Archive for February, 2010
Bringing the Comfort of Home to Healthcare
Feb 19th
Nor-Son Earns National Construction Award for Rural Hospital
San Diego, CA Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) recognized the nation’s top 2009 construction projects during its Excellence in Construction and National Safety Excellence awards celebration at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel and Convention Center in San Diego, CA on February 4. Nor-Son’s work on the Cuyuna Regional Medical Center Addition, Crosby, MN earned the company a national award in the category of HEALTHCARE – $10–25 MILLION.
Nor-Son Attains National Recognition from Associated Builders and Contractors
Feb 17th
San Diego, CA Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) recognized the nation’s top 2009 construction projects during its Excellence in Construction and National Safety Excellence awards celebration at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel and Convention Center in San Diego, CA on February 4. Nor-Son’s work in the home, hospitality, healthcare and commercial sectors has earned the company four national level awards. Nor-Son’s representatives accepted awards for Cuyuna Regional Medical Center, Crosby, MN; Gull Lake Conference Center, Nisswa, MN; Chase on the Lake Hotel, Walker, MN; and a Rustic Retreat in Northern Minnesota.
Nor-Son – Nor-Son Attains National Recognition from Associated Builders and Contractors
3D Painting features
Feb 17th
Sneak peek: New 3D Painting features and render surface improvements in 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design
Caddies” for soft selection
Feb 17th
Sneak peek: Introducing “caddies” for soft selection (and other modeling functions) in 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design
Sneak Peek: Object painting in 3ds Max?
Feb 17th
Here’s a sneak peek at some things we’ve got cooking. We’re going to do a series of these and you can classify them as “developer art” because either developers created them or we’ve had our sales engineers throw them together while training them. Don’t confuse these with the professional videoas that will come later.
Sneak peek: Object painting in 3ds Max
That crazy wizard, Carl-Mikael, developer of Polyboost and Graphite has been busy. Here’s a sample of what he’s been up to (and trust me, there’s more coming):
Visual Tour – high speed rail
Feb 11th
A guided tour of the proposed high speed rail lines running from Anaheim to San Francisco, San Diego to Los Angeles and Fresno to Sacramento.
Trelligence Affinity for Revit Pre-Design | Programming | Schematic Phases
Feb 8th
How can I automate the collecting/managing of a design project’s conceptual/programming data while connecting it with my Revit project?
Which is easier and less costly to obtain?
- Asking a client to “sign off” on a design that’s been “lightly modeled” according to their design scope or waiting until its been fully modeled in Revit?
Trelligence President, Larry Ciscon PhD, demonstrated Trelligence’s value for capturing, visualizing, analyzing and bi-directionally syncing a design project’s programming data (scope) with Revit models.
Business value points from my Madison Revit User Group notes:
- Trelligence is designed to “inform the designer, without forcing the design programming onto the designer”.
- Start your project in Trelligence Affinity or in Revit – Changes syncs using Revit’s API
- Import spreadsheet data sources & connect/sync to Revit project properties
- Template driven for specific project-type & prototype programming; schools, hospital, medical clinics, restaurants, etc.
- Templates store your standard client questionnaires, pre-defined room layouts, space types, equipment requirements, room areas & volumes
- Provides visual color coding (text, 2D or 3D) to compare programming to design: spreadsheet views, bubble diagrams, graphing, mass modeling, single-line or color filled walls between spaces
Quantifies spaces-volumes between multiple buildings, floors, wings, departments, alternates, design options and phases - Sets relationships, dependencies & priorities between spaces-rooms | informs designer when these conflict with original programming.
- Revit-BIM Interoperability: Importing, connecting & syncing 2D/3D plans between Revit & Trelligence
- Export to IFC and gbXML formats
Trelligence has been available for Revit 2008, 2009 and now 2010.
Trelligence Affinity provides significant value for the best phase of a Revit project; before its fully modeled.
Additional Revit Conceptual / Pre-Design Phase Tools
- WinEstimator Revit-BIM Workshop | Marquette University-College of Engineering
- January-February 2010 Free University Seminars | WinEst Revit-BIM Construction-Estimating Technologies
Original article from the Revit-BIM Playbook
SmartBIM Library® Has Been Updated
Feb 4th
SmartBIM Library 3.8 Now Available
The SmartBIM Library from Reed Construction Data has been upgraded in its new release. We’ve added new content and enhanced features to ensure that SBL is a single source to simplify BIM content management. It is a cost-effective solution for Autodesk® Revit® users that:
- Streamlines design workflow
- Facilitates the generation of catalogs from Revit objects
- Simplifies storage, organization and location of Revit objects including user’s existing content
- Enables manufacturers, architects, engineers and building owners to easily share catalogs of objects
Get a product demo and/or download a trial version now!
