Monday, November 23, 2020

Physna & Thangs Do Algorithmic 3D Searches

Issue #1,075: | 23 February 2020

by Ralph Grabowski with Paul Powers

Several companies in our field of CAD offer 3D search tools. If you need a certain size of compressor or washer, then 3D-search finds ones that are similar. The idea is to find look-alikes using hints like 3D geometry, 2D sketches, photographs, dimensions, colors, classifications, and text descriptions.

Paul Powers is ceo of Physna, and he has taken a different approach to 3D search. His company's claim is that it can take 3D data from any source -- CAD, AR, VR, scans, OBJ -- and convert the file data into mathematics that describes the geometry. The company offers two products, the commercial Physna and the free Thangs.

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Ralph Grabowski: What is the benefit of your algorithmic approach to 3D-search?

Paul Powers: We map the unique 3D polygonal structures of models, as well as every subpart and any direction of 3D, spatially. For instance, we know that the cap belongs to the water bottle, and where the cap resides. Our machine learning makes predictions on what the model might be called, like "bottle of water," even of the brand of water bottle based on its shape, such as Evian.

The data is stored in a MongoDB NoSQL database, and not in the models themselves.

Grabowski: How did you get the idea to use mathematics for 3D-search?

Powers: I have a background in international patent law, which uses algorithms to find stolen text, pictures, and so on, but there was none for 3D models. There is a need to know every possible relationship, like trying to find just the head of Mickey Mouse rather than the entire body (and vice versa).

Other geometric search tools rely on CAD sources and use entire models, so the cap on the water bottle would get lost. Translating into different formats to enable searching can also result in data loss.

The mathematical background comes from astrophysics, which I took for a year, just long enough to realize that the mathematics astronomers use to determine locations of stars relative to one other (e.g. using signatures and patterns specific to certain locations with the use of various data points ) could be used for 3D objects.

I never thought of using it for CAD at first, but then we were approached with a lot of use cases – over 300 so far -- and many of them involved engineers.

Grabowski: Do you have an API so that end users can use your technology?

Powers: End users can already use the functionality available in Physna’s enterprise version and in Thangs. We are also working on an API that will allow others to create additional use-cases.

Grabowski: How do you make money, and who funded you?

Powers: Through SaaS [software as a service]. We sell licenses of the enterprise version based on the number of users and number of models.

The Thangs site is free to use. It is our consumer-facing Web site that crawls the Web using our algorithm to search for 3D models. It has over a million of them now. https://www.thangs.com/

We have raised $8.9 million so far, and soon will have another announcement.

Grabowski: Where does the name Physna come from?

Powers: It comes from "physical DNA."

*The user interface of the Thangs Web site*

Trying Out Thangs

Thangs is a free site that lets you test out a simplified, consumer-level version of Physna’s algorithms at https://thangs.com. You can upload 3D models to search for, or to share with other people. It has over 50,000 members.

When I tried it out, I hit a point of confusion: the site offers two Upload buttons that do different things. One is for uploading models to the Thangs database, after which you and others can search for them. No search is involved.

The other Upload "button" is part of the search bar and is meant for visual searches: it's for uploading models like the one(s) you are looking for, and then Thangs is meant to return results. The files you upload through this button are not uploaded to the Thangs database, and so they are not searchable by others.

Thangs accepts file in the following formats up to 250MB each:

.3dxml
.CATPart
.dwg and .dxf
.iges and .igs
.ipt
.jt
.model
.par and .prt
.sab, .sat, and .sldprt
.step and .stp
.stl
.vda
.x_b and .x_t
.xcgm and .xml

Thangs offers unlimited storage, along with version control for collaboration, which I did not test. While the site boasts 1.1 million models, the most popular models on the site are organic mesh models more suitable to games and renderings. That’s because while the majority of models are industrial components from suppliers, they are less popular and so less obvious -- unless you search specifically for them. It searches models from users as well as publicly available ones on other sites that hold 3D models.

I tested Thangs with a 3D model of a motor from SKG Sweden, which makes models of its products available in multiple formats: STEP, Solidworks, SAT, Pro/Engineer, Parasolid, IGES, and 2D DWG.

*Thangs scanning the content of a 3D model*

I uploaded the model in SAT format, and then tested Thangs by uploading the same model in the other formats. Here are the results, along with the time it took to upload, scan, and search. Because of the efficiency and inefficiency of each format, file sizes ranged between 400KB and 3MB, and the polygon count between 900 and 23,000.

STEP (.step) -- 19 seconds; match found correctly

Solidworks (.sldprt) -- 9 secs; found incorrect results like a series of washers and other simple parts at other sites

SAT (.sat) -- 17 secs; match found correctly

Pro/Engineer (.prt.1) -- not accepted

Parasolid (.x_t) ---- 10 secs; found incorrect results like a series of washers and other simple parts at other sites

IGES (.igs) -- 49 secs; found no correct results but mostly found unrelated organic models at other sites, such as the left arm of a HE Barbarian.

DWG (2D views) -- I canceled the operation after waiting ten minutes for scanning to complete.

Out of the seven formats I tested, two returned correct results. Physna explains why: “The algorithm doesn’t just search for similar parts. It looks for all geometric relationships. It’s likely that these parts are able to be used inside of the part you uploaded. But Thangs is soon going to receive an enhancement that will make the meaning of these results clearer (like in Physna’s enterprise version) and show not only what is related, but exactly why, how and where.”

In the case of the HE Barbarian left arm, Physna says, “The results aren’t technically incorrect because a false positive isn’t mathematically possible, as the algorithm searches for geometric relationships, not just similar models. What you’re seeing is a partial match (some portion of the geometry is the same between the parts). The reason these results don’t make much sense is that Thangs uses a simplified version of Physna’s algorithms. We’re in the process of updating the algorithms, which include weighting to remove these results that aren’t helpful.”

For the failed DWG search, Physna reports that “2D<>3D search is not yet supported in Thangs. DWG isn’t a 3D file format, so while you can save the model in Thangs, the 3D<>3D search algorithm won’t work on it.”

In summary, Physna told me, “Thangs doesn’t yet contain the full algorithm set available in the enterprise version. as it uses a simplified version of Physna’s algorithms. We’re in the process of updating the algorithms. Thangs also doesn’t yet normalize the models to the same extent Physna’s enterprise version does. That is why you’re seeing differences between file types.”

https://physna.com

And in Other News

MachineWorks releases Polygonica 3.0 SDK [software development kit], its component library for polygon mesh modeling with automatic determination of best-fit tolerance and zone-based remeshing.

The library is used by ANSYS, 3D Systems, Mecsoft, and others. Actually, there is much, much more to this release, and you can read all about it at polygonica.com/polygonica-blog/polygonica-30-new-features/.

- - -

CCE is pre-announcing Review Room, an add-on to its EnSuite Cloud online file viewer that will use peer-to-peer connections to review CAD files, and so avoid storing your proprietary files on remote third-party servers (aka ‘the cloud’). “This has never been done before,” says the company. It’s due to be released in a few weeks, so sign up through cadcam-e.com/EnSuite-Cloud/index.aspx.

- - -

Also in pre-announcing mode is Siemens for the next release of NX coming out in December, with the highlight feature being MBD [model-based definitions]. It automates rules-based PMI [product and manufacturing information] through a software advisor that checks data. A demo video is posted at blogs.sw.siemens.com/nx-design/the-all-new-model-based-definition-is-coming-soon/.

- - -

Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through Feed Burner at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

Letters to the Editor

Wow, a new format!

- Stan Przybylinski

The editor replies: Yup! I detail the gruesome changeover process at worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/10/now-is-the-time-to-cancel-mailchimp.html.

- - -

For some reason I stopped getting the newsletter around the beginning of October. When I tried to resubscribe I received a strange web page. In any event I would like to keep receiving the newsletter if possible.

- Mike

The editor replies: I switched my mass email provider from MailChimp (much too expensive for a free newsletter!) to SubStack, and so the old subscribe link no longer works. I will add you to the mailing list manually, and you can catch up on back issues at www.upfrontezine.com.

- - -

I only just noticed, but you might want to remind subscribers to check their Junk or Spam folders if they seemingly are no longer getting upFront.eZine in their Inbox. Speaking from experience.

- Jim

Re: Readers Respond to Revit's Shared Parameters

Nice to see the great response to the Revit Shared Parameter exchange you published. Sometimes I think my suggestions just come from a very jaded place. The stress of managing BIM ended my career, which I may be not-so-secretly bitter about.

- Dave Edwards
Dave Edwards Consulting

The editor replies: Some aspects of technology work great, but other areas are desperately bad, and so I fully appreciate you bringing them up!

- - -

The issue with multiple sets of different BIM systems is without question a huge problem. My company is mostly involved in the Catia world for aerospace. That said, this same problem happened to aerospace many years ago. A perfect example of it is described in intuitivestories.com/airbus_and_trillion_dollar_engineering_error.html -- a trillion-dollar Airbus problem.

Here is how Boeing and Airbus -- the two largest airplane manufacturers in the world -- addressed the problem.

Boeing -- works under the AS9100 guidelines. As part of the guidelines, there is a specific AS9102 “First Article Inspection Report” form that must be submitted whenever you generate CAD data. Folks like inspectionxpert.com/fai/as9102 are common in this industry.

