The Business of CAD | 16 November 2020
by Ralph Grabowski
Two years ago, Bricsys introduced Blockify, a command that converts identical 2D entities into one block with one click. This is useful for imported drawings and ones that were poorly drawn in two ways: makes drawing file sizes smaller, and makes them easier to edit: changing one block changes all instances of it in the drawing, like replacing all chairs in a drawing at once.
BricsCAD V21 automatically adds 2D and 3D constraints to make blocks parametric, and creates associative arrays when the modeler finds repetitive patterns of 2D entities. These can be edited in the BEdit environment, and seems to solve the painful problem of trying to figure out how to add parametrics to (dynamic) blocks.
Any parameter can now be geometry-driven. For instance, change the size of any part of a chair, and all connected items change appropriately.
Drawing Optimization
The new Optimize command fixes drawings by closing gaps and forcing lines horizontal/vertical/45-degrees within tolerances. This is handy for imported point clouds, which tend to have come up with lines that are rather shaky. As you change settings in the Optimize’s dialog box, the drawing updates in real time to show you which entities will be affected.
The Simplify command reduces the number of vertices in overly-verticed polylines, such from 350,000 to 450 vertices in the demo we were shown.
The CopyGuided command was added last year, and this year V21 adds MoveGuided, which heals related entities when, say, a door moved in a wall or a window is removed.
The Third Discipline: Civil Engineering
Once Bricsys established independence for its general CAD program, it branched out into verticals, specifically ones involving architectural and sheet metal design, with significant nods to 2D and 3D mechanical drawings. Over the last decade, Bricsys used advances in one area (say BIM) to advance other areas, such as in mechanical CAD. The leapfrogging is possible because Bricsys programs a single CAD package; it's much harder, for instance, for a Dassault to add a Catia function to a Solidworks.
Last year, Bricsys branched to another discipline, civil engineering. Well, it's not the broad range of civil engineering activities I know from my university days, but a narrower focus on terrain modeling and roadway design. Or, as Bricsys calls it, “visually-correct linear infrastructure modeling.”
This year's release allows users to map a 2D satellite photo onto a clipped 3D TIN (terrain) file, and then model in 3D on top of it. For roadway design, V21 adds spirals (needed for horizontal road curves) and parabolas (for vertical road curves). The new accuracy factor forces profiles to match existing groups, followed by optional manual edits with grips or with the Properties panel to manipulate stations, grades, elevations, and so on. There still is no input criteria, which for roads is design speed, which determines horizontal and vertical curvatures.
A “corridor” is a 3D cross-section that defines the elements of road and bridges (see figure above). BricsCAD can apply multiple corridor templates to make the road change along its length, such from road to bridge. There is no design analysis for pavements or bridge strengths.
V21 defines slopes for cuts and fills (embankments). Cuts and fills update automatically as users use grips to move the alignment horizontally and vertically. Missing is cut-and-fill balancing, which minimizes earth haulage and then adjusts the alignment to match.
Third-party developers provide some of the missing elements.
Point Cloud Processing
Two releases ago, Bricsys added the ability to import point cloud data, albeit indirectly. It converts common formats (.ptx, .pts, .las, and .rcp) in the background to its project format .vrm (Virtual Reality Model), which points to folders containing the point cloud files stored in an optimized format, .bpt (Bricsys Point Tree).
In V21, BricsCAD Lite can view point clouds added to drawings by a higher license. A new point cloud processing engine uses background processing and multi-threading to manipulate and navigate point clouds faster. Cropped sections of point clouds can be exported to .pts files.
These days, the tough task is turning the scatteredness of point clouds into the precision of 3D geometry. Those who lived through the raster-to-vector transformations of the late 1980s understand the challenge well. In v21, Bricsys takes the first step in generating 2D floor plans from point clouds through the new DetectFloor command. This is followed by the Optimize command to smooth out converted vector lines.
