We keep putting things together that have never been put together before. The number of new systems are increasing, adding complexity.

“We should be using offsite manufacturing. There is no downside to using factories. We have better safety, bring in more diverse people and get the benefits of scale. We should be leveraging the benefits the manufacturing sector has had for years. But the one thing we have not cracked with offsite is cost and this prevents us from scaling up offsite.”

Sinclair explained that adopting a ‘Kit of Parts’ approach in design is phase one. The next step is to mobilise offsite, by taking a small number of large components to site (panelisation not modular).

This can then be followed by adopting a broader ‘program mentality’, using fabrication-level details at the start of a project, pushing manufacturing information upstream and adopting configurators. “We have flipped the entire process on its head, so we are coming from a manufacturing first [approach] and it’s a game changer,” he said.

Sinclair believes off-site has to be explored at a country level. He thinks that offsite fabrication spaces should be distributed throughout the UK, in all the places there is unemployment, and hopes the UK Government wakes up to the benefits of doing something like this. I suspect we will have to wait to see it work somewhere else first.

Watch Sinclair’s NXT BLD talk here

Bouygues Construction – Paris

From the other side of the channel, construction giant Bouygues Construction has been on its own digital journey. It has similar challenges, but instead of focusing on the original architectural design, it concentrates on how to connect its clients’ design information to the Bouygues fabrication and cost estimating system.

The decision to digitise and automate has led to a multi-year consultancy engagement with Dassault Systèmes – creator of the leading MCAD brands Catia and Solidworks – to create an expert system for Bouygues called ‘Bryck’.

Bouygues’ strategic vision is to head towards metamorphosing building sites to a place where products are assembled – unlike the current process, which requires the onsite transformation of materials. Antoine Morizot of Bouygues explained, “The products could have been prefabricated or assembled in micro factories near the site, but the idea is not to standardise the products, it’s to standardise the processes.”

The concept that Bouygues is adopting is not dissimilar to the ones which Dassault Systèmes has proven many times in the manufacturing space for aerospace and automotive. Here customers build a virtual digital mock-up or in common CAD parlance, a digital twin, which contains all the details of what is to be manufactured, to simulate the method of construction, the construction site and the as-built.

Morizot stated that BIM has failed to give the result the industry was expecting. By modelling in 3D, there was an expectation that, like in MCAD, this data could be connected to fabrication systems. BIM data conveys the idea, but not from an engineering or construction point of view. To achieve this, Bouygues has built a ‘productised’ system which covers all these bases, using Catia and customisation to produce a predictable, systemic view of project data.

RVT or IFC models are brought in and converted to productised Catia components such as groundwork, structure, covering, partitioning, finishes, MEP, equipment and prefab modules.

This template-based system also offers a library of parametric templates, which pre-define multi-disciplinary parametric modules for central cores, CLT floors, façade design, electrical components, MEP etc, which can adapt to any complex geometry, or imported IFC or Revit files. These ‘products’ adapt to the architectural model, through the use of generative design, adding tags, attributes, dimensions, 3D annotations, surface treatments, manufacturers’ catalogue part numbers, integrating a lot of data making calculations, and even defining the installation order.

Morizot demonstrated that by simply clicking on the raw geometry of a floor in a model, Bouygues can apply a product, in this case a CLT floor, and a complete, highly detailed CLT floor is created, adapting to the new model, ready panelised to fit the capabilities of Bouygues’ in-house fabrication machines. These can then be edited in multiple ways, such as orientation and installation order.

This was a rare outing for Bouygues to explain the level of detail it has achieved with its construction expert system. It means the firm can be given an IFC or a Revit model and in minutes get a fabrication level digital twin, with the exact cost and all the fabrication drawings. Bryck has impressed the company’s board so much that another long-term deal has been signed with Dassault Systèmes, with more capabilities to come.