Airbus -- has a similar approach, but uses different software: airbus.com/content/dam/corporate-topics/publications/suppliers/A220-Suppliers-Quality-Requirements.pdf. Airbus requires that all Catia files submitted be stamped inside the Catia file that Q-Checker has blessed this file; see technia.us/software/q-checker/.

These processes have, of course, trickled down to most of their suppliers. Both Inspection Expert and Q-Checker are $10,000 products. With software this expensive, this should give you an idea of how serious this problem has become. We at CAD/CAM Services now offer checking with these software products as a service to customers who have no interest in spending so much on checking software just to make a part. And of course, we have to provide not just the reporting, but the fixing of that part or assembly to pass inspection.

Until BIM requires a version of something like this checking/certification program, BIM will continue to be a logistics nightmare. Stay safe.

- Scott Shuppert, president
CAD/CAM Services

The editor replies: I think that buildingSmart and IFCs are supposed to (eventually) be the solution, but I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future. MCAD benefits from having giant manufacturing firms who can dictate standards. Building construction is far too dis-integrated for one standard to have a chance of ruling. When it comes to input from BIM vendors, Autodesk doesn't seem interested enough, and Nemetschek, while interested, is at this point not big enough.

Mr Shuppert replies: And therein lies the problem. Which is also why we, as a CAD service bureau, shy away from BIM work. It is pretty hard to make everybody happy.

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Vectorworks (large company donation): “We greatly appreciate your continued support.”

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

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Notable Quotable

“Minimum wage is the industry standard, I’m afraid. Now, would you like to be called a Colleague or an Associate?”

-Management Speak (@managerspeak on Twitter)

*4771

Posted at 07:00 AM in Interviews, Q&A, Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, November 16, 2020

Bricsys Digital Summit 2020, Cont'd

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.

*Deciding which lines get to be straightened-out*

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.

*Cross-sections being applied to bridges and roadways*

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.

*Point cloud data being converted to rooms*

Other new point cloud-related commands do the following tasks:

Fit planar surface geometry to flat areas of point clouds
Fit lines to sections of point clouds
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.

*Viewing a point cloud through the new VR viewing function in BricsCAD*

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.

*Fire ratings color coded into a generated drawing*

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

- - -

“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.

*Architectural render of the completed Ordsall Chord*

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

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers donating towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Randall McSwain: “Thank you Ralph, for your continued work with the upFront.eZine.”
Alex Kunz of A. G. Kunz LLC (small company donation): “Thank you for the continued insights & perspective.”

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then I suggest the following amounts:

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$750 for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750

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Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.

Notable Quotable

“Apple leads the world in charts with no y-axis or numbers.”

-Owen Williams (@ow on Twitter)

*4780

Posted at 07:00 PM in Software, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, November 09, 2020

Bricsys Digital Summit 2020

Issue #1,073 | 9 November 2020 | The Business of CAD

by Ralph Grabowski

The problem in covering Bricsys' annual conference each year is the overwhelming amount information broadcast to attendees. Whereas some CAD vendors introduce a very few new functions each year, the much smaller Bricsys corporation generates hundreds of changes for its lone software program that handles general, mechanical, civil, and architectural drawings and models.

In other years, the info deluge was spread over two days; this year, over four hours. So, I'll report on a bunch of things that were announced, but not everything. You can view the recording at youtu.be/VnxrUoffY7k. For the official what's-new list, see the 31-page-long bricsys.com/common/releasenotes.jsp, which is updated with each point release.

Some 2,900 people watched the live event, about 6x more than attended in-person events of earlier years. Unlike many other CAD firms, Bricsys always runs their software demos live, with no pre-recorded interactions with the software.

*Product specialist Chi-Yan demo’ing BricsCAD live with 2D and 3D mice*

Global Licensing

Bricsys has a new tag line, “Connecting people and companies that transform CAD, BIM, and mechanical design of today.” The company always has emphasized its unified approach in using a single CAD program with a single file format in which to store drawings and models. The only translation customers need to perform is on files coming from non-DWG CAD programs.

This year, the emphasis in the keynote was on the global nature of their software licenses. This is an issue, because some CAD vendors limit use of the software to the country in which the license was purchased.

Chief operating officer Mark van den Bergh reminded us that BricsCAD does not have named-user licenses, nor does it limit license use to single countries, nor does it force customers onto subscriptions. “One license for planet earth,” said Mr van den Bergh. As well, an office license can be used at home.

A testimonial from Mazda spoke of the company’s appreciation for global licenses. “The fact that we can use the same licenses overseas is definitely a factor.” BricsCAD is used by Mazda for drawings of production lines, and the company expects to move BricsCAD from 2D to 3D.

Rejiggered BricsCAD Lineup

"Sometimes 2D is more powerful, sometimes 3D is more powerful," Mr van den Bergh said, introducing the rejiggered software lineup.

BricsCAD Lite ($560) replaces BricsCAD Standard, and is at the low end with 2D-only drafting. Lite includes open LISP, which Bricsys says is 5x to 100x faster than other versions of LISP. Lite has advanced tech like machine learning with targets, but lacks BRX and other APIs, and so it is limited as to which third-party add-ons it can run.

BricsCAD Pro ($960) combines the previous BricsCAD Pro and Platinum editions to offer full 2D/3D direct modeling with 2D/3D parametrics. It is the base needed on which to run Mechanical ($1,700) to assemblies, to access the Communicator ($500) file translator, and/or the BIM module ($1,800). Prices are for perpetual licenses and are in US$.

*Differences between BricsCAD Pro and BricsCAD Mechanical*

BricsCAD Ultimate ($2,000) carries on from before, combining all of Bricsys’ software in a single package.

BricsCAD Shape (free) for 3D modeling is still included with any BricsCAD download, even after the 30-day trial ends.

All interact with 24/7, the company's subscription-based online collaboration platform.

BricsCAD Cloud moves from being free in BricsCAD to being available only to customers who purchase an annual subscription. This is not surprising, given that CAD vendors don’t get to rent space on cloud servers for free.

Bricsys Collective is the new name for third-party add-ons, of which 350 are available through the online store.

What's New in BricsCAD V21

Some new features in the 21st release of BricsCAD are catch-ups with competitors, while other new functions leapfrog ahead of pretty much any other competitor.

Some of the catch-up commands include the SetByLayer command for changing any property of objects on layers. LayTrans maps layers in imported drawings to office standards. Three-D meshes can have their smoothness adjusted from 0 (none) to 5 (maximum), and can edit individual vertices and edges. CombineText groups single-line text into Mtext; properties of imported ArcText can be edited.

Other new functions are clever. History is recorded per-entity in the Properties panel, so you can go back to change your mind about changes to specific entities.

Copy Array places multiple copies at once as an array.

Importing SKP files turns SketchUp meshes into blocks so that they can be manipulated more easily; as well, SketchUp materials are imported and so can be used by BricsCAD.

*Meshes from a SketchUp model imported as blocks, with attached materials*

Externally-referenced drawings (xrefs) load in the background. When a drawing has many xrefs, you see them displayed one at a time as they load, as you work on other things.

Direct Modeling

Fillets and chamfers in direct modeling can have variable-radii curves and multi-angle chamfers. The manipulator lets us edit the curves and angles interactively.

Hold down Ctrl to push or pull during PushPull command. PushPull now works with constrained objects, such as interactively changing the size of a plate with several holes.

BricsCAD introduced L- and T-connections in an earlier release. If you have a bunch of pipes, valves, and Ts connected and you move one, the others move/stretch to compensate. V21 offers hotkeys to switch between connected and disconnected moves. Added to V21 is the ability to rotate connected elements

*Pipes interactively being moved from where they intersect a column*

We saw a demo of the roof of a building being rotated. When disconnected, the trusses and walls stayed in place. With a connected rotation, the trusses moved along with the roof, while the walls stretched automatically to meet the roof line. V21 also adds real-time previews of these movements.

*Roof being rotated with connections turned off*

- - -

Next week we have for you part 2 of the Bricsys Design Summit 2020, covering updates to its civil engineering, mechanical design, and BIM modules.

And in Other News

PTC plans to release Creo 7.0 in the coming months, featuring the first Atlas-based add-on — cloud-based Generative Design Extension (GDX) using technology from the Frustum acquisition; GDX works also with Onshape. Other Atlas add-ons could take five to ten years to appear, such as a cloud-based version of Creo.

PTC CEO James Hepplemann noted that Onshape revenues grew 80% year-over-year, and “landed over 700 competitive displacements, the majority coming from SolidWorks.” Dassault Systemes has 49,800 companies using Solidworks.

PTC’s 2020 revenues were $1.46 billion, up 17% from the year before; next year, it expects to take in $1.55 - $1.6 billion. The company, however, sits on $1.0 billion in debt. www.ptc.com

- - -

3D Systems is unloading all of its subtractive CAM software, selling Cimatron and GibbsCAM to the SigmaTEK Systems division of Battery Ventures for $65 million. Six years ago, 3D Systems paid $97 million to acquire Cimatron-GibbsCAM.

