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. 

USC BIM Conference 2017, "BIM 2017: what's next?"

I attended the eleventh annual BIM conference at my alma mater. https://arch.usc.edu/calendar/bim-2017-whats-next-sold-out

Here is what I learned:

1. More and more firms are bringing visualization into their design work flow
• Virtual Reality
• Augmented Reality
• Reality Capture is replacing site photography
• 3d Printing
2. Machine Learning and Internet of Things bring valuable data to the design process
3. Grasshopper, Dynamo, Lumion are software to leverage what computers are good at to improve design outcomes
• Do analysis to better understand the performance of design
• Grasshopper can create visually complex designs using math and small repeated elements like bricks
• Dynamo can gather data from the design and automate repetitive tasks
4. The number of tech companies involved in VR and its technologies is extensive - Vive, Samsung, OculusRift, HoloLense, ...
5. Some VR tech allows live design - move equipment in space, add objects,
6. A virtual dissection table allows doctors to perform operations in a virtual environment using full body scans
7. A structural engineering firm used scripting to model every structural steel connection on a large project; they used Tekla to analyze and optomize the structure to identify and eliminate steel that was redudndent; the Tekla model was used by the fabricator

I already knew, and it was reinforced:

1. BIM helps designers make better design decisions and create better constructability
2. Sun studies optimize overhang performance
3. VR of virtual construction saves over building full scale mockups (Operating Rooms, Hospitality)
4. Each stake holder has different priorities, design teams must analyze the priorities and seek to maximize the satisfaction across many dimensions of priorities
5. 3d laser scanning is used for as-built visualization and to help design in existing structures; it reduces field time; one project is estimated to have saved ~$900,000 in change orders

If you have any questions or would like further discussion, please comment on the post.