Other new point cloud-related commands do the following tasks:
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Fit planar surface geometry to flat areas of point clouds
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Fit lines to sections of point clouds
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Generate volume sections on a floor-by-floor basis (regions of points with similar z coordinates)
BubbleViewer is a separate app running alongside BricsCAD for walking through point cloud scenes. You specify a variety of colorizations: there's natural colors, naturally, along with directional colors, (red and green are horizontal, blue is vertical -- same as the UCS icon), or showing distances from cloud points to your viewpoint. The idea is that you use the viewer to identify walls, thickness of walls and slabs, and so on.
Finally, there is a new VR Viewer for looking at 3D models directly. It reads the aforementioned VRM files.
BIM
Bricsys BIM product owner Tiemen Strobbe showed us what's new in his company's building information modeling add-on. Some 80% of BIM work is repetitive, according to Bricsys, and so the company is working on automating the steps. Semi-automation tools include QuickBuilding, Bimify, and Propagate. Mr Strobbe mentioned also using LISP and Python to automate design tasks and data visualization.
Of the three, the addition new to V21 is QuickBuilding. It converts 3D spaces and solids into BIM models with specified story heights. This is the initial implementation, os users can expect enhancements over time.
Copying and pasting geometry is improved through the Propagate and CopyGuided commands using the context of the drawing to paste the geometry correctly, such as lining up with walls. Related to this is the Bimify and AutoMatch combo of commands for automating the placement of repetitive elements.
Drawing Composition
BIM programs like BricsCAD do nearly all design work in 3D, but in the end it's 2D construction drawings that are still needed on-site. There are two ways to make these drawings: flatten 3D models or slice 2D views through them. No matter how it's done, the production of drawings is tedious (well, it's pretty exciting the first few times you do it), so there is a push by numerous CAD programs towards the semi-automation of drawings. BricsCAD V21 offers its version of automated 2D drawing generation, including tag placement and drawing styles, through its Project Browser.
Two-D views are stored in separate drawings, which are linked to the project model through sheet sets. Views are arranged automatically through Sheetset Setup, with them generated as a background process. When users reduce the number of views on a sheet, BricsCAD adds more sheets automatically to accommodate the overflow. Hundreds of sheets can be generated in minutes, according to Bricsys, although we did not see this in the demo.
More interesting to me was V21’s ability to link drawing representations to entity properties. The example we saw showed fire ratings of walls with appropriate colors. (See figure below) This is done through the new Drawing Composition panel, which also defines tags, such as for fire doors.
Automatic design checking was mentioned, but not expanded upon. As construction detailing like dimensioning is still manual, this is to be added in the future.
Revit Editing
The hot topic these days is the importing and editing Revit files outside of Autodesk-supplied software, through an initiative of the Open Design Alliance. Here BricsCAD is no different: it imports RVT (Revit models) and RFA (Revit symbols) files as underlays or converted to editable entities, including importing selected entities from the Revit file.
V21 uses the Bimify command to turn imported (dumb) geometry into BIM elements by detecting what entities probably are, such as walls and slabs.
There was a whole whack of more info given to us on architectural modeling, but at this point I was getting cross-eyed from data overload. This two-part article is, after all, already close to three thousand words long.
I did perk up when version control was mentioned. How to have multiple users work on a single BIM model? With V21, Bricsys implemented GIT-based version control in which users check out a file locally from a server. It downloads only portions of models, and works online and offline. Currently in beta.
Mechanical Assembly Design
Bricsys mechanical product owner Dmitry Ushakov talked to us what is new on the mechanical side of BricsCAD. He showed us how V21 can convert a 3D solid model to sheet metal parts in under four minutes. “No one else can do this,” he said.
With the online session getting close to four hours long, I found myself taking fewer and fewer notes. Sorry! You can read the entire what’s-new list for BricsCAD V21 at bricsys.com/common/releasenotes.jsp and view the summit online at youtu.be/VnxrUoffY7k.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
A Bricsys new-release event is assuredly an exercise in feature overload, but in a good way: you know the folks at the company take their software and customers seriously. Despite the cornucopia, I noticed a few things missing.
There was no mention of generative design, which is okay, because it appears to be losing its luster as users go from “Wow! A million different designs!” to “Oh no, a million different ugly designs.”