- - -

This reminds me when we used colors in CAD to specify plotter pen numbers: In KeyCreator MfgCAD 2021, face colors on 3D models become MBD [model-based definitions] data to signify manufacturing tolerances and hole types.

*Colors indicating model-based definitions*

A fifteen-day free trial of KeyCreator is available from Kubotek3D: info.kubotek3d.com/products/keycreator/trial-request.

- - -

Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through Feed Burner at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

Letters to the Editor

Re: Parallel Computing in CAD

Is there anyone providing CAD software that will work in a parallel computing environment?

- Roger Roberts, president-retired
Mid-West CAD, Inc.

The editor replies: Some CAD vendors have implemented some basic functions in parallel computing, such as loading files and performing renderings, but none have the full CAD package, nor is it likely this will ever occur.

- - -

Hope you are surviving well during these crazy times! I was intrigued to see a guest editorial in your newsletter. What is the process to submit a guest editorial?

- A. S.

The editor replies: “Guest editorial” refers to any article not written by me. They are usually ones with specialized topics that I think are of interest to my readers.

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

1SET Design Pty Ltd
Novedge LLC (small company donation)

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Monday, November 02, 2020

Readers Respond to Revit's Shared Parameters

Issue #1,072 | 2 November 1020 | The Business of CAD

I work in the food service design industry. We design commercial food service facilities for restaurants, schools, hotels, and so on. Back in the 1980s, a group of forward-thinking food service designers developed a layering standard for AutoCAD, which we still use. Having a standard made our lives much easier.

There are over 400 manufacturers in our industry. A food service designer may use equipment from dozens of manufacturers in a kitchen design. We simply don’t have the time to edit Revit families from all these sources to work together in our Revit projects. So we applied the same thinking to Revit, and food service designers have been using a common Revit Shared Parameter file since 2010.

Our Shared Parameter file covers all the utilities that one may find in a kitchen: gas, water supply, voltages, drainage, and so on. By and large, it has been working very well. Now our group has expanded to develop these standards for international food service design. I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

- Truman Donoho
Foodservice Equipment Symbols

- - -

I don’t see how you can have BIM-to-CAM when there is insufficient resolution/fidelity in the BIM to start with. It’s easy to degrade resolution, but how do you add it?

- Robin Capper
New Zealand

The editor replies: The idea is to have CAM-level details in the BIM model, which I think is referred to as LOD 5 (level of detail 5). This is the level at which screws are modeled.

The problem is how to get to LOD 5, as lighter models already overwhelm BIM hardware and software systems. So this is the gap that exists between doing the design and being able to manufacture it.

Martyn Day of AEC Magazine wrote about the BIM-can't-CAM problem, but I can't find that article; sorry! Traditional BIM vendors are making enough money from selling regular BIM that they haven't bothered fixing the CAM part. Autodesk, which went overboard on buying construction management software, doesn't have a way to get from Revit to the construction site. Bricsys proposes adding intimate details through "AI," where the software predicts the details needed, and then adds them automatically.

Mr Capper responds: I think the real issue is that BIM is often more ‘design intent’ than actually constructible. I thought Autodesk’s Quantum concept, demo’ed at AU a few years ago, was an interesting approach to that.

The detail modeler, say curtain wall fabricator, just pulled critical control points from the architect's model (live, and refreshed at agreed-to intervals) and served back as a lightweight placeholder. Seems to have ‘gone dark’; I wonder if it was abandoned or retreated into secret development?

The editor replies: It was abandoned after several years of development. It was known as Project Quantum and was specific to AEC. Autodesk is replacing it with the all-encompassing Project Plasma, and apparently will announce more at Autodesk University later this year.

You can read more about the history of these two initiatives in "What Comes After Revit?" at aecmag.com/technology-mainmenu-35/1821-beyond-revit-autodesk-seeks-to-reinvent-collaborative-bim

- - -

The discussion of Revit and BIM are very interesting, even though it's totally different world than the mechanical one that I inhabit.

Occasionally, I read things that make me realize that the building construction world is intensely striving to achieve the level of documentation that is considered completely normal and routine in the manufacturing world. The problem is that they have to do it for a "product" that is more complex in terms of the number of different parts involved (generally) and, instead of being built in a single factory, with all components purchased by a single purchasing department, there are many, many companies involved, each with their own systems of part numbering, naming, modeling, purchasing, warehousing, issuing, inventorying, and accounting.

So they can look to the manufacturing world for some guidance, but no manufacturing system is going to stretch to fit the construction of a large building by fifty subcontractors.

The article noted that "The Shared Parameter GUID ensures each Shared Parameter in existence has its own unique 32-bit identifier number, which is the only thing Revit really cares about with any parameter you create."

This is called a "part number" in my world. And I have occasionally had to explain and convince small manufacturers that it's important to assign a unique number to every component they make. I can only imagine how hard it would be to convince everyone involved in a large building project, from the architect to the electrician, that having consistent names for things is essential.

Thanks for your continued insights into this world.

- Jess Davis, president
Davis Precision Design, Inc.

The editor replies: You hit the nail on the head, to borrow a phrase from construction. As someone once put it, think of assembling an Boeing 747, but in a muddy field miles from the factory, and each one plane being made with a different set of plans.

The BIM software world has, in the last year, just started to notice that they have a great problem in failing to connect with construction, except experimentally. It is all well and good for industry critics to complain that construction has only progressed 1% in efficiency over the last couple of decades, but there can be no automation when there is no data to input into the automation.

Mr Davis responds: It's kind of fun to explain manufacturing to a carpenter.

"Yeah, that 2x4 you just cut and nailed in place? See, we would have a drawing for that."

"Why would I need a drawing to cut that?"

"Oh, you wouldn't cut it. A supplier would cut it, and you'd just have to find it in those two semi-loads of pallets that got unloaded during the last rainstorm. It'll be marked with a cardboard tag."

The editor replies: ROTFL

- - -

Dave has an elegant solution to the parameter mess, although it would require some admin. Bizarrely, it is implemented for some items in that old, non-BIM product called AutoCAD Architecture, that in some ways is more sophisticated at managing BIM standards.

Revit has a similar concept in its CAD export maps (object keys to layer names), but AutoCAD Architecture's Layer Key system addresses the same problem. The list of AEC Objects is consistent, but there is no standardization across the industry for layers.

So an object 'DOOR' can be mapped to 'A-Door' in one key, or '32-Door' or 'Bld_Door' or whatever you assign in the different keys. Open a generic file; hit Remap; all the layers and properties update; start work. This means you have one template, one parameter in the library, potentially serving hundreds of client standards.

Using a key to build names has massive advantages, with the only real disadvantage of having to administer the keys:

It enforces company standards by allowing users to only select pre-set values when naming content. For Revit, imagine when creating parameters (to use Matt's example) you could only choose ‘Width’ as part of the parameter name, because the BIM standard has set it . This eliminates creative naming or typos ("witdth").
It would allow mapping of multiple values to your standard, so my ‘FurnLength = Desk Width | Width of desk | witdth’ in ‘foreign’ content or linked files.
As an aside I only have Length (X), Depth (Y) and Height (Z) but no ‘Width’ in my shared parameters as I found this avoids confusion. If you want to have a ‘Width,’ it has to update the relevant X, Y, or Z shared parameter used for tracking object volumes. I can do that with our content, but not any foreign stuff.
It would allow you to have per-project or client Key Tables. If they are consistent with naming (and often they are consistently different), just link the content, apply the map, done.

I would not like a parameter creation standard or mapping key to control everything, but it should be able to manage consistent information crucial to information sharing and basic data entry (Width, not widTH, Witdh etc). In some ways the shared parameters do that, but still depend on users complying with a standard while making them!

The other thing is, and sorely lacking in Revit, Layer Keys -- like every other AEC Object, Display, Material and Property Set (Parameters) -- have both Style and Instance GUIDs and can be updated (from a standards file) automatically or with a prompt on first access, or manually any time. If the BIM Manager updates a key to reflect a client’s requirements or a change in standards, then every project will acquire that update when it’s next edited. So I wish Revit had that!

I even have found using Schedule Keys (combinations of parameters tied to a single selectable key value) for things like rooms, area, and space properties works very well in a Revit Project, but is challenging to standardize across multiple projects, even with third party tools.

For instance, I have a master Schedule Key in my Standards project, update it (add a value, or change some of the existing key sub-parameters), but then update the same key schedule in existing projects. It’s a basic requirement in using BIM for lifecycle management, not just build and run.

- Robin Caper

- - -

Another excellent eZine from my man Ralph! A reader wrote, “What I proposed (many, many years ago) was a Linked Parameter Mapping Table.”

That’s a ‘no-brainer’! Any idiot could see that as the only solution for a changing world. I’ve said as much to Autodesk in the past, but my wishlist suggestions always fell on deaf bureaucratic-guarded investor pocketbooks.

It’s too late to fix the screw-up of data in the CAD world. The only way it will get fixed is if we impose upon ourselves a global CAD dictatorship! Cheers,

- Chris Cadman

The editor replies: Data exchange is a problem that stays problematic, even as brilliant programmers find solutions.

