Petrol vs Batteries vs Fuel Cells

Petrol is the fuel of modern economies.

Solar for all its virtues is still more expensive in both land and $$$.

Petrol is the most dense, portable, relatively safe, energy storage medium. No current battery tech even comes close. Batteries also have significant energy losses over time. Batteries are much more subject to temperature variances.

Fuel cell technology is much closer in energy density and storage than batteries. Fuel cell tech comes close to Petrol in terms of overall performance. The only problem with Fuel cell tech is that it does not have the infrastructure that both electricity and petrol have in place.

Perhaps come day, solar + batteries will be a viable option on cost and performance. Today is not that day.

SCRUG July 19, 2018

SCRUG returned to Orange County this month. Architects Orange hosted. Thank you Rob!

We had two new sponsors. Thanks to Plan Grid and Masonry IQ for providing Newport Rib Company and drinks...

Tom Cuneio of Masonry IQ presented first to the gathering of 21 SCRUG members. Their Revit Plug-in and custom CAD software adds a Level of Detail presently lacking in the masonry tools in Revit. The main benefits to the add-in are hatch patterns on masonry walls that match both sides, masonry module alerts when cutting of masonry units will be required, coordination of bond beams, layout of control joints, ability to choose specific colors/products from suppliers, quick/easy custom coursing, color mixing and better renderings of masonry. And once your get outside of Revit, the software identifies every masonry unit. It is a dream come true for those making masonry shop drawings or those having to coordinate masonry with other building systems.

Under the hood, Masonry IQ

• creates custom .pat files for Revit to use
• lays out control joints - and they are adjustable
• generates sweeps on Revit walls
• for rendering it can create custom blends of masonry units and colors 
• creates custom .jpg files for Revit materials
• creates custom materials inside Revit

The future holds... custom grout colors, rebar tools, and more.

Wayne Atkins of Plan Grid presented second after a brief tech interlude. Their niche in the market is making a fast, mark up tool with offline capabilities. The live demo included things that field people typically do - review drawings, make mark ups, document punch lists, create RFIs, respond to RFIs, search for stuff on drawings, take photos, paste stuff on drawings, ...

Under the hood, Plan Grid

• creates a database out of the drawings exported from Revit or imported PDF files
• gathers everything that it considers as hyperlinks (drawing call outs, references in note blocks, and so on)
• stores everything locally and in the cloud
• time/user stamps every mark up, upload, attachment, photos, document, 3D photo, spreadsheet, specification, ...
• stores blank forms 
• project chat room
• version controls for issuance of drawings
• voice to text (it uses siri, android, cortena)
• geo tagging of all changes

The future holds...free RFI access/response, 

SCRUG June 2018

SCRUG had a new venue this month...Studio 111 in Long Beach CA.
Thanks to our sponsors... Kelar Pacific, Microdesk, & U.S. CAD. 
The food was street tacos, with cookies, danishes for a treat. The drinks included beer, pop and bottled water.

Studio 111/Retail Design Collaborative is in a LEED Platinum building. It is a remodel of a former Nordstrom Rack. 

I should have gotten a photo of the patio. It is a nice urban space.





Chuck and Garrett of Keller Pacific presented first. They ran through a variety of Scan to BIM projects. It was great to hear how they progressed from their earliest efforts to the modern tools and techniques that they have today. The software in use today includes: Recap and Edgewise. Scan to BIM is a value proposition. It provides value in time savings for the survey team. It is also a quality savings by providing accuracy to as tight a tolerance as ±2 mm. The uses of the technology is not just in pre-design, but also in construction and post construction. Keller Pacific also uses this technology to provide support for BIM deliverable compliance. Overall a solid presentation with videos of actual projects and narratives of how it was done. Thanks Keller Pacific.

The final presentation was by Clive of LOD Planner. They have been working on their product for more than 18 months. LODplanner.com is a web based collaboration and accountability reference for BIM projects. It is a live BIM Execution Plan. Some of the questions it helps to answer include:

• How do you pick the BIM standard for a project?
• Why is BIM required?  
• What does the team expect the BIM to do?
• What level of detail is required, when and for what purpose?
• How much modeling is required for the owner's purposes?

One future feature is to have the ability to integrate with existing tools to check the compliance of the deliverable.

SCRUG 3/15/2018

Last night at the offices of Little, an important meeting took place. Thanks to Allen Jay, and Sam

Little was the only sponsor. They provided the venue, parking, pizza, water, pop, beer, and wine.

Susan is a principal at little. She sat on the AIA documents committee for over 10 years. She presented some background and provided sample documents.

The 2013 documents discussed were: Guide to Digital Practice Documents, C106, E203, G 201, and G202

The key take away points are:

• AIA documents are made to fit into the court system
• It something won't work in court, it gets cut
• The committee includes lawyers, insurance representatives, architects, contractors
• Some AIA documents are guides on how to use the other documents
• The documents are updated every 5-10 years
• The AIA help line has good customer service Docinfo@aia.org
• Agreements save time and headaches by spelling out who does what, the scope
• Digital data includes everything digital: email, photos, BIM, Sharepoint, ...

Schedule sorting hack

SCRUG 9/21/2017 Making Money with Revit, Delivering the Promise of BIM

Sam Keville of Architects Orange was our master of ceremonies. A. Jay Holland had other matters to attend to.

Thank you to our sponsors... Kelar Pacific, Microdesk, & U.S. CAD. They provided pizza from Sgt Pepperonis Pizza, Cookies and drinks. 

