#ResidentialBIM

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VisionREZ for Revit 2018 released

VisionREZ® 2018 for Revit® and Navisworks® Plug-In’s Now Available The Leading Software Developer of Residential Construction Tools for Revit and Navisworks Grand Prairie, TX — Wednesday, September 13, 2017— Alpine, a leading North American supplier of products and services for the architectural drafting, building and component manufacturing industry, has announced the release of VisionREZ® 2018 for Revit® and Navisworks®. This is the 6th release of a VisionREZ designed specifically for the Revit platform, and the third release for the Navisworks platform based on the award-winning VisionREZ products for AutoCAD® Architecture (ACA). Four individual modules: Architecture, Structure, Options Management and Fabrication (wall panels) encompass the Revit release, along with a plugin for Navisworks. Momentous development to the VisionREZ Structure module has resulted in significant improvement for the wood-framed residential building industry. VisionREZ Structure can now create real-time wall framing inside of Revit using native Revit objects. New Quick-Frame tools and framing via Revit links were added to the horizontal framing toolset. The new features allow for separate structural framing projects that will not burden the original architectural project. According to Steve Bumbalough, VisionREZ Product Manager, “With the 2018 Release of VisionREZ for Revit the builder can now easily generate the most accurate framing takeoffs available for light frame construction using Revit. Builders can frame their models using framing rules and assemblies that work specifically for their markets as easily as swapping out a few thumbnail images”. The enhancement to the VisionREZ Design Option Module feature the Enterprise version to support larger national and regional builders. The Option Administration tool has been redesigned and implemented for builders desiring to establish a corporate strategy for option management. To accommodate the larger scale workflow, VisionREZ Design Options is fully functional in the Revit Worksharing environment.

[designerbuilderbim-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvNVCzIF_00)

[rubysketch-blog]

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Toll Brothers' new T | Select line slated for Houston MPC http://buff.ly/2jyXB0C

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US to add 25M households by 2035 http://buff.ly/2hV9j6i #housingMarket

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10 housing events to watch in 2017 http://buff.ly/2iLoCLH #housingMarket

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VisionREZ 2017.1 for Revit has been released. This release is focused on designer productivity and increased functionality. Specific enhancements have been made to the Architecture, Structure and Options Management modules as well as adding network licensing to the suite. Architecture expands on our roof and transition tools with the addition of several new conditions and other enhancements. Structure brings residential framing tools to Revit. This release sees an improved framing engine as well as multi. Options Management has seen significant functionality and productivity enhancements. This releases adds the long awaited Delta QTO tool to highlight costs differences between various option selections. VisionREZ will begin rolling out the update throughout its user base in the coming days.

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Imagine you’re a hotelier. Your newest property—let’s call it a high-end resort in the south of France—has gone into construction, but is not yet fully designed. Your firm is based in New York. The old way of designing the property would have involved several transatlantic flights and PDFs sent between you, the architecture firm, your marketing team, and any other stakeholders. Choosing the layout of the hotel rooms, making furniture selections, even just picking out materials and a color scheme, “can be a long and expensive process,” says Benoît Pagotto, a co-founder of IVR Nation. IVR Nation is one of a few companies championing a new approach to making these kinds of architectural decisions. In the new way, clients need not fly back and forth. They simply strap on a virtual reality headset and “step into” a digital version of their new property. Once the client is there—virtually, at least—she has a spatial understanding of how a furniture layout feels, or how a floorboard material meshes with the textiles chosen for bedding. Without leaving the VR experience, the client can make changes and collaborate with her partners in real time. What once took weeks can now happen in an afternoon. “It’s a real game changer for what the architecture industry has been doing,” Pagotto says. VR is a place Architects have come a long way from drafting plans on big sheets of royal blue paper with dotted white lines. The analog blueprint is, by now, practically a cartoon of an architectural rendering—but for years, they’ve still lacked the tools to bring their work into the third dimension. Most architects today will use CAD software to create computer-rendered mockups of a physical space. Some will even augment them by 3D scanning a property and feeding that data into the rendering. One particularly advanced design method is called building information modeling; with BIM, architects use meta-data about projects to create interactive, digital prototypes of buildings. This allows for a new degree of precision and efficiency during the design process. But even in sophisticated BIM and CAD programs, architects and clients can only see abstracted versions of a project. This makes architecture a particularly fitting application for VR. Technologists, filmmakers, and designers are still making sense of exactly how VR will fit into mainstream culture, but in its simplest form, VR is a place. So, too, is architecture. Pagotto and his IVR Nation co-founder, Olivier Demangel, recognized this a couple years ago and launched their studio in January 2015. Pagotto comes from the world of luxury retail design; Demangel is a veteran of the video game world. The combination is important: IVR Nation provides a service-for-hire for developers and designers, and the experience needs to simulate materials, finishes, and colors to work. To do that, IVR Nation treats 3D models a bit like video game design. Pagotto and Demangel take information from clients—either an existing 3D model or one they create from scratch based on the architect’s plan—and build the experience in Unreal Engine, a game design platform Pagotto says they chose “because it’s the most advanced in terms of photorealism.” Hardware for our architects of the future IVR Nation uses the Vive headset to show clients spatial renderings. Pagotto says they chose the Vive over, say, the Oculus Rift, because the Vive can track your body’s position (so if you lie down in the real world, you’ll also lie down in the virtual world) and since it comes with dedicated controllers that help users control their experience, it cuts down on common VR side effects like motion sickness. TruVision VR, another company working at the intersection of VR and architecture, also uses the Vive. It also offers clients experiences via the Samsung Gear VR or the Oculus Rift. This is partly because TruVision has a wider sliding scale for its projects. Some clients come in at the very initial stage of design, while others come in to make some final nips and tucks, says Connor Handley-Collins, a co-founder and sales and marketing director of TruVision. Like Pagotto, Handley-Collins says these new models allow for clients to make design decisions more efficiently than in the past. That cuts down on mistakes, and therefore, costs. “For us, the biggest part of the design process is the ability to change the objects and colors in real time,” Handley-Collins says. “Before we may have looked at colors in 2D, and then you do them one way, and they’re stuck.” These efficiencies are particularly desirable for large-scale projects that will use one template to design many rooms, like micro-living units, hospitals, schools, and hotels. Looking ahead, the ability to make these changes ahead of time will become even more powerful when they’re part of a larger, virtual decision-making process. This could include, for instance, construction worker training ahead of putting stakes in the ground. Dassault Systèmes’s Optimized Construction lets designers and builders create virtual animated scenarios that act out how to use equipment, or how to handle a given terrain. Once these become available, they’ll become part of a string of VR experiences that help buildings go up more efficiently. Right now, the design-oriented VR experiences come as services created by third-party studios like IVR Nation and Tru Vision. But Pagotto says soon, it will be a standard offering. “In the coming years architecture firms will integrate this in-house,” he says. “You can put your headset on and look directly at what you modeled.” That may be happening already: global architecture firm Gensler just launched its Gensler VR app, which combines with the Microsoft HoloLens to start showing clients work created in-house. Gensler will use the new technology to do things like adjust office layouts to encourage collaboration, move indoor infrastructure to make spaces more pleasant, and reconsider the sightlines in arenas to give sports fans the best view possible. For smaller firms like IVR Nation and Tru Vision, that could signal opportunity for consulting, or acquisition. Either way, soon, Pagotto predicts, “The whole architecture world is going to be working in real time.” Akio Moriwaki is responsible for global marketing strategy and deployment for the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry at Dassault Systémes. Mr. Moriwaki led the global marketing team in launching the Lean Construction Solution Experience in January 2013.