And in Other News

Hexagon reported total Q3 revenues of €940 million (US$1.1 billion) — flat both on organic and constant currency bases from a year ago, following five quarters of declines. Despite this, the company has so far this year made ten acquisitions, including a third line of CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] software through last week’s purchase of ESPRIT owner DP Technology.

CEO Ola Rollén said the company needs also to get more into AEC. Details from Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/2020/10/28/hexagons-q3-was-flat-year-year-on-an-organic-constant-currency-basis/.

- - -

Contact Software releases its PLM software Elements v15.5 as an LTS [long term support] edition, so that customers will receive support for years to come.

The software helps manufacturers offer variations on products quickly through rule-based family models linked to ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems. contact-software.com/en/news/2020/10/contact-elements-155/

- - -

OnScale Solve’s cloud engineering simulation platform offers multi-physics solvers. The current version has mechanical, thermal, and coupled thermal-mechanical analyses; in the future, the site plans to add dynamic mechanical, nonlinear mechanics, thermal-fluid, fluid-structure interactions, and acoustic analysis.

The company is offering free private accounts to anyone of 500 core-hours/year. The software runs on its own at onscale.com, as well as inside Onshape.

- - -

Here are some of the posts that appeared recently on my WorldCAD Access blog:

You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog’s RSS feed through Feed Burner at feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Dairobi Paul
Karlheinz Peters: “Thanks for sharing your always informative insights. Always like reading your eZine. Keep it up as long as you enjoy doing it.”

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then the amounts I suggest are these:

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Monday, October 26, 2020

Parallel Computing in CAD

Issue 1,071 | 26 October 2020

Guest editorial by Roman Lygin, CAD Exchanger

In CAD, parallel computing is tough.

Parallelism is where the computer runs two or more pieces of computer code at the same time on CPUs and/or GPUs. Nearly all CPUs sport multiple cores (the equivalent of two or more CPUs in a single chip) and handle multiple threads (more than one software operation at a time). GPUs are the graphics boards in our computers, and they commonly boast thousands of tiny CPUs, huge amounts of on-board data storage, and high data speeds.

Parallel operations on CPUs in CAD are limited to loading files and regenerating drawings, for the most part. In GPUs, parallel operations are useful for speeding up predictable actions like renderings and finite element analyses. Most of what we do in CAD cannot, however, be predicted by software. When we, for instance, start drawing a 3D solid cylinder, the software has no idea what step we take next -- specify the radius, drag the height, switch to a mesh model, specify an angle... And so all CAD software for the most part is single-threaded, running on a single-core.

Should someone make headway in CAD, then this is an important advance for our industry, because then our favorite software will run much faster. Roman Lygin heads up CAD Exchanger, and he talked with me about how his team works with parallelism in their software.

- Ralph Grabowski, editor

- - -

Indeed, parallelism in CAD is tough. There are two important issues here.

Firstly, parallelism is challenging for the ordinary software developer. And the truth is that not every developer on the team should be involved in parallelism implementation. The entry barrier is quite high and it is best to have skilled people to do it.

Secondly, bringing parallelism to CAD is especially difficult due to CAD-specific challenges.

Parallelism requires good understanding of lower-level architecture (CPU and memory, processes and threads) as well as parallelism-specific issues, such as data races, work imbalance, and associated overhead.

Truth to be told, I did not see decent GPU-parallelism coming to CAD, except in the limited case of triangulation of huge 3D models, where the overhead of data transfers between RAM and GPU memory is offset by speed-ups due to the massive parallelism made possible by the GPU. The problem is that GPU parallelism is vulnerable to branching (such as through if/else statements), which is very common in CAD. I believe that CPU parallelism has a greater potential for CAD, and so let's set aside the GPU to focus on the CPU.

CPU parallelism can be viewed as a three-level pie, a metaphor I first heard from Arch Robison, former Intel senior principal engineer and the first architect of Intel Thread Building Blocks, the C++ library for parallel computing.

The three levels are as follows:

1. Multi-process parallelism. Usually MPI-enabled [message passing interface], the program runs in independent processes, with instances communicating between one another. Communication can be via shared memory when running on the same computer, or through a network when running on a cluster.

2. Multi-threading. Each process works through multiple threads that share data in the same (i.e. shared) memory. This applies to multi-core CPUs and multi-CPU workstations.

3. SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Thanks to long CPU registers, one arithmetic command can be applied simultaneously to several data items, such as two or four doubles [8 bytes each].

Multi-process parallelism (approach #1) can probably be applied reasonably well to processing huge assemblies, when the entire assembly simply cannot fit into a single process memory. We have never experimented with that, but we have seen our clients trying to achieve it with our APIs, and it made sense. You still have to apply to a lot of intelligence to achieve efficient scalability and reduce overhead, as assemblies can be very imbalanced internally.

In CAD, the greatest potential lies in working with a multi-threaded approach (approach #2), in most cases and when working with medium to large models. This is where we apply parallelism the most.

Approach #3 can be applied quite efficiently to NURBS [non-uniform rational B- splines] evaluation. In 2013, I wrote a paper “Applying Vectorization Techniques for B-Spline Surface Evaluation” (see figure 1) that found the local speed-up was 15x or more, thanks to applying FMA [fused multiply-add] instructions in most recent CPUs of that time.

Figure 1: From the paper, the function for determining surface point coordinates

CAD-specific challenges manifest themselves through several cases, especially the following ones:

Data structures with strong interdependence. For instance, a b-rep [boundary representation] graph has one shell referring to multiple faces. Each face refers to an edge shared by two faces (in a closed-manifold solid body). Each vertex can be shared by multiple edges, and so on. To efficiently process such a structure, you have to take care of proper data access synchronization to prevent data races, which can cause invalid executions and make it hard to trace bugs.

But if you do this naively by just applying a typical mutex [mutually exclusive flag], then you can easily kill all scalability because each fine-grain access to a vertex, an edge, and so on will be mutex-protected, incurring significant overhead -- which you don't have in pure serial code. [A mutex is a gatekeeper that allows one thread in but blocks access to the others.]

Data imbalance. In a typical assembly, you likely have parts with distinct complexity, such as a bolt being different from an impeller. Inside each part, you can have very different geometries, such as planar and NURB surfaces. Computation complexities (e.g. a 3D point from UV parameters) can be distinct in several orders of magnitude. So, again you cannot simply divide the work between n threads and expect good parallelism. You end up with pathological imbalances, with one unlucky thread crunching a big chunk of data, while the others sit idle.

We address these challenges efficiently by restructuring the data to reduce/avoid interdependence, and by applying work-stealing vs. work-sharing paradigms. We also heavily exploit nested parallelism, such as across parts in an assembly, across bodies in a part, and across faces in a body. Imagine a thread working on a first part of a thousand NURBS surfaces in one sub-assembly, while three other threads are processing hundreds of parts of twenty other sub-assemblies, with nesting.

This allows us to scale up 8x or more threads easily on typical medium-to-large models. Of course, the larger the model, the farther the algorithms can scale. In CAD Exchanger, these techniques are implemented in the core architecture, and most our converters take advantage of that.

But the effect strongly depends on the capabilities of the file formats themselves. In STL, there is essentially no parallelism, as the format does not allow for anything except a flat list of triangles. In JT, by contrast, parallelism is leveraged very efficiently.

In addition to conversion procedures, we apply parallelism in triangulations and organizing visualization pipelines by asynchronously loading/converting the data and gradually displaying the complex models. This video demonstrates the effect. We also apply a lot of parallelism tricks in I/O [input/output], reaching a great speed-up and efficient scalability.

Q&A

Ralph Grabowski: When customers license your firm's SDK, what kinds of projects do they use it for?

Roman Lygin: The most typical use cases include:

CAD/CAM/CAE, BIM/AEC, PCB, and the like, both general-purpose and domain-specific, such as in Altium Designer [PCB design software] and OMRON Sysmac Studio [virtual factor planning]
Visualization, AR/VR including Unity-integration
On-demand manufacturing and in particular cost estimations
3D Web apps

Grabowski: You mentioned that CAD Exchanger is more than a converter or viewer. What other functions does it perform?

Lygin: It imports/exports assembly hierarchies, b-rep and mesh geometries, meta-data, and PMI [product manufacturing information]. The SDK and our other developer tools also offer:

Measurements/computations of bounding boxes, surface areas, volumes, and so on
Visualization in multiple display modes, with interactive selection/hover, and so on
Direct Unity integration in run-time
Manufacturing-related algorithms, such as for CNC [computer numerically controlled] machining feature recognition of milled surfaces, drilled holes, countersinks; sheet metal unfolding, and so on
Advanced meshers for FEA [finite element analysis]
Web toolkit for in-browser visualization
Cloud-based conversion API [application programming interface]
Model simplification through b-rep shrink-wrapping, internal body removal, and so on, along with mesh decimation by factor 100x and more; see figure 2

Figure 2: CAD Exchanger reducing meshes by 99%

Grabowski: You support five native file formats -- Solidworks, NX, Creo, Catia V5, and DWG. Why did you choose these ones?

Lygin: Based on the general market and particular customers' demands. We currently support 20+ formats, with three just released and more underway. All the converters are based on common-core architecture and design principles, so the converters can leverage scalable parallelism on multi-core architectures.