Watch Morizot’s NXT BLD talk here

SHoP Architects – New York

New York-based SHoP Architects is a relative latecomer to the NXT BLD roster, but principal John Cerone has been a long-time advocate of embracing digital fabrication and going beyond the limitation of delivering drawings.

Cerone is certainly in the architectural camp of wanting to get rid of drawings and move to a pure modelling paradigm and the practice is doing its utmost to define its own process to connect architecture with modern methods of construction. He defines his firm as ‘Production Architects’ as they focus on materials, process and how the buildings they design are made.

Cerone is on board with offsite manufacturing and the concept of a ‘Kit of Parts’, sub-assemblies and how these Cover story work in the design as a whole. SHoP is not a fan of the plan, section and elevation approach to define its schemes but places itself in the Ikea approach to communication.

Cerone stated, “Architecture, with a capital A, can be designed and manufactured. To do that, you need to understand the processes, who/what is reading the instructions and how the materials are being processed. When you do that, the deliverables are not the flat orthogonal drawings, we can be much more diagrammatic.

“We operate in this industry with the mentality that there’s an opportunity to leapfrog and take advantage of advanced manufacturing techniques in our projects. If you come to our office in downtown Manhattan, in the Woolworth Building, the first thing you’ll notice will be model planes, boats, cars – they are everywhere.

“And for us, one of the principles behind that, is how you can design simulate, coordinate, execute a complex project in a digital format. To do that, you have to get outside of the traditional tools of the AEC industry.”

SHoP Architects is a big fan of Rhino and Catia and builds a lot of its own tools for geometry solvers which are used at scale. The firm has cut its teeth working on projects with complex geometry that were built off site. This involved talking with manufacturers at the concept stage to start optimising for fabrication.

Information, such as optimal steel sheet size helps reduce waste, lower cost, and act as design constraints early on in the process. This means the final design does not need reengineering once all the work is done. SHoP then makes reuseable templates for the assemblies it creates.

From this, SHoP has got heavily into the fabrication side of things, sometimes bypassing the drawing phase and even just delivering the model and the G-code, whilst keeping track of job tickets through factories. On site the firm uses laser scanning to ensure the assemblies are to specification and communicates installation through screen shots of the model.

With all this experience in offsite and manufacturing, SHoP Architects creates a ‘cousin’ company called Assembly OSM to deliver modules for high-rise residential buildings (12 to 30 floors), all based on templates for building systems, including mechanical.

Watch Cerone’s NXT BLD talk here

Conclusion

There are no off-the-shelf solutions to link digital architecture to digital fabrication. Every firm that has made progress connecting the two worlds has done it through belief, investment, experimentation and sheer bloody-mindedness. However, it doesn’t mean that this situation won’t change as lessons learnt by these pioneers will eventually find their way back into features in standard software. The use of Inventor and Catia for defining architectural design is currently niche but there is a chance that next generation BIM tools will have the underlying technologies required to span the design to fabricate chasm.

Defocussing from technology solutions for a moment, it’s clear from Sinclair, Cerone and Bell – all architects – that to wholly embrace the process, the industry needs to start thinking about the design of buildings differently.

If designs are to flow from concept to construction, the ‘Kit of Parts’ approach appears to have the longest legs, mimicking automotive and aerospace. But this still puts a lot of work upfront to design flexible parts with construction-level detailing. As Sinclair points out, less project think and more of a program mentality, spanning projects. Bell has done this with the Facit Homes’ adaptable chassis (see below), where every house is a variation on a tried and tested theme.

Facit Homes – bringing the factory to the construction site

Bruce Bell has a long connection with AEC Magazine and NXT BLD. His UK company Facit Homes uses vanilla Revit with its own family of parts, which are optimised to create highly defined BIM models. Through a secret sauce, they are flattened and G-code is created to fabricate on-site via a router in a shipping container.

In a way, Bell has developed his own expert system that is designed for houses out of mainly one material, that is cut up on site and nailed together to make box sections. Every building created for individual clients is a variation on a long-tested system.