CEO Erik de Keyser did not make an appearance.
Two years after being acquired by Sweden's Hexagon, there are no new links to Hexagon software other than one announced a year ago with Leica (for importing scanned point clouds). The Scan-to-BIM consortium announced last year by HOK, Leica, and Bricsys hasn’t gained more members.
Hexagon offers a half-dozen (or more — it’s hard to count) analysis and CAM programs. Perhaps next year we will see links to analyze and output products designed in BricsCAD.
In the end, I consider Bricsys’ reliance on a single file format its strength, but its limited links to external programs something that needs to be addressed.
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And in Other News
Design Master’s 11th annual BIM and MEP survey is now on. The survey starts at surveymonkey.com/r/DCBXXKF. Questions include the use of collision detection and BIM itself in your office. You can read the results of the surveys from other years here: designmaster.biz/blog/2019/12/mep-bim-2019-survey-results/. One of the surprising results is that over the last decade, BIM appears to be used less, rather than more.
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Like all other CAD vendors, CadLine Kft is holding their ArchLine.XP user conference online. It runs for three days, beginning Nov 24. Unlike all other CAD vendors, presentations at ArchLine.XP Expo will be held in eleven languages. Sign up at archlinexp.com/events
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“Maybe ten years ago, innovation was all about electrifying mechanical systems. Today, it seems to rely on material science: what can we create that's lighter, stronger, conductive, responsive, or in some other way unique, as a product differentiator?” asks Monica Schnitger in talking about Siemens’ acquisition of Clugi of The Netherlands, which will add computational chemistry for multi-scale simulations. Price was not announced. Details at schnitgercorp.com/2020/11/02/siemens-adds-computational-chemistry-modeling-to-simcenter/.
Letters to the Editor
Re: Readers Respond to Revit's Shared Parameters
Some interesting discussions about the gap between BIM as a design tool and what is required with regard to modeling for manufacturing / fabrication / construction.
You are right that this gap exists, that it is the cause of significant commercial and process inefficiencies, and that it isn’t much helped by some of the technology platforms that are widely used (in my case, in the AEC environment).
My view, however, is that this is largely driven by disconnection in business relationships, not by technological issues. I can give an example: it is common in my field of construction for a designer to generate drawings and/or BIM models as an end-product, and for these to form an input for construction and fabrication teams. Steelwork fabricators, who have used 3D CAD and CAM platforms for many years, sometimes take the designer’s model and adapt it, but it’s still more common for them to build their own model, fit for their own purposes.
This is partly driven by contractual liabilities (nobody wants to be responsible for data that is not their business), and partly by self-interest. The fabricator is interested in things such as plate-cutting, weld distortion, and precamber, where they need to adapt their model to suit working methods over which they have power. The designer does not.
We have on at least one occasion broken free from this, and it was successful and rewarding. For the design of a pedestrian bridge on the Ordsall Chord project (Manchester UK), we (the structural engineers) created a digital model which specified the structure in full, including every single weld, nut, and bolt. For the first time in the UK, that was enough. We did not produce any of the normal design drawings. This process saved a month off the design delivery program, and also measurably reduced design costs; this is not just the designer’s claim, the contractor confirmed to us that these savings were real.
How was this possible? Firstly, we used the same software that the steel fabricator uses (Tekla Structures) instead of what we were using for most of our other designs on the project (Bentley AECOSim). This ensured they would get the level of detail they needed, in the format most useful to them. Secondly, the fabricator’s own modeling technicians helped us prepare the model. This gave the end users confidence in the quality of the model content, so that they could use it as the direct basis for any further (non-design) elements they needed to add.
The project and processes used on that occasion are described in detail in our paper (icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/full/10.1680/jbren.16.00012) freely available online. The technology to do things better is already here: what is required is the boldness to forge new, more collaborative contractual relationships in industries that lack vertical integration. The improvements in quality and the real financial savings that can result need to be set against the inevitable obstacles such as overly-restrictive digital standards compliance, to allow these obstacles to be set aside.
- Brian Duguid, technical director
Practice Leader for Bridges and Civil Structures, Mott MacDonald
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