Grabowski: Do you write your own translators, or do you license them from other developers?

Lygin: All translators are our own, except for a proprietary Autodesk FBX SDK to parse/format FBX and related formats. Other than that, CAD Exchanger does not depend on any proprietary technologies as we own entire technology stack for CAD conversion. We certainly use several open source libraries, though.

Grabowski: Has the coronavirus benefited or hindered your company's operations?

Lygin: YTD [year to date] our product revenue has grown strongly, on par with previous years. In the early weeks of coronavirus, we did notice some cautiousness in customers' orders, as some orders were temporarily put on hold, but in the following weeks things got back to normal.

I believe we offer excellent value to price and our customers appreciate that. We added many Fortune 500 companies to our customer list.

In operations, the team moved to and continue working remotely most of the time. We are now revisiting our lease to reduce the occupancy given the ongoing remote working mode.

[Roman Lygin spent ten years at Intel working in the software division that develops Intel Parallel Studio and Intel Cluster Studio, both developer suites for parallel programming. For the last five years at Intel, he managed engineering teams developing Intel TBB, OpenMP, and MPI libraries. He is the founder of CAD Exchanger. Parallel computing has become his second professional passion, after CAD data exchange.]

https://cadexchanger.com/

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And in Other News

Bricsys announces the new release of BricsCAD v21 online tomorrow, 27 Oct. I'm expecting to see the company expand its offerings in direct modeling with BIM and MCAD.

To watch, register at https://summit.bricsys.com/

- - -

Heads up as Graebert breaks up their two-day in-person new-release event to two online events:

neXt is a 30-minute what's-going-to-be-new Webinar on Dec 1 (or Dec 2 or 3, depending on your residential continent)
ARES 2022 launch event is in April

You read correctly: Grabert is skipping a version number, going from ARES 2020 to 2022. Save the date, as the registration link is not yet live.

- - -

The CAD software business tends to be recession-proof, with sales going up in good times (people looking to spend money) and up in bad times (people looking to save money).

But this year the world's tiniest living object felled the world's largest CAD company, as Dassault Systemes’ Q3 license revenues fell 15% and the company lowered expectations for the year, as it expects license revenues to fall 19-20% -- reduced more from July's prediction of a 16-18% fall.

Now, Dassault gets revenues from more than just licenses, and so overall organic revenues [revenues excluding recent acquisitions] fell a more modest 3%, and stalwarts like Solidworks were even up 5% on the quarter.

Monica Schnitger does important work summarizing CAD earnings at https://schnitgercorp.com/2020/10/22/a-mixed-bag-schneider-electric-and-dassault-systemes-announce-very-different-q3s/ so be sure to follow her.

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Holly Stratford: "I continue to enjoy your ezine!"
3DBrains PTE, Singapore

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal.me, then the suggested amounts are these:

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Monday, October 12, 2020

Two BIM Guys Talk About Revit's Shared Parameters

Issue #1,069 | The Business Side of CAD | October 12, 2020

Click to subscribe by email

by Dave Edwards and Matt Stachoni

Dave Edwards: Even with a common file format, things are nearly impossible without a common data format or at least common data naming.

Case in point: I hand my architectural model to a furnishing consultant and to a medical planner. They use their own developed libraries of content; each could have data fields for the same information using different names. Once I receive the model back, how do I then combine the fields to do scheduling and cost analysis.

Matt Stachoni: Using Revit? It's relatively easy. Furniture and medical equipment consultants/vendors often use Revit family libraries from the manufacturers of the products they sell. Any manufacturer who develops a bespoke content library for professional use will likely implement their custom data as a series of Shared Parameters within the families.

Shared Parameters are designed to be shared between multiple projects and families, scheduled, filtered, exported to ODBC, appear in tags, and so on, so standardization is a key planning item. Within a given vendor library, the Shared Parameters should be the same, so you should not have one furniture family with a "Desk Width" parameter and another with a "Width of Desk" or "Desk is This Many Inches Wide" parameter or other such nonsense.

Disclaimer: I'm not guaranteeing anything, obviously. Revit users are just as capable as AutoCAD users of doing horrible, horrible things, but in this case it's actually more work to do it wrong. Custom family parameters which are not Shared cannot be scheduled or used in tags, so it's in their best interest to use standardized Shared Parameters just to get their work done.

You should be able to simply link the furniture model into your architectural model and create a schedule of furniture/equipment, and have those proprietary Shared Parameters exposed in the schedule creation dialog box. Just be sure to check the "Include elements in links" box at the bottom of the Fields tab. You can also combine parameters to appear in a single cell of a schedule as well.

Of course, there is no standardization between manufacturers, so if you have three different furniture manufacturers on a job you could end up with the "Desk Width" / "Width of Desk" / "Desk is This Many Inches Wide" nightmare.

You cannot rename Shared Parameters within a project, but you can rename parameters (fields) to a standard name in the schedules, so you may have to create separate schedules per manufacturer. You could export the schedules to Excel and combine them there to create a master, and/or use Dynamo to perform some home-brewed hocus-pocus to get the results you need.

Dave Edwards: Thanks for the response. I was familiar with most of those workarounds, but they can be a pain. And during my time as a BIM Manager, they weren't all available (such as combining fields in a Schedule).

Using a single set of Shared Parameters by multiple firms often never has the chance to happen because-- shared with whom? If you're a consultant working with many architects, which set of Shared Parameters to do you use to create yours with? As in your example, having no naming standard can be horrible to overcome and I ran into that often.

What I proposed (many, many years ago) was a Linked Parameter Mapping Table. You could assign a table which mapped the names of Parameters to a set of standard names when it was attached any file you had linked into your project. This would require a bit of setup, but could then be used on multiple projects with the same consultant in the future. Schedules using Libraries created with a divergent set of Parameters could be created using standard Revit procedures, etc. Not a great solution, but one which wouldn't require Libraries to have been built (or rebuilt) with the same Shared Parameters or any external data manipulation.

Matt Stachoni: Yeah, combining fields in a schedule is fairly new, and of course there's always Dynamo for stuff Revit doesn't do out of the box if you have the 3,024 hours to learn it.

But there's no compelling reason to expect anyone's Shared Parameters name will match anyone else's name. Unless they came from the same Shared Parameters file definition, two parameters from different projects (even with the same name) are completely different parameters from Revit's standpoint, and you cannot ever create a schedule with such parameters that would appear in the same column. That's not how Revit's parameter subsystem works.

Remember that the Family Editor environment is completely outside of the Revit Project environment, and the two do not talk to each other. The term Shared Parameter doesn't imply anything beyond the ability for that parameter to work in families, including tags, and be exposed in the project environment for scheduling. That's it. It has nothing to do with what company you belong to or your business relationship with anyone else.

As a furniture manufacturer or consultant working with many architects, the only Shared Parameters I'm worried about are the ones I need to create for my families. I may or may not use an internal standard naming system, but that's just to make my life easier.

Family Parameters that you define in the Family Editor cannot be exposed to the project as a whole, except from within the family's Type Parameters palette/dialog or as instance parameters you can view/edit in the Properties Palette. You cannot schedule a Family Parameter or include it in a tag, because neither the schedule nor the tag family knows what you are talking about.

Likewise, you can assign a Project Parameter to a category, which is then present in every element instance within that category, but only inside of the project environment. For example, if you add a Project parameter called "Door Panel Type" to the Doors category, you can then add data to it when you select any door, as well as schedule it (because the project understands that parameter), but the parameter does not appear in the family editor, nor can you add that parameter to a tag family because, as with Family Parameters, Revit doesn't know what you are talking about outside of the project.

Shared Parameters bridge that gap. When you define a Shared Parameter in the Shared Parameters dialog, it is best to think of it as essentially defining a dictionary entry. The Shared Parameters File contains all of the SP "definitions" each of which contain a few pertinent pieces of information:

· The Revit GUID [globally unique identifier]

· The parameter name

· Its data type

· Optional description

· And so on

The Shared Parameter GUID ensures each Shared Parameter in existence has its own unique 32-bit identifier number, which is the only thing Revit really cares about with any parameter you create. That's how you can create a hundred valid Shared Parameters with the same name, data type, description, and so on; Revit is only ever concerned with the GUID and the name doesn't matter.

· When you add a Shared Parameter to a component family, you pull in the GUID information so it understands the parameter fully.

· When you create a tag for that component, you also pull in the same Shared Parameter data (i.e. GUID) so both the tag and the family are able to reference exactly the same information.

· When you bring the family into the project, the Shared Parameter comes along for the ride and is exposed to the project, and every case of this Shared Parameter has the same GUID no matter the context, which is what Revit needs and is how you can schedule and tag it.

There is nothing special about the Shared Parameters file itself, except that it stores the complete list of Shared Parameter definitions you typically use in your projects. Shared Parameters are a one-way street from the Shared Parameters file to the project or family.

Changes to the Shared Parameters file (the "definitions") do not update themselves in the project or families, so you would need to get it right the first time, or spend lots of hours redefining the parameter in every family you previously created (one argument for organizing and standardizing Shared Parameters when creating a manufacturer library _before_ you model anything). You can also delete the Shared Parameters file, then go to Shared Parameters and export every Shared Parameter in your project or family out to a new file which is one way to get foreign Shared Parameters into your content.