With a deep central resource database of the common products used in fitting out, Facit can predict the cost of its buildings within 1%. As the company also manufactures and assembles the building, that reduces risk and means the company’s fee spans design, construction and delivery. What is incredible is that this all done with off-the-shelf software.

Recently Bell has raised his aim and is looking to develop a giant robot which can cut and stack enough panels to build out entire estates. His talk at NXT BLD highlights the journey he has been on and the solution that he will be bringing to market, which features an onsite micro-factory.

Watch Bell’s NXT BLD presentation here

The post Connecting architecture to fabrication appeared first on AEC Magazine.

hsbcad has launched hsbDesign 27 for Revit, the latest release of the Revit-native software for offsite timber construction which can export fabrication data to a range of CNC machines including Hundegger, Weinmann, and Randek.

The new version includes several new features, such as integration with Autodesk Dynamo, reduced file size, multilingual support, enhanced project information output, and the ability to create custom item container labels.

Integration with Autodesk Dynamo, the visual programming add-in for Revit, is designed to help automate repetitive manual tasks and reduce potential errors.

Features include importing framing styles, overriding details, assigning elements to item containers, generation of item containers, and exporting.

hsbDesign 27 for Revit ‘significantly reduces’ the file size of projects without sacrificing detail, with numerous connections and edge detail families. There is now only one connection and one edge detail family, which can be easily customised or overridden.

‍The detail editor in hsbDesign 27 now features multilingual support for English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, catering to a global user base.

Project information is now automatically incorporated into various exports using the default parameters, to help ensure ‘consistent and detailed’ documentation across outputs.

An enhanced formatting engine makes it possible for users to customise the labels displayed on item containers, to help ensure that essential information is immediately visible. For example, it can be customised to show the framing style alongside the item container number.

Elsewhere, users can now enhance architectural ceiling designs with a new framing style editor, manually recalculate blocking without regenerating the item container, and execute extensions on framed or manually adjusted item containers within the model.

The post hsbDesign 27 for Revit launches appeared first on AEC Magazine.

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

Subscribe to the digital edition free + all the latest AEC technology news in your inbox, or take out a print subscription for $49 per year (free to UK AEC professionals).

Cover story: towards open systems
We explore Autodesk’s new approach to openness and note that, with its recent Nemetschek announcement, things seem a little different

NXT BLD / NXT DEV event previews
At AEC Magazine’s annual events in London on 25-26 June you’ll not only see what the future holds for AEC technology but you can have a say in how it unfolds

Skema: BIM workflow compression
Skema is one of a handful of new tools from design-oriented start-ups that is engineered to work with existing BIM software to shrink project timescales

Dassault Systèmes (DS) in AEC
A market leader in manufacturing, DS is developing a new generation of AEC tools, which aim to cross the chasm between digital design and digital manufacture

Twinview (digital twins)
We explore Space Group’s Twinview, one of the most advanced BIM digital twin offerings available today

Safeguarding contractors from Cyberattacks
It’s every construction firm’s biggest nightmare: criminals taking control of their data and holding them to ransom

Nvidia Omniverse spreads its wings
With new Cloud APIs, Nvidia is extending the reach of Omniverse beyond the core demographic of designers and artists

XR: streaming to a headset near you soon
All-in-one XR headsets have proved very popular for AEC design review. But for realism and complexity, 3D models must be processed externally, and pixels streamed in

Review: Scan micro workstation
This compact 8-litre workstation might not bring much new to the table in terms of chassis, but it’s hard not to take notice when the price is so aggressive

Review: Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada
This entry-level pro viz GPU is a great option for small workstations

The post AEC Magazine May / June 2024 Edition appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Dassault Systèmes’ flagship brand Catia was originally released in 1977, back when the company was a manufacturer of aircraft called Avions Marcel Dassault. Its name derives from the French abbreviation ‘CATI’, which stands for ‘conception assistée tridimensionnelle interactive’ (or in English, interactive three-dimensional aided design). The software was spun off into its own division in 1981, where it became Catia and went on to provide multi-platform software for MCAD, CAE and PLM (product lifecycle management), initially targeting the aerospace and automotive industries.

