Is this the next challenge for AEC consulting Engineers and Architects?

Luke Johnson

For years, Architects and in some cases Engineers have seen their project involvement slowly diminish as new niche disciplines take over parts of the project delivery process.  Once upon a time, an Architect would have controlled design, contracts, bidding and cost analysis, full contract administration, defects and more.  Many of these components have been trimmed away by quantity surveyors, project managers, and to a large extent Head Contractors.

Could Trade Contractors (in Australia these are often call Subcontractors) be the next group who starts chipping away at this scope, as they take on more and more responsibility for developing detailed BIM models (yeah I said it) for future projects?

Along these lines, you may have seen this tweet, where I quoted Steve Jones from McGraw Hill, speaking at the SmartMarket breakfast in Adelaide this week:

This trend is evidently not limited to just one country, as this quote supports: 
Contractors have now surpassed architects as the fastest growing adopters of BIM. Over the next two years, contractors expect the percentage of their work that involves BIM to increase by 50 percent on average…

Read more in the article at:
Building and Infrastructure Industry Customers Surge to Autodesk in Fourth Quarter – WSJ.com

Heads-up:
https://twitter.com/LEEDing_Lady/status/448069445441687552

An open, crowd-sourced library of IFC and BIM files

Luke Johnson

Ryan Schultz is working on Revit–>IFC–>Revit translations, and he has created a open source page as a focus for test and sample files.  Here is the link:
https://github.com/theoryshaw/IFC_Roundtrip

Interestingly, Ryan is looking into IFC translations with ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, Microstation, Tekla and others.  The mixed environment of BIM software on collaborative projects is proving a challenge to many teams.  Ok, we can’t all work with Revit (maybe one day), but for now we have to find a way to share our models with high geometry fidelity and without losing the actual intelligence of BIM data.

I’m sure Ryan would be keen to hear from you, perhaps via Twitter or the github page.

Let’s work together to learn how to work together…

via
https://twitter.com/theoryshaw/status/450604566132686848

Controlling Reference Planes with Angle Parameters in the Family Editor

Luke Johnson

In a somewhat unexpected post, landarchBIM has described a method of inferring the movement of a Reference Plane that is driven by an angle parameter.  This probably falls outside of the “best practice” category, but it may be worth a read:
http://landarchbim.com/2014/04/01/rotating-reference-planes/

The key seems to be “that the plane must be constrained to the plane it wants to move along.”

Personally, I will probably stick to Reference Lines, because I don’t find them too difficult to understand or control.  But hey, whatever works for you!  Oh, and if you have any problems, contact landarchBIM 🙂

via
https://twitter.com/landarchBIM/status/451012524477927424

Reply:

Assembly Codes & Uniformat addin to allow quick searching and setting in Revit

Luke Johnson

Harry has put together a nice Revit addin UI for searching, choosing and setting Uniformat and Omniclass codes.  You can read his post and view the video at:
A better way to set Assembly Codes & Uniformat | Boost Your BIM – making Revit even better

Direct download for addin:
here it is – http://gdurl.com/WsDe/download

Using Link IFC in Revit 2015

Luke Johnson

Daniel has created a useful post describing how IFC Link works in Revit 2015.  Here are some key points from his post, as well as some of my own:

  • You must set a default project template before using the Link IFC function.  This is the same as Revit 2013 / 2014 etc – you could not import IFC without a default template
  • In Revit 2015 it is faster to Link an IFC rather than opening one
  • When you Link IFC, Revit 2015 actually creates a .rvt file from the IFC and then uses that data as the link.  The process is quite seamless from the user side, but it is something to keep in mind.  As Daniel describes, you can actually modify the ‘temporary’ RVT file slightly and it will not harm the link
  •  I’m unsure yet how this feature can integrate with Revit Server.  My initial feeling is that a manual step would be required each time, and you would probably open up the automatically created .rvt file and save it over the Revit Server version – but this idea is not tested as yet
Image from danielgijsbers.blogspot

Read the whole post:
http://danielgijsbers.blogspot.nl/2014/03/revit-2015-and-ifc-linking.html