Thus, naming standards may be nice to have but aren't really required for the end user. A manufacturer's standard convention may be to prefix all of their Shared Parameters with a 2-3 letter prefix, e.g. "ES-" for Global Industry's "Evolve Systems" line, which identifies those Shared Parameters as their's to the uninitiated.

As long as you can keep the manufacturer's parameters differentiated from one another (so you aren't dealing with multiple copies of the same parameter name), you should be OK. But expecting every manufacturer to use one standard would be ridiculous and unworkable, and in the end it's simply not required anyway. The only use case I could see is where you want to schedule all of the furniture and want the same set of parameter names to be used for size, cost, and so on. But like I said, if you filter your schedules by manufacturer and modify the field header text, you are 99.9% there without any Dynamo gizmodic jiggerwaddling.

Alternatively, you could create a single schedule that has everyone's pricing parameter fields (which are all different), and group everyone's price parameters under a single "COST" heading and change each manufacturer's pricing parameter header name to the manufacturer's name.

- - -

Dave Edwards heads up Dave Edwards Consulting, while Matt Stachoni is BIM Manager at Tutor Perini Building.

And in Other News

Here are some of the posts that appeared on our WorldCAD Access blog recently:

· Standards for collecting point cloud data
worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/09/standards-for-collecting-point-cloud-data.html

· A.I. for classifying point clouds
worldcadaccess.com/blog/2020/09/aiforclassifyingpointclouds.html

You can subscribe to the WorldCAD Access blog RSS feed through feeds.feedburner.com/WorldcadAccess.

Letters to the Editor

I read your reader's comment about the Generic CADD ebook and your reply, and realized I'm still earning a few dollars from my 2003 book on AutoLISP and the 2011 update. That buys me a cup of coffee every month, and I love coffee.

To whomever is purchasing my Kindle books: thank you! I don't know if Autodesk will ever invest in LISP again, but it was fun while they did.

- David Stein

The editor replies: It is helpful when an AutoCAD function doesn't change. My biggest selling ebook was on dynamic blocks, which haven't changed in a decade. Today, I do bespoke ebooks, where a CAD company pays me a lump sum to write a book specific to them.

Mr Stein responds: I wasn't aware that was even a thing. That makes sense, from a marketing aspect. Nice!

Re: Addressing the problems of digital twins

In constructech we see change, possibilities for efficiency, and an explosion of hype. The core issue with "twins" is the core challenge of tech in construction: understanding the difference between physical reality and the data that describes it.

If I create a full-scale animotronic version of myself (a la Disney or 19th century automatons) is that my "twin"?

-Leo Schlosberg (via WorldCAD Access)

Re: Open Design Alliance opens up the Revit file format

I am looking for ways of reading or writing a Revit file formats. Could you please provide any information regarding the above and if there is any documentation available?

- A.B., England

The editor replies: This is the only source for reading and writing Revit files independently of Revit: https://www.opendesign.com/products/bimrv

To date, the read side is well implemented, the write side is a more difficult project and is only partially available. Note that this is for writing your own software. If you don't want to do that, then consider a CAD program that reads RVT files, such as BricsCAD V21 (due out end of October), ARES 2020, and other programs that have implemented RVT-read

Re: When the cursor gets erratic, it's the mouse's nano-receiver at fault

Let me add an interesting, contemporary twist to this problem. As has been much described in these comments, my Logitech M705 started misbehaving and became almost impossible to use. Changed the batteries to no avail.

Decided to Google the problem and found this thread as a result. After reading all the original post and subsequent comments, I decided to try the USB extender cord. While preparing to do so, realized I had installed a Cam Link 4K [for connecting cameras live to computers] in the USB port adjacent to the Logitech receiver. Unplugging the Cam Link, instantly the mouse resumed its normal behavior with no problems. Reinstalled the Cam Link and the mouse's erratic behavior immediately returned.

I moved the Cam Link device to another USB port away from the Logitech receiver. Problem solved!

- Ed (via WorldCAD Access)

- - -

My Logitech MX Master 2s started to act sporadic on my Macbook Pro. Instead of continuing to use the unifying receiver and/or extension cables, I merely went to the Mouse preferences and hooked it up as a bluetooth mouse.

Now it is working fine, and I have a spare useless receiver in a drawer.

- Scott Duchin (via WorldCAD Access)

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Guest Editorials, Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, October 05, 2020

Introduction to Generative Design for Architects

Issue #1,068 | October 5, 2020

Guest editorial by Gavin Crump, founder, BIM Guru

Recently, generative design entered the interest of the AEC industry mainstream when it was included in Revit 2021 as a new feature. In this article, I explore the various challenges and opportunities offered by this way of working -- many of which aren't often marketed openly.

Any given design process we engage in typically involves a myriad of interconnected variables, whether they be compliance-driven or simply personal preferences. Capturing all of this in a code-based workflow can be challenging, if not impossible (at least to the time-frames we work within). Long story, short: generative design is difficult.

Many industries have been benefiting from generative design for many years now (such as medical research and industrial design), however this is typically from a pure optimization perspective. Usually the generative goals are not focused on aesthetic appeal, a much harder aspect of a building to objectively measure. Generative outcomes are often quite 'ugly’; as evidence, just check out this study by Fusion 360's optimization of the Golden Gate bridge. See figure 1.

Figure 1. A bridge not even a mother could love (image source engineering.com)

To further understand how difficult it has been for the AEC mainstream to embrace generative design, we only need look at the fact that there have been AEC-relevant tools (like Grasshopper) able to work in a generative manner for at least a decade now. Will another tool entering the industry change this, or are we simply witnessing a hype cycle?

Barriers to Implementation

Generative design faces barriers to realized success. The primary one is probably perceived return-on-investment (ROI). If a generative study cannot save time or money in a provable manner, it is difficult to take it beyond a curiosity.

One way to combat this is to develop generative tools that can assist on a wide variety of projects, but in this case we encounter another issue: generative outcomes are often overly simplified and cannot handle later exceptions to their predefined rules.

Some companies have successfully developed generative tools for their own internal use, some prominent examples being the dashboards of NBBJ Digital (see figure 2), or Gensler's forays into modular building generation. In both cases, the setup and management of these systems require a significant investment in terms of time, maintenance, and staffing to generate a significant return on investment.

Figure 2: Example of digital dashboard set up by NBBJ to package generative and feasibility studies (image source nbbj.com/about/digital-practice/)

AEC firms are not usually known for taking such deep dives into the fiscally unknown, and so examples like these have proven this is usually the only way to get started.

Generative Design LT

It is worth noting that nearly all major firms investing in generative design are not using the newly introduced tool in Revit to make their studies, and I expect they never will. Whilst the newly added tool is a welcome addition to the collection of 'nobs and whistles' progressively being grafted onto Revit, I believe its true benefit is simply introducing the concept of generative design to the unaware. From here, I expect most will move to other, more fit-for-purpose platforms once they encounter some limitations.

The primary limitation of Revit's Generative Design tool is that it relies on its geometry engine, as well as Dynamo (Autodesk’s computational design software for BIM), for its execution. No matter how smitten users may be with Revit, few will defend the speed and ease of using it to generate complex geometric forms that a generative study would typically rely upon.

Historically, AEC users have leveraged Rhino 3D and its scripting environment Grasshopper to produce generative tools and studies. Such add-ons as Galapagos evolutionary solver (integrated since v5), Wallacei multi-objective optimization engine, and Octopus parametric problem solver provide a wide variety of methods by which to create complex and meaningful studies, further enhanced by analytical add-ons, such as Ladybug weather tools. The Human UI add-on also provides the ability to flexibly design custom user interfaces for Grasshopper, such as the one previously shown by NBBJ.

In comparison, the Generative Design tool in Revit has a restricted UI, as well as three pre-defined methods of undertaking and filtering study results -- limited potential, with the trade-off of greater ease of use. The types of studies used to market the Generative Design tool must also be scrutinized: a furniture layout and the optimization of three boxes. One could argue that these are telling of the tool’s self-aware nature of its inherent limitations.

Setting Up a Generative Design Study

(The script in this article can be downloaded from https://tinyurl.com/y6spk8hw)

Let us imagine we are designing a simple single story residential dwelling. The script we will be using to undertake the generative study in this case looks a bit like figure 3:

Figure 3: Script for a simple study

All generative studies rely on the measurement-of-fitness for numerical goals. These goals come in many forms, but ultimately they will be the key to defining how we develop and review our study – the end justifies the means. Such goals we may wish to measure are the following:

Space planning fitness
Maximizing areas
Minimizing areas

In the case of our study, we will focus on measuring four concurrent goals:

Maximizing living room area
Maximizing back yard area
Minimizing front yard area
Minimizing corridor area

It is important to note that our script uses a predefined spatial layout; for example, the master bedroom is always at the front of the house. Whilst we will allow a range of flexibility to the sizes of rooms in the generated layout, we will not give the script the ability to rearrange these spaces at will. Such a change to our study would, at the very least, double the complexity of how our study is conducted and built.