While Dassault Systèmes (DS) focused on its work as a software development house, sales and service was supported by IBM via a long-standing partnership, which turbocharged the company’s global reach. From 2014 onwards, the company added 3DExperience to its brand as the integrated platform that brings together all of the company’s software solutions.

Historically in AEC, DS has had a casual relationship with AEC, with some leading architects using Catia on large engineering projects. For example, ZHA, SHoP and Frank Gehry are all well known users of the software.

In this way, a tool that enables aerospace and automotive firms to design and fabricate complex surfaced products has also proved exceptionally useful on complex buildings. Recently, during the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, DS and Bouygues Construction collaborated on designing a Catia-based system to automate and optimise construction bidding and fabrication from 3D design inputs, generating fabrication drawings and estimating costs.

At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD conference in London on 25 June, Antoine Morizot of Bouygues will speak specifically about this development.

DS has been interested in exploring the mainstream AEC market since 2012, but has yet to pull all of its software together to directly take on the traditional BIM players. As AEC and manufacturing converge around digital fabrication, the benefits of a Catia-based platform start to make more sense in the industry.

We spoke with Jonathan Asher, architect, software developer and now head of the business development of DS’s AEC business.

AEC Magazine: How did you get into Dassault Systémes and Catia?

Jonathan Asher: I’m an architect by training and spent many years in the industry as an architect. I started using Catia V5 when I was at Coop Himmelb(l)au (Austria) in 2009 as a part of its first real BIM team. There I used Catia as an architect and I fell in love. Up until that point, I had been using Generative Components and other applications in the ‘smartgeometry’ ecosystem. I took the generative and parametric approach to modelling from Generative Components into Catia and it blew my mind, the things the team and I were able to model in such a short amount of time. I realise Catia is best known as an engineering software, but I use it for design, and at this point, I couldn’t imagine using any other software for design. What is more, the applications in the software now compared to what we were using in V5 are pretty incredible.

AEC Magazine: You were in AEC software development but then you changed your role?

Jonathan Asher: I joined Dassault Systèmes to lead our Catia software development efforts for AEC. After more than seven years in R&D, I switched roles last year, moving into a sales position. I’m not a ‘salesman’, but I oversee our global sales strategy for Catia in the AEC industries, as well as go-to-market strategy, market awareness and user adoption worldwide.

I’m happy to do this, because I’m convinced that we have the best software for these industries. I’ve been around long enough to have seen the competition, to have used the competition, and there really is no competition. When you look at it, Catia is like a Ferrari and our competitors are offering Toyotas. No disrespect to a flagship Catia customer, but you can’t drive a Ferrari as you would a Toyota, and if you try, you will never see what the car can really do. This can be the case for people who have tried Catia and may have struggled with it, because they’re probably driving it the wrong way. Catia is different from most other AEC software and that is not a bad thing.

AEC Magazine: Some architects are experimenting with MCAD applications to replace products like Revit so they can ‘talk the same language’ as their fabricators and model assemblies. Picking midrange tools from their product bundles seems logical, but aren’t there limitations to mid-range tools?

Jonathan Asher: Absolutely. There’s a scalability wall or ceiling that you hit in mid-range desktop modellers, where you simply can’t go any further. Moreover, with file-based modelling applications, file size is a major issue that impacts collaboration and performance. On the other hand, Catia scales with the size and detail of the project; even in huge complex assemblies, you can visualise the nuts and bolts. In addition, the Catia V6 architecture is no longer file-based; we are integrated into the 3DExperience platform, which hosts a database on the cloud, making collaboration and performance much better.

AEC Magazine: Dassault Systemès has not only been developing for architects but also for construction. What can you tell us about that?