Thank you to Little Diversified Architectural Consulting for providing the venue, hot drinks, wine and chilled water.

After introductions of new people, Ed Tallmage showed off the latest in tech from Leica Geosystems. His was one of  40 delivered thus far. This model connects wirelessly to the Apple Ipad Pro. It is lightweight and fast. Each scan taking two to three minutes based on whether you want hi res or low res. 

Sam jumped into the meat of his presentation. It was a throwback to the early days of #SCRUG when we had everyone exploring new features and sharing how to get things done.

With so many new comers he had to review some of the basics.

BIMX - Building Information Modeling Execution Plan. We covered this a bit in the 2/2017 SCRUG meeting. 

LOD - Sam shared his version of the Level of Detail breakdown of modeling. 

• 100 Walls & openings = 10% Construction Documents (CDs)

• 200 Content that approximates geometry = 25% CDs

• 300 Accurate geometry, cartoon set = 50% CDs

• 350 Plan Check Set, fully describe everything = 100% CDs

• 400 Issue to client for maintaining and managing the building = record set

ORG Chart - Who are the members of the team, what do they do, what are their capabilities, how are they related.

These three pieces work together. Susan  chimed in that these parts need to be codified in the contractual relationships. Sam emphasized that the documents are not enough, the responsibilities should be presented and divided up in a meeting. Who does what by when is the key to Making $$$. Agreements need to be in place. The contract should support the process.

Sam described the benefits of upgrading projects as new features are released since Revit is on an annual upgrade schedule with two interim upgrades. He reads the release notes. There is no better way to see, "what is in it for me". One of the biggest improvements in Revit 2017 has been Global Parameters. He uses it to make the parameters render well on AO's title blocks. It was a major frustration that text/parameters wouldn't line up properly in Revit 2016.Sam explained the Revit Project division of labor looks like at AO. 

·       Revit Lead - Project Architect

·       3D Drafter - Advanced User builds families, does modeling, uses plugins, know how to fix the model 

·       2D Drafter - Junior User uses mainly the site and annotation menus. Could use the Area plan tools to have live updated area schedules during schematic design.

With a proper division of responsibilities, a set can get to the 10% CDs in about a week. BIM Managers have a specialized set of skills that do not necessarily coincide with typical architect or CADD training. Skills like software license management, network analysis, plugin evaluation, and hardware troubleshooting are vital to keeping the Revit Team efficient.

Meetings, they are often not a good use of time. Sam shared some tips to help Production Meetings improve: Have an agenda with things on it like: lessons learned, new Revit Features, project successes, skill refreshing, training,...

Sam's motto: Get better every day. Make mistakes only once. 

Tidbits:

Using the roof by footprint, draw the rectangle, add points for spot elevations, then use cutouts to trim the edges rather than adjusting the boundaries. The 3D rendering patterns will look better - I am going to try this tip out.

Keynote Manager + is a software to manage the text files with keynote information. One need not use Revit to have access to it. A perfect tool for a project manager. Link keynotes to materials and schedules. If you make your tags right the keynote tag and the material tag can snap together. Workflow wise, one can use the text version of keynotes during schematic design and presentations and flip them to numbers once you have your schedules on the sheets!

Dynamo: Sam shared a Dynamo graph that grabs all the data form revision clouds and spits out an Excel file. If you follow protocol it generates a useful narrative for your revisions! Thanks Andrew King at WATG. The key points are to have 1) Where the revision came from and 2) What the revision changed. The excel file will have: 

• Sheet number

• Sheet Name

• Revision Number

• Revision Date

• Revit Element ID number

• Revit View

• and both 1) & 2) 

This .dyn was worth the wait. It essentially writes the revision narrative automatically.

SCRUG 8/17/2017 dRofus

The August 2017 SCRUG (South Coast Revit User Group) met at the Irvine California offices of Little Diversified Architectural Consulting.

Food was supplied by Super Mex. Cheese enchiladas and chicken enchiladas. Thank you to our sponsors... Kelar Pacific, Microdesk, & U.S. CAD.

Brok Howard of dRofus presented. He emphasized that his company was not trying to remake all the Revit Addins or tools inside Revit Architecture. Nor are they trying to have a huge feature set.  It can be used as a Revit content management solution and admittedly, it is clunky. 

dRofus leverages the existing tools in Revit to help designers focus on design. Their cloud based solution is a database that has bi-directional communication with Revit. dRofus can create and push shared parameters into Revit files. However, not all information needs to be in the model. The examples showed how an owner's requirements or an architectural program can reside outside Revit. With dRofus and Revit side by side one can have a list that depopulates as objects are placed in a Revit model. 

Many today use checklists to verify and confirm the correct number of items wind up in the Revit Model. For example: furniture, rooms, equipment, and so on. With dRofus a single click can place all the required revit families in a room for later adjustment. All the stuff lands at the room origin point, so use with caution.

One can compare square footage in dRofus and have a spreadsheet of what the owner asked for to what is actually in the model - with live updates. 

dRofus also can create an IFC file from the Revit model to allow visual navigation of the Revit Model inside a web browser. With the model objects in a list on half the web browser, one may easily click in the list to highlight in the 3D what is where and see it on the other half the web browser. 

Doors & Door hardware can be managed in dRofus. It can grab the relevant data from Revit and be manipulated and output to specifications or pushed back in. 

One opportunity that dRofus presents is designing the building requirements and specifications into a standard before any modeling actually takes place. In this manner is seems similar to the programming phase of a typical project. By placing the requirements into dRofus, it integrates with Revit and can facilitate increased quality and speed in design.