The first job my father held was apprenticing in an aircraft factory. Later he became a drafter, for which I also had a knack, and that's why now you read about CAD in this newsletter.
He wrote his life story, from which I borrow this chapter, in which he describes his experience taking the final exam for aircraft construction apprentices.
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In the days before our apprenticeship final exams -- verbal, written, and practical -- were to take place, much speculation was raised over the question of what kind of design would we have to figure out, and complete in time. Previous test pieces, displayed in showcases outside our classrooms, were intricate parts of airplanes.
Mr Grabowski at the drafting table
The big day arrived, and each one of us was given a locked toolbox. It contained the drawings, pre-cut materials, and specialized tools for the job. Standard tools and machinery were over in the training center, reserved exclusively for us. We had four hours in which to complete the practical portion of the exam, and we were told to start now!
Opening the box, we grabbed the drawings, flew over them, and saw that we were to fabricate and assemble a wing inspection hole cover, complete with a spring-activated thumb latch lock. All straightforward stuff, except for the double-coiled twin spring, which would be a tricky -- a challenging task.
From habit, I decided to tackle the most difficult part first. Winding spring steel wire requires tight over-winding, but only so much so as to allow for spring-back to the desired diameter. It was tricky all right. There were left-hand and right-hand windings, a loop in the center, two straight ends each 1.5" long, at right angles to the center loop.
Double-coiled twin spring
Alarm, everybody stop! The commissioners put their collective heads together and concluded what was obvious: Whoever pre-cut the spring wire had cut it too short. Hurriedly, longer pieces were provided for us to use. I happened to be the only one who had already completed the spring, found the shortness, and so sounded the alarm. Did I get extra time? No, but later I did get extra credit.
I was happy with my final marks. Matter of fact, the director of training, Mr. Jacob, whose signature was on all aircraft apprenticeship diplomas, personally upgraded my marks from Good to Excellent. His initials are to this day a pleasant reminder of the best years I had in my younger life.
I kept in touch with Mr. Jacob by letter throughout my time in Europe. And on my only visit home, I stopped by at the aircraft plant. He took time out to show me the new long-distance bomber capable of flying across the Atlantic and back. Yet there they stood, lined up, waiting. Waiting for what? For engines, which were not available because of lack of nickel and other raw materials to fabricate the engines. |
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Re: Autodesk at 2020
Great article and very timely for me personally.
In the '90s I taught AutoCAD extensively but as my career evolved I left it behind. I went full circle and I am back in design and using AutoCAD full-time. I was fortunate enough to get back into teaching AutoCAD 2020 starting last September. After a couple of terms trying to explain to students why the Limits command still exists (et al) I decided to abandon my AutoCAD teaching.
I thought I would enjoy teaching AutoCAD again, but I really didn't at all. The software is just too complex and confusing with all its variants of anything and everything. And as I get older I don't need the hassle in my life, so I gave it up again.
Teaching the software, though, really showed me how much feature-piling Autodesk has done over the years. I had to laugh when you said, "Yet another palette to insert blocks" and it's really NOT a very intuitive one either. Just one more example of rampant duplicity that gets programmed in, instead of real improvements. And it still crashes all the time. Sad. Must be a bitch to maintain that code base.
I am seriously looking at some of the work-alikes you have written about.
It's fabulous that you are out there doing this, reporting on software across the industry that not everyone has the time to research or, in many cases, even be aware of. The community is a far better place due to your presence and active involvement and I know you've been in the trenches a long time. You also are a survivor, sir.
- Robert Melnyk
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You said that Revit is now the primary software for architecture in some regions. Actually there is also a new clone called Renga Architecture from Ascon of Russia. Any data on how people now see Renga as a serious replacement for Revit?
- Kholish Nur
The editor replies: I am familiar enough with Renga that I know it is not a Revit clone. It has, in my opinion, the most beautiful interface of any BIM software, but it is for architectural, MEP, and structural design using Russian standards. https://rengabim.com/en/
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Excellent summary of Autodesk ‘bad business’. Thanx! I can’t tell you how much I hate the Autodesk business model.