Jonathan Asher: Four years ago, we signed a partnership with Bouygues Construction and, since then, we have dedicated a number of resources specifically to construction. With Bouygues, we are focused heavily on integrating construction processes into our tools, to streamline the creation of generative 3D construction models (that we call Brycks), link these to design models coming from their architects/engineers, and drive their site and logistics systems. We call this approach ‘productisation’ and it’s gone very well. The team at Bouygues Construction has been super involved and we continue to ramp up our engagement every year.

AEC Magazine: There are many workflow enhancements in development in the industry. Automated drawings will make a big impact on AEC, removing a lot of manual work. We know Catia for modelling – but what about drawings?

Jonathan Asher: Every conversation with every architecture office inevitably gets to the topic of drawings. They recognise Catia’s modelling capabilities, but in the end, they all need to produce drawings, drawings, and more drawings!

Most architects spend too much time in 2D working on individual views, jumping from view to view, trying to coordinate geometry in their head and representing that in their drawings. This process is obviously time-consuming and error-prone. For automotive, aerospace and other traditional Catia customers, they use the 3D master approach to document the model; in this way, the drawings are extracted from annotated and dimensioned sliced views of the 3D model. If there is ever a doubt about what you see in the drawing, you open the 3D Catia model, navigate to the annotated view and check the 3D. Of course, the drawings are only as good as the 3D model, but the geometry is always coordinated between views.

At this point, drafting is a short-term problem. It won’t be automated tomorrow, but we’re looking at somewhere in the one to three year timeframe, certainly by the end of this decade.

[Editor’s note: Graebert’s autodrawings will find its way first into DraftSight, DS’s DWG drafting tool (www.draftsight.com)]

Find many more articles like this in AEC Magazine

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AEC Magazine: AI and automation seem to be hot topics in the software we are seeing developed. How do you believe they will impact the industry?

Jonathan Asher: In the next five to ten years, AI will first impact engineering, where things are more rule-based and data-driven. Eventually, most building design will be automated, as will the manufacturing. However, design is subjective. Yes, computers will design – but in the end, will people ever let go completely?

Right now, the design-to-manufacturing component can already be automated to a large extent, and this is what our customers in the AEC space are doing. They take a design model as an input and automate everything downstream through to manufacturing. This is already happening. The promise of AI is that it will get even easier, faster and more performative, with less user input and decision-making. Today, it’s limited by dataset training models and hardware constraints, but in the future, AI will be better, faster and more experienced than any human.

A clue as to what the future might look like is already available in Catia – not yet for AEC, but it will come. We call this our ModSim approach, where we model and simulate at the same time. The simulation informs the design in an iterative loop to find the optimal design solution.

AEC Magazine: There have not as yet been any big announcements of applications from DS for architects, but are these coming?

Jonathan Asher: Dassault Systemès’ strategic path for AEC has been years in the making. We have so many things going on, so many incredible applications that already exist, we haven’t made any big announcements – but that’s not to say we don’t already have an incredible solution. That said, we have some really exciting things in the works. Automated drawing generation is one example, but there’s a lot more to come. Because we are on the 3DExperience platform, and our data model supports granularity, we can deliver solutions that offer scalability, control of complexity and ease of collaboration. There just aren’t any other technologies like ours, many of these competitive tools are still monolithic point solutions.

London Catia buildings user day

With NXT BLD and NXT DEV running consecutively on 25 and 26 June, Dassault Systèmes is taking our lead and carrying on the innovation theme by putting together a Catia Buildings User Day on 27 June at its Hammersmith offices in London. If you would like to attend to learn more about Catia for AEC and meet Jonathan Asher and his team, you can sign up here.

The post Dassault Systèmes in AEC appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Kreod, which presented its approach to building fabrication at NXT BLD last year, is developing a new, from the ground-up, solid-modelling-based fabrication modeller for architects and fabricators. The collaborative Level 400+ tool, called Kreodx Integrated DfMA Intelligent Automation software (or Kidia for short) will launch this September.