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With the rise of Building Information Modelling (BIM), the importance of standardisation within terms and definitions to support a seamless communication between actors in the construction industry is of the highest importance. Therefore, in order to explore the full potential of data in BIM we have to look at how such standards are implemented in the tools we use. The European Context In order for manufacturers to be able to sell their products within markets such as the European Union, the EU commission has created procedures on how to prove performance and intended use, for construction products (via the Construction Product Regulation - CPR), electrical equipment (via the Low Voltage Directive - LVD) etc. The testing and associated data that is created in meeting legislative frameworks such as the CPR and LVD provides the basis for most of the data that a manufacturer will need to share with its supply chain. Moreover, the associated EU standards under CEN/CENELEC provide a common technical language to assess the performance of products and systems for construction works and infrastructure. In Europe, governmental programs to define a “common context” have been established in order to agree on properties and definitions. Expert groups are set out to validate datasets, set out in national standards based on EU standards and ISO standards. These resources are what product data experts such as coBuilder use in order to incorporate a common technical language and standards-based construction product data structure when creating Product Data Templates for the European construction industry. These unified test methods are the foundation for manufacturers’ data, and therefore define what manufacturers data is for the market. - Says Lars Chr. Fredenlund, CEO of coBuilder Utilising manufacturer’s data within BIM software One of the problems with getting manufacturers up to speed with BIM, is that they already have all the data the industry requires, but it is unstructured and often stuck within PDFs. That is why coBuilder developed the goBIM tool – providing Product Data Templates that allow manufacturers to create Product Data Sheets based on standards (CEN, CENELEC, IFC, COBie etc) that are machine readable and interoperable with all languages and proprietary BIM software solutions. Find out more. Without providing interoperability solutions for product names and their associated parameters, the move of the manufacturer’s data towards BIM is hindered by the fact that the predefined parameters in proprietary BIM tools have their own language for product parameters. This therefore makes it hard for manufacturers’ specific data to be easily incorporated directly into BIM. The solution goBIM – coBuilder’s tool allows manufacturers to populate PDTs with their data, and it is then made available in hundreds of different languages and data formats. The data is now structured, interoperable and clients can select the properties they require in the format/language they require them in. All properties in goBIM are developed in accordance with harmonised standards under the CPR (Construction Products Regulation) as well as with LVD (Low Voltage Directive) and open BIM standards such as IFC and COBie. Even the basic free PDTs are available to all construction product manufacturers globally with Regional (e.g EU) national, and openBIM formats. THE OPPORTUNITY By mapping and importing the data from the manufacturers based on the CPR, LVD, IFC etc. through goBIM, you can make your data available in different languages openBIM formats and even push it into BIM software like Revit, Navisworks, ArchiCAD etc. That is how the collaborative philosophy of BIM can unite software providers such as coBuilder and Autodesk in order to help manufacturers, specifiers and contractors to jointly provide accurate and verified as-built data to models and CAFM systems. Published 7th September 2016 08:53 Posted by Mariela Daskalova Source: cobuilder.co.uk/wanted-standard-based-properties-in-bim-software

[visionrez]

Poor Integration Stifles Mobile Technology in Construction Collaboration is all about cutting out the time consuming and accuracy robbing steps of manual transfer. BIM and its technologies put a high value on interoperability and efficiency. Autodesk Revit can export quantity takeoff items seamlessly using Navisworks, which can either port to SQL or MS Excel using VisionREZ’s Navisworks plugin. Visit visionrez.com for more info