- Chris Cadman
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In response to your recent upFront.eZine #1043 newsletter article “Revit at 20,” you make a series of wildly incorrect points that belie even a basic understanding of the platform, and miss some of the most crucial aspects of how Revit’s development is currently affecting the AEC market. You do at least get the age of Revit correct. After that, well. In Revit, ceiling heights are “instance” properties, that is, each individual ceiling has its own Height setting. You do not input a new ceiling height in one place have it change across an entire building unless you either (a) explicitly tie each and every ceiling height to a single global parameter, or (b) group the common ceilings together and insert the group on each floor. Not impossible, but it doesn’t happen automatically. A better example to illustrate the point of BIM is perhaps adding or removing a door, which automatically updates the plans, elevations, and schedules. Revit is most certainly not “held together with glue and gum.” When it was first purchased by Autodesk, they did have to do a lot of work to rework much of the spaghetti code and bailing wire which kept it together, but over the years Autodesk has rewritten large portions (if not all) of it and ultimately produced a platform that is much less crash-happy than it used to be. With each development cycle Revit’s codebase has to undergo extreme testing so that new features do not break existing functionality, which likely explains in large part why we don’t get a lot of new features every year. Instability does happen (see the recent Revit 2020.2 update family corruption debacle) but overall the platform is more stable than ever, more so on very large projects. Almost no one using Revit today creates an entire building in a single file, unless it’s designed by a single person, and even then it’s a bad idea. You would quickly hit a wall with having so many people Worksharing a single file. Having several discipline-specific models are the norm in order to parse out workloads efficiently. Architectural, interiors, mechanical, plumbing, electrical, fire protection, site, etc. at a minimum all get their own files, with additional models for FF&E, exterior enclosure, signage, space planning, low voltage vs power, etc. being typical on larger projects. My current project has 32 active design models and over 50 separate trade subcontractor models that we work with daily. The largest files are well over 1GB in size. BIM isn’t losing any luster, it’s just not considered the brand new thing anymore. It’s simply the new universal standard for building design and construction that AutoCAD was 20 years ago. No one is calling for its demise. If anything the number of smaller specialty designers and trades coming on board and joining the BIM community is growing, not shrinking. These days no one is going from BIM back to CAD. Remote collaboration is a problem solved in several ways under Revit, and is the primary driver for the creation of Autodesk BIM 360, which is arguably the best platform under which to work across office / company boundaries. Maybe this is the “Glue" Sw you are referring to? Level of Detail (not to be confused with Level of Development = LOD) has zero to do with it, and as far as I know there are no other third-party (read: non-Autodesk) “enhancements that optimize the shuttling of monster models between multiple offices” that are worth mentioning. Regardless of Quantum development, your comment that “Revit was designed to be irreplaceable through an incomplete API that operates only inside the program, along with undocumented file formats” is patently absurd. No one designs an application from scratch thinking up ways to screw their customers. Revit HAD NO API when it was first created and was built with no intention of ever exposing anything through one. Under Autodesk the first API was ultimately developed and supported - by one person - then released with Revit Building 8 in 2005, I believe. Today the Revit API is much different; it’s matured to the point that Autodesk uses it to develop additional applications such as the Worksharing Monitor, Revit DBLink, and other usual stuff we all install with the program. Now the API is freely accessible from any number of interfaces, through Dynamo running alongside of (not inside of) Revit, as well as Python, C++ / C Sharp, and so on. If anything the API now allows people to customize and enhance the platform in more ways than you can AutoCAD. To say that Revit does documentation “poorly” is an outright falsehood. Sections and callouts are always tied to the drawing / sheet number -- youu simply can’t mess it up. Done correctly, all text notes are made “smart” through the use of tags which annotate properties, materials, keynotes, and parameters from the model elements directly, allowing two-way changes to happen in one place and percolate throughout the drawing set immediately. Similarly, schedules always read model-based properties and can use formulas to calculate totals and other extrapolated information. All of this makes the usual QA redlining process a shadow of what it was under a CAD application. Graphically, you have complete control over component family element graphics in plan, elevation, and 3D; we have multiple 3D graphics options controlling ambient and hard shadows, background, shading, transparency, and even squiggly lines. From day one we have had scale-dependent text notes, dimensions, hatch pattern scales, and line weights that all naturally Just Work, unlike AutoCAD’s Annotative feature which is STILL, 20 years later, simply beyond horrible. All of this makes documentation much more fluid and consistent drawing sheet to sheet and, more importantly, from designer to designer. The people still getting ugly drawings out of Revit are those who just go with the idiotic out of the box settings and don’t even try to make things look better. “For its part, Autodesk props up Revit with 31 Web-based BIM 360 apps that manage projects, costs, and so on. I consider BIM 360 a stopgap measure.” We have at least 31 separate available solutions for working across project models and documentation and you call this platform a “stopgap?” Seriously? This is not counting the hundreds of third-party solutions such as Egnyte and Revizto which have BIM 360 integrations to allow those applications to plug into the ecosystem. What’s the minimum number of applications required for it not to be considered a stopgap? Having solidified its place in the design world, Autodesk’s recent acquisitions of Assemble, BuildingConnected, and PlanGrid, among others, helps close the loop by bringing the “C” in AEC into the BIM fold. Again, there are a huge number of truly great third party construction-specific apps that support Revit and BIM 360. This isn’t to say Revit is free of challenges looking forward; I could spend at least another hour talking about what’s wrong with Revit and how to fix it. But what other platform has more breadth and depth, and can play in both the design and construction space as well as Revit and BIM 360?
- Matt Stachoni
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