Click here to determine your ROI with SmartBIM Library!
Industry Comments
The latest family update to SmartBIM is major. Impressive amount of plumbing fixtures, ceilings, mechanical equipment (!) has been added. And also too easy to drop too much stuff in my model… They’re doing a nice job.
Andrew Watkins, AIA, LEED AP, Senior Associate
Over 23,000 Quality Architectural Objects
SmartBIM Library comes pre-loaded with over 22,950 high quality Revit architecture family types. Reed, an AIA partner, created these SmartBIM objects to meet the high standards architects demand.
One Source To Simplify BIM Content Management
Automatically publish and load Revit families into SmartBIM Library from a user’s file system, Autodesk® Revit project files or Autodesk® Seek. Users can easily manage all BIM content in one place.
Create New Catalogs & Merge Content
Easily navigate the SmartBIM Catalog, find the object and simply drag-and-drop it into a Revit project. Architects have the flexibility to create a master office catalog, a catalog for each project or a catalog for each building type.
Search, View, Tag & Manipulate Objects
Users can view Revit Families by category and type, hierarchies, 3D thumbnails, DWF views or by searching family, property, type and userdefined tags. Drag-and-drop can also be used to insert families into a Revit project or save families to a directory folder.
Best Practices & Help in Organizing Data
SmartBIM Library’s flexible interface includes guidelines describing best practices for modeling objects in Revit. These guidelines include modeling advice for each Revit category, recommended family and type name conventions, tips on modeling for ‘count ability’ and design representation.
Product Features
- Support for Revit 2009 & 2010
- Over 23,000 high quality Revit architecture and engineering family types, including manufacturer specific objects and generic objects
- Family Content Publisher plug-in generates libraries for existing Revit objects
- Improve productivity by dragging objects from SmartBIM Library directly into Revit
- User-defined object tags allow users to identify objects according to their preferences
- Automatic content update service delivers new Revit families directly to the user desktop as soon as they are available
- Powerful search tools allow users to easily find content by family, type, properties, or object tag
- Create new catalogs and merge content for maximum object management flexibility
- Flexible navigation to Revit objects by thumbnail or by tree hierarchies including categories, families, and family types
- Open and search across multiple catalogs for increased efficiency
- Customized desktop allows users to turn panes on and off and re-size, move, arrange, and drag panes outside of the application frame for maximum flexibility
- Contains Revit modeling guidelines and suggested object naming conventions
Deployment
SmartBIM Library currently installs on the desktop or to a Local Area Network.
Learn More!
Learn how SmartBIM Library can load objects from architects’ files or other 3rd party sites, and create thumbnail and DWF views to make object selection easier. Demos are provided to demonstrate how SmartBIM Library organizes, displays and inserts Revit objects which assemble into Revit design projects. Also see Quick Cost Estimator and Quantity Take-Off tools as value added aspects of SmartBIM Library.
Get a product demo and/or download a trial version now!
Click here to determine your ROI with SmartBIM Library!
Download the SmartBIM Library Overview Sheet by clicking here.
Excalibur (XBR) public unveiling
Feb 1st
Excalibur (XBR) public unveiling took place on January 27th, 2010 via 3 webinars. Over 450 people joined us to review how we plan to go about the restructuring of 3ds Max and tackling some core issues to ensure that 3ds Max remains the workhorse of the industry for a long time to come. Some statistics:
- 93% of attendees said the presentation was good or excellent
- 88% said that the XBR initiative was important, 86% said that we are tackling the core issues that they think exist
- Attendees were asked to pick one thing for us to focus on, 30% gave equal weight to Stability and Performance, 18% said Features and 16% said Usability, 9% said Interop
- XBR Graphics was the most important as 42% said we should focus on that if they had to pick one thing; new UI was second at 19% followed by Diet, Doc views and Simulation at around 11-14%
- Ratings by core area (1-not useful, 4-excellent) shows that everything rates between a “Definitely useful” and a “Excellent! That will make a big difference for me”
- XBR Graphics: 3.6
- XBR Docs: 3.3
- XBR Simulation: 3.3
- XBR Diet: 3.2
- XBR UI: 3.2
- XBR Data: 3.1
Public link to view one of the sessions: http://adinc.na4.acrobat.com/p23782361/
Thanks to all of you that joined the webinars and gave us some of your time to discuss the future. We learned a lot, I hope you did too.