Establishing Initial Constraints

Before we even begin the design and layout process, we have to contend with the following development constraints that are beyond our control:

Height restrictions
Front, rear, and side setbacks
Maximum and minimum areas
Other LEP/DCP [Australian Local Environmental Plan / Development Control Plan] requirements

These must all be captured in an initial portion of a generative design study in a scripted form. In the case of our hypothetical study this is achieved by the following steps:

Capturing site controls as scripted inputs
Beginning from a start point (origin)
Establishing a site boundary
Establishing a compliant building outline

The script portion that handles this part of our study looks like this:

Figure 4: All this just to create a box and a line

If this already looks too complex for your liking, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Introducing the House Contents

Once the boundaries of the study are established, the remainder of the script deals with working inwards from these boundaries to script the layout of our house. Note that we cannot simply model our house like we would in Revit; a generative study requires a fully coded workflow.

The requirement of coding a solution is often the main stumbling point for newcomers to generative design. They only see what marketing shows, which is a nice end product and a clean user interface: how complex can it really be? Very complex, it turns out.

By working inwards from our building boundary and corner points, we can code all the rooms into our study as rectangles that report their areas. From this, we can generate what is leftover (the living area). Note that we are also introducing some optional criteria:

The alfresco [outdoor covered living area] at the rear can be combined with the living space
The third room on the right (a media room adjacent to bedrooms 2 and 3) can be omitted. See figure 5.

Figure 5: Well, that got a bit more complex!

As before, if the above is looking too complex, then I have some bad news for you: we are not done yet. We still need to visualize our results and measure our goals.

Finishing the Study

Whilst so far we have been viewing our study in coded format, we must construct a visually discernible outcome for the end of our study. We could simply report back the numerical results; most users, however, require visual aids to interpret the numerical goals/fitness. See figure 6.

Figure 6: Looking a bit more like a house

Note that everything is still contained within Dynamo, the coding environment. Our study does not necessarily generate a house in Revit with walls, floors, rooms, and so on. This would require an additional 'back-end' that would likely need the same amount of coding.

This leads to a common narrative I try to promote to others: we are not typically setting up a workflow to automate the model setup process. The real value is derived from using the tools as planning and decision-making aids. If you simply want an automated house layout, send some money overseas to an outsourcing firm; you will save time and money vs. attempting to automate your design process.

Running and Reviewing the Study

Once we have set up the Dynamo script (and defined the inputs/outputs), we can export the study to the Generative Design tool itself. See figure 7. This process will also capture any graph dependencies, such as custom packages that may be involved in the study. (In our case, we are using none.) Note that if you are using the educational version of Revit 2021, you will only be able to run your study from within Dynamo itself.

Figure 7: The Export (left) and Define Study (right) dialogues

The tool presents us with a few methods to generate our study, each supporting a different means of generating and reviewing its results:

In the case of Randomize, our inputs are generated at random and we will see every result generated.
If we use Optimize, Revit instead creates sub-studies from a population size; for example, in the above study we will see the most successful result of ten studies, with 20 sub-studies undertaken for each.
If we use Cross Product, Revit exhausts every possible combination the study can produce.

(An important type of study that is not offered by the tool is an Evolutionary method. In this case, each iteration of the study takes results from the previous population to generate the next, essentially forming an evolution that optimizes itself progressively until an ideal solution is reached.)

Once the study is undertaken, we can review and filter the results. In the case of the above study, I have sorted results so that I see first the studies which generated the most living room area. See figure 8. As we would logically expect, the alfresco is not present in any of these outcomes. (Which lends to the question: did we even need to include it in the first place?)

Figure 8: Results of the generative study

I also applied a filter on the third-to-last goal (GOAL_AreaLiving) to isolate a smaller sub-set of results for detailed review. By selecting one of these, I can review the inputs that generated the successful outcome, which I then can use to inform my actual design.

(In the bottom right of figure 8 is the option to Create Revit Elements, should the study be designed to allow this to occur.)

Problems to Solutions

As I previously mentioned, this study works with a predefined housing layout and known setback requirements. If I were to conduct this study with a different layout or planning requirements, I would probably need to edit the base script, or begin again. Generative studies are often tailored to very specific problems, and so they might not provide broad use cases beyond their initial setup.

In the case of the above study, the entire process took me three hours to set up and conduct. Given that this is for a very specific use case, it is unlikely I would have generated enough ROI on such a study to justify its setup. Whilst on the surface it may wow a client, the conclusions drawn from the study are not revelations by any means:

If I want to make my living area larger, I should remove the alfresco.
Likewise, I should exclude the media room.
Likewise, my rooms should all be as small as possible.
To maximize my backyard, I should work close to the front setbacks.

I intentionally set up my study to demonstrate that when the goals are too simple, the results will be too predictable and not generate an outcome different from what we could have simply predicted ourselves. Maybe we should have asked more specific questions like these ones:

Which side of the house should my bedrooms be on?
How can I maximize sunlight to living areas?
Which results achieve the most cross ventilation?
What if I rearranged room locations in each case?

All of the above are more loaded questions, with less predictable outcomes. Each of these would also compound the complexity of the script to set up. For all of them, there must be a break-even point identified for the time invested vs. the results obtained.

Conclusion: Question the Answer

All of the above challenges lead me to these burning questions:

What is the problem that generative design ultimately solves for our industry?

Are we ready for it and, if not, when will we be?

Simply put, I believe that generative design does not answer any questions unless we ask the right ones in the first place. As is the case with BIM, generative design is far more than a set of tools – it is a process. The tools necessitate that the answers they provide must be to questions we cannot easily prove to our clients.

I commend all those out there leveraging generative design to improve their design workflows, but I encourage all those considering exploring this field to focus more on the questions, and less on the answers.

- - -

Gavin Crump is a BIM consultant and the founder of BIM Guru, a Revit training and consulting firm in Australia. (h/t: R. vD.)

[This article was reprinted with permission from BIM Guru and first appeared at bimguru.com.au/post/generative-design-problematic-solution.]

And in Other News

Here are some of the posts that appeared on our WorldCAD Access blog recently:

Letters to the Editor

You and I (and many others) are extremely fortunate that during our life path our early careers intersected with a brand new (and soon to be burgeoning) industry: CAD. For me, it was 1984 and my first job as a drafter helping implement an Intergraph MEDS dual InterAct CAD system hooked up to a VAX VMS mainframe.

I remember CADalyst and the elusive CADReport, and watched an industry morph from 2D CAD, to wireframe, to 3D Parametric solid modeling into the behemoth that it is. Your writing over all these years has provided us a beacon of direction, and a comfort of reliability.

I have often wondered, as hard as it is to just focus on ONE aspect of CAD, how is it that you have been able to cover the many aspects and industries it entails? Truly amazing, and a dedication to such an industry.

It’s been such a pleasure sharing this professional road with you. Congratulations on 35 years of guidance!
- Randy Mees, Sr. Manager, Designer
Transcather Heart Valves, Edwards Lifesciences

The editor replies: In my early years at CADalyst, I was only-AutoCAD, always-AutoCAD. After I left, book publishers asked me to write about other CAD, so I got exposed to Microstation (the most un-AutoCAD-like CAD package ever!), Generic CADD, Visio, and then all the IntelliCAD clones. They were relatively simple to pick up.

Grasping 3D history-based sketch-based parametric MCAD, like Inventor and Solidworks, took me years, mainly because I was spoiled by AutoCAD's simple 3D, and so I could not figure out why you would want to be dependent on history, need to start from sketches, or bother with parametrics.

A great help to me over the years was all the interviews I have done at shows and online. Experts at firms explain to my audience (and me) how things work.

Color me cynical, but after a while, there really isn't much new. Cloud CAD is just a rehash of what Alibre tried two decades ago, which was a copy of the terminal-mainframe system I used two decades before that. BIM is a newer version of smart architectural software from the 1990s, which did exactly what we expected architectural CAD should do -- insert a window symbol and slide it along the wall. Generative design is just a better version of iterations of a FORTRAN-like DO loop. Mobile CAD is just desktop CAD with fewer commands.

Re: Autodesk joins Open Design Alliance

In my opinion, AutoCAD is EOL [end of life]. Nice to have for a quick and dirty drawing, but no longer for every day use. That's a job for the verticals.

I think Autodesk is of the same opinion, seeing the 'improvements' over the last years releases; mostly bells and whistles, although importing PDF is a nice addition, for the time being.
- Simon Weel

Re: Open Design Alliance DevCon 2020

You wrote, "The problem lies in the file format. Once a model is in Revit, it is not effortless to move it to another system."

Even with a common file format, things are nearly impossible without a common data format or at least common data naming.

Case in point: I hand my architectural model to a furnishing consultant and to a medical planner. They use their own developed libraries of content; each could have data fields for the same information using different names. Once I receive the model back, how do I then combine the fields to do scheduling and cost analysis?

I know there are default fields, but not all of them are required for a project. There are attempts at this, such as OpenRFA, but without industry support, they don't get widely accepted.
- Dave Edwards
Dave Edwards Consulting

The editor replies: Then there is the whole issue of intellectual property. Architects, who spend time (ie money) on developing a BIM model aren't keen to hand it off to others. This can be overcome if it is agreed that the owner owns the BIM model, pays appropriately for its development, and so allows it to be shared.