Kreod CEO Chung Qing Li explains that in any approach to DfMA all components need to be designed, manufactured and assembled with high precision, adding that Kidia uses sophisticated algorithms to decode this complexity, transforming intricate designs into manageable, step-by-step assembly instructions.

Kidia automates the planning and execution phases of DfMA projects, with a view to reducing the time required to bring projects from conception to completion. The software also optimises material usage and minimise offcuts by ‘precise planning and modelling’.

There are additional plans for detailed planning and virtual testing of assembly processes. The software will support a digital twin outlook, encompassing design, engineering, manufacturing, assembly, through to operation and maintenance.

Other capabilities include structural integrity assessments, energy efficiency evaluations, environmental impact studies, plus support for AR (Augmented Reality).

As Kreod is also an architectural practice, we can be sure that it will be testing and proving its capabilities on live projects.

Find many more articles like this in AEC Magazine

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The post Kreod to launch new fabrication modeller appeared first on AEC Magazine.

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

Subscribe to the digital edition free + all the latest AEC technology news in your inbox, or take out a print subscription for $49 per year (free to UK AEC professionals).

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.

The post AEC Magazine March / April 2024 Edition appeared first on AEC Magazine.

The first time I wrote about Facit Homes was back in 2013, when the company had just been highlighted on Channel 4’s Grand Designs as a design-build architectural firm. What set it apart from other design-build firms I knew about was that the house that featured in the TV programme was designed in BIM using Revit, but was digitally fabricated on site, using a CNC router housed in a shipping container. This CNC device cut out box sections from 2,440mm x 1,220mm timber sheets filled with masses of insulation.

More than ten years on, Facit Homes co-founder Bruce Bell is still designing and fabricating digitally. He has a profitable practice and has so far built housing collectively worth over £30 million, with build times typically two times faster than traditional methods.

At the time of our first conversation, Bell was not convinced that factory-produced houses were viable for reasons of standardisation, repetition, and boredom. The economics didn’t stack up either, he argued, with no one size fitting all when it comes to buildings, plus the costs of transportation, which might be up to 20% of overall price.

“There is a direct correlation between factory fabrication and repetition, because you can’t have factories sitting idle due to the overheads, and as soon as you have a factory, you need turnover. In order to have turnover, you need standardisation, and you end up producing the same thing over and over again,” he told me.

That said, neither of us could have known at that time that factory fabrication would become such a disaster in both the UK and USA — even when producing the same thing repeatedly.

A family of parts

Today, Facit Homes is still deeply reliant on Revit as its BIM weapon of choice, although it has expanded its repertoire to include generative tools such as Rhino Grasshopper. Bell has created a distinct family of parts and these are key to the fabrication of a chassis design for all homes created by Facit. With his special CNC code linked to Revit, Bell produces G-code at his London office, which is then sent to an on-site CNC router. Box sections are made with machine slots, and these vary from day to day, depending on the weather, for reasons of moisture content.

Since I last visited Facit’s offices, the company has built its own specification database. This has been fleshed out and expanded with every project the company has undertaken and includes components, suppliers, models – everything you need when specifying a building.

The net result of having this linked to Revit is that, by the time any BIM model is complete and fits the client’s specification, Facit Homes knows how much the building will cost to fabricate and to complete fit-and-finish to within 1%. It also has a full bill of materials quantities and a cost breakdown for the project. While the company relies on a chassis-based design, variations in designs show that this is not a limiting factor.

From house to houses

Bell has spoken at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD event several times on the topic of digital construction, and he has always seemed like one hand clapping – because, unlike everyone else, he’s not been trying to build buildings in factories.

The time has now come for Facit to scale up its operation to offer services to developers – not just in planning sites, but also designing all housing, as well as construction projects.

Bell explains that, in his conversations with developers in the UK, today’s financially precarious construction firms can cost them millions if they collapse midproject. They suffer from labour shortages, which lead to delays and missed project timelines. So, for Facit Homes to scale up, it’s not so much a case of a bandwidth problem in design, because Revit combined with generative provides significant productivity benefits. Instead, the bottleneck for Facit lies in the on-site fabrication method, because one shipping container system may be ample for building a single residence, but when tens or scores of houses are planned, a different approach is necessary.

After a few years of mulling over the problem, Bell has engaged a fantastic robotics fabrication firm in the UK called Tharsus to devise a new, shippable digital fabrication unit. For those not in the know, Tharsus has designed and built pick-and-place robots for Ocado’s grocery delivery warehouses.

Bell originally envisaged four shipping containers’ worth of machinery in each unit. With the help of the team at Tharsus, however, this looks to have shrunk down during the design process to two containers.

As the design is nearly finalised, all that remains now is to put the first unit to work on its first contract. Without giving too much away, the first thing the new machine will fabricate is the temporary wooden structure that will keep the site’s assembly area dry. Set-up time is estimated at one week.

Its cutter can produce a much higher throughput of CNC cut sheets than the previous tool, and it also has a built-in printer, which prints the actual drawing on the sheet together with a unique QR code. Once complete, the sheets are autostacked for assembly.

The designated assembly area, meanwhile, uses video recognition and mixed reality technologies to assist the team in measuring and assembling sections before they are installed on the chassis.

Bell reckons that each machine is capable of building some £20 million worth of housing each year, or approximately 80 homes. The idea is obviously to have a number of these robots fabricated, so that Facit Homes can tackle bigger projects and win bigger customers, both nationally and internationally.

Bruce Bell is a mix of technologist, architect, and canny-but-cautious entrepreneur. The expansion and development of Facit Homes comes only after years of Bell analysing the market and figuring out how Facit might best address the opportunity without running the risk of a spectacular crash-and-burn scenario. The company’s biggest overhead has been the design and procurement of the new high-throughput fabrication systems. Bell will now be hoping to reap the rewards of that move.

Bell will be speaking about this exciting project at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD conference on 25 June. By then, he will hopefully be able to show off prototypes for the fabrication machine and go into more depth on how digital fabrication of homes can be achieved without owning a factory and in such a way that, in the lean times, the costs don’t kill contractors.

The post Scaling-up digital construction appeared first on AEC Magazine.

If you go by the sheer number of off site housing fabrication bankrupt cies, closures and turmoil, the purveyors of MMC (Modern Methods of Construction) have had a pretty shocking past eight years. Given that the UK has a chronic shortage of housing and construction labour, and a record number of building contractors going out of business, it’s astonishing that the one process designed to overcome these constraints – building offsite – has so utterly imploded, burning hundreds of millions of dollars in investment along the way. The amount of capital required always seems to be underestimated and the factory space acquired before the workflows or technologies have been fully worked out.

Reflecting the fractured and fragmented problems that face the industry, BIM and mechanical CAD (MCAD) grew up in different parts of the city. BIM tools like Revit build models to produce drawings, which then get handed onto contractors to be built manually. MCAD creates solid models of parts, which are contained in assemblies, which then generates Gcode to drive various fabrication machines, cutting metal or wood, or for output to 3D printers.

Both types of tools were developed independently of each other and paid little heed to the file formats or user-bases of each discipline. That is until manufacturers of fabricated components in buildings, such as MEP, wanted to be driven by 3D models, and offsite housing fabricators wanted to build from data created in BIM tools.

While BIM software is 3D, it does not have the same level of detail as fabrication-level assembly data in MCAD and herein lies the chasm to cross.

To get data out of Revit and into Inventor, Autodesk’s leading MCAD tool, Autodesk initially added SAT file capabilities to Revit. (N.B. SAT is a 3D model format used by ACIS-based MCAD modelling software). Then RFA (Revit assemblies) were added to Inventor as an export.

However, the workflow to use and create RFA was a six/seven stage process: open > simplify geometry > use specific tools to create geometry with special connectors > position the UCS > add the metadata and omniclass tags > export and import into Revit.

These file-based transactions were an inhibitor. Then Autodesk invested in doing the reverse and in Revit 2021 data could be exported as a reference to Inventor using the AnyCAD technology.

In the 2022 release, Inventor got RVT export and, in 2023, the concept of Data Exchanges meant portions of the files could be shared, but not the whole RVT project. Exhausted yet?

One can’t say Autodesk didn’t put the effort into trying to tie Revit and Inventor together and it seemed to be gaining traction in the small but growing industrialised construction sector.

However, since the 2023 releases there seems to have been a pause on this development and a rethink on the strategy of doing industrialised construction.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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A new approach

In February 2024, Autodesk announced ‘Informed Design’, which is a new take on connecting Revit with Inventor. This is more of a combination of workflow strategy and technology. At the heart, Revit and Inventor connect via the cloud but, prior to starting a project, work is required in creating pre-defined building products in each application, giving the impression of a bi-directional digital thread.

The upfront work requires the users to componentise the manufacturable elements of a building and create those in Inventor, producing a library or family of customisable parts or assemblies using AEC-specific templates.

These are then loaded to Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC), and then made available as Revit families. These Inventor AEC families allow parametric editing, materials, and build corresponding BoMs (bills of material).

With this active substitution connection, Revit designers build not only the architectural model but simultaneously create a model of fabricable 1:1 components in Inventor.

While the chasm remains between Revit and Inventor, Autodesk has introduced a kind of fabrication modelling by proxy. As the predefined Inventor parts and assemblies include the constraints of what can be manufactured, the architect is forced to design within the boundaries of fabrication reality. This is an intriguing solution to a historical problem.

The downside of this approach is that there is significant work to be done upfront in the fabrication definition of every fabricable component or system. Pre-work is required in Inventor, which is arse about face to the way the process works today.

For very organised multi-discipline firms I can see this burden paying dividends, especially as the library of components defined in Inventor grows. However, in the typically fragmented AEC space, the level of pre-coordination and investment would certainly be a challenge for many.

Conclusion

Autodesk and the industry are on a long and painful industrialised construction journey. There is no doubt that there is convergence and there will be increasing pressure to cohabit the same design space and fabricate with the most modern methods.

As it stands the software applications that are used to do this were never intended to work together and so workarounds have to be sought. Lobbing the data over the wall between applications was the first attempt. But trying to apply brute force to data that doesn’t sit comfortably outside of its original environment, and comes with overheads, is essentially a form of design puppetry, operating two systems through proxy substitution. Informed design is a more intellectual approach.

One has to wonder if just designing in Inventor is the way to go. Dale Sinclair, head of digital innovation at WSP has been an advocate of the Inventor route since his days at AECOM, where Inventor allowed him to speak the language of the offsite fabricators and model at 1:1.

Sinclair will be speaking on this strategy at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD conference on 25 June 2024 at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre.

There are other options routed in MCAD, such as Dassault Systèmes Catia which has been used in high-end projects by ZHA, SHoP and Gehry. But traditional BIM and MCAD tools, even from the same vendor seem to sit together as well as oil and water.

Autodesk’s Informed Design in some way respects that but I don’t think this will be the industry’s final attempt at integrating the two worlds. While its obvious that different disciplines need different tools, if there is a fresh reimagining of CAD, does there still need to be different formats for each? For now, that’s what we are dealing with. The future may see a more unified database with less need for parlour tricks.

The current sorry state of offsite construction is unfortunately not going to help drive this. At some point, someone, with deep pockets, is going to make this work. Labour shortages will not improve and hundreds of thousands of quality houses need to be quickly erected to increasingly sustainable constraints. To hear about that, come to NXT BLD to hear from Bruce Bell of Facit Homes who’s got a plan to upscale residential on-site fabrication.

The post Autodesk Informed Design – a bridge between BIM and MCAD appeared first on AEC Magazine.