Mr Edwards responds: No kidding. We are required to turn over our entire model, including all the Families [Revit's parametric block libraries] we have developed or purchased; they ended up with copies of all of our hard work.

We feel some system of copy protection is needed so that they can use the model to print and do scheduling, but not extract the Families for use on other projects.

- - -

Thirty and more years ago the “standard” for translating between systems was IGES [Initial Graphics Exchange Specification]. Most systems were pretty good at writing IGES files, but all systems were horrible at reading the files -- except those that originated in their system, so round-trip conversions usually worked.

To successfully translate between systems, you almost always had to use IGES Flavoring software, which would take the IGES file from system A and modify it to be able to be properly interpreted by system B, usually by massaging it to use the round-trip capabilities. By writing customized Flavoring software you usually could, but not always, get something useful into the second system.

So, it seems that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
- Scott Taylor, founder
Tailor Made Software

The editor replies: It appears BuildingSmart wants to do some kind of flavoring approach with IFC v5.

Re: Bentley Files for IPO

FYI: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1031308/000110465920105086/tm1922834-5_s1a.htm
Bentley Systems prices $17-19/share IPO for selling shareholders
- Jimmy Bergmark, owner
JTB World

Re: How Programming CAD Goes On, Behind the Scenes

Now you're talking my language, Ralph! Always good stuff from LEDAS, but I disagree with Ivan's conclusion that it is better to not make the base visitor class abstract.

I think the top-level base class should *always* be abstract, a pure interface. An intermediate second-level base class can be introduced with empty implementations of all virtual functions. In this way you can have your cake, and eat it, too. Then, each implementation scenario can decide which base class is most appropriate for it: the top-level abstract base that ensures compile-time errors in case the abstract interface changes; or the non-abstract second-level base if the implementation doesn't care about changes in the top-level interface.
- Owen Wengerd

Re: My First Software Manual

Your piece struck a reminiscent cord with me, particularly those early computer days. My first exposure was to a Digital, I do believe, PDP-80 (maybe? I think). Shortly thereafter, it was replaced by an HP. This was at the Nova Scotia Institute of Technology circa 1972/1973.

I recall programming with cards, where you could mark or shade boxes with a soft pencil. If memory serves correctly, once programmed with cards you could get a punched paper tape copy and/or backup for subsequent use.

The photo shows a punched tape copy of a program for solving quadratic equations (no claim that it actually worked is implied). As always, thanks for your work.
- Jim Longley
Canada

The editor replies: I never did work with punch tape, but the blank punch cards were used for everything else in university life, like notepads, signs, study sheets...

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Robert Sweeney
Anon.

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are these:

$25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25
$150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150
$750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750

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Posted at 07:00 PM in Guest Editorials, Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, September 28, 2020

Siemens in 2020: Solid Edge 2021 (part ii)

Issue #1,067 | September 28, 2020

by Ralph Grabowski

Siemens last summer held an online launch event [replay: youtube.com/watch?v=2nZXi9YJ3o4] for Solid Edge 2021, at which it emphasized the do-it-all nature of this mid-range software. Presenter vp of R&D Dan Staples boasted that Solid Edge has "the best mechanical design in the marketplace." (Siemens had not yet held a launch event for NX.)

In addition to MCAD, Mr Staples noted that Solid Edge 2021 is involved in a number of related fields (see figure 1), ones that aren't, however, quite as complete as marketing might suggest. It is Siemens as a whole that has the breadth in software offerings, with Capital electrical design for vehicles and aircraft as the most recent significant acquisition.

Figure 1: Breadth of activities performed by Solid Edge 2021

Electrical Design in Solid Edge consists primarily of designing cabinets and auto-routing wire harnesses; it doesn't actually do electrical design. Instead, it depends on importing electrical and PCB designs through TeamCenter, IDX, and DSI files.

Simulation is conducted through a cutdown version of Siemens's own Simcenter.

Manufacturing involves choosing tools for simulating models cut by multi-axis CAM [computer-aided manufacturing] machines, as well as AM [additive manufacturing] material selection and output checking.

Technical Publications means generating interactive documents through the HTML5-enabled Share3D at https://www.share3d.com/, and PDF files; see Figure 2.

Figure 2 Exploding a 3D model for training

Data Management employs parts of TeamCenter inside Solid Edge to control drawings.

Cloud-based Collaboration refers to a separate program, TeamCenter X (in beta), for sharing and viewing models on mobile devices, and using AR [augmented reality] to place them in the physical realm; see figure 3 or visit https://trials.sw.siemens.com/teamcenterx-cloud-plm/.

Figure 3: Teamcenter X placing a 3D model the real world

Sub-division Modeling is the number-one feature touted by Siemens for Solid Edge 2021. It really is meant for industrial designers who make organic-looking things like the swoopy shell of a mouse or camera body. The emphasis in sub-d is not accuracy but looks.

Me, I have difficulty with freeform sketching programs like Gravit, and so I find sub-d just as difficult to wrangle. Never mind. Here is how it works. You begin with a primitive, like a box or sphere, and then interactively push and pull mesh areas to get closer and closer to the shape you want.

When you need greater detail, you sub-divide some meshes into smaller ones. Sharp corners are added by manipulating edges. Solid Edge includes a handy mirror function, so that anything you do on one half is replicated in the other half to create a perfectly symmetrical result. See figure 4.

Figure 4: Mirrored subdivision modeling in Solid Edge 2021

Arriving at a curvy mouse or camera body is faster with sub-d modeling than with solid modeling, but eventually the mesh needs to work with solids. Here, Siemens offers Convergent Modeling, its take on allowing disparate data to exist in a single model, including generative and reverse-engineered (3D scans) ones. Sub-d modeling is included with both the Classic and Premium versions of Solid Edge 2021, so you don't pay extra for it.

Let me run down highlights for some of the other new features:

Modeling. To make large assemblies faster, all parts are kept in a single assembly file. Internal relationships (like constraints) are now remembered when copying and pasting parts from one assembly to another.

Frames can have gaps to allow for welds, and semi-automatically add inward or outward end-caps with optional offsets and chamfers. Nesting now optimizes parts placement on unusual shapes, like cow hides.

Sheetmetal. Multiple edges receive flanges just by selecting them and then pulling, and partial flanges can be constructed. Decals lets you place images and logos, even across multiple faces.

Simulation. The 2021 release adds electronics air cooling analysis from Simcenter's FLOEFD fluid simulation module. Package Creator defines the packaging and solder points of chips.

Modern chips generate a lot of heat, and so simulation in Solid Edge now handles the impacts from air flow and cooling of fans, shown as temperature curves and iso-surfaces that represent air flow direction, velocity, and temperature. See figure 5. Structural designs also can take temperature into account.

Figure 5: Iso-surface visualization of fan's cooling capacity

User Interface. Adaptive UI tracks the commands with which you are working, and then guesses the next command you might need. CAD managers can take output from experienced users and give it to novice users as they learn to do specific tasks, with Solid Edge telling them the next command to employ.

Parts Catalog. Siemens licensed the Cadenas parts library to provide Solid Edge 2021 with 1,500 manufacturers' catalogs. There is a visual search function that returns results sorted by percentage likelihood of matching your request.

Q&A

Q: Siemens had a sketching app on Android a few years ago, which I notice hasn't been updated in over a year. Is NX Sketch based on this technology?

A: Good catch on that. We learned from CatchBook how people sketch, but NX Sketch is brand-new and is built into NX. It avoids over-constraints on sketches.

Q: Is NX Share available standalone or only in NX?
A: Right now, it is part of NX. It will be available standalone later this year.

Q: Regarding the $100 million AAR [average recurring revenue] of Mendix: why did revenues skyrocket?
A: The covid crisis is making companies wanting to build apps quickly, to work remotely. Even before, Mendix provided local capabilities, such as to Teamcenter. It grew 155% over last year.

Q: What is the pricing for Teamcenter X?
A: We have very competitive and attractive pricing with what's out there on the market.

Q: Is Teamcenter Share a re-badge of Solid Edge Portal?
A: Absolutely not. It is built on the Mendix platform. It adds CAD knowledge to a Dropbox-like platform.

Q: Will Teamcenter be replaced by Teamcenter X over time? Is this part of a roadmap to replace all desktop programs with cloud apps?
A: We are not one of those vendors who go to their customers who say, "As of May 25, we will be completely SaaS [software as a service, a.k.a. cloud-only]." This is not our approach. We are modernizing products by bringing them to the cloud. Customers can make the transition, if they want to, when they are ready. We will never have to have that hard discussion with customers about them having to make a difficult transition of technologies.

Q: What market does Teamcenter X target?
A: Immediately, in the mid-market. But there is interest from large customers as well.

Q: How is Mendix affecting development at Siemens, and will it be an independent company?
A: We learn a lot from each other. We don't forget that Mendix began with business applications, such as HR [human resources] and finance. So we can solve the complete solution across the board for customers.

Q: How is your partnership with Bentley on CALM [capital asset lifecycle management] going?
A: It is growing business for data management of plant design, offshore platforms, and so on. We will be doing more together, as you will hear in the coming 12-18 months. We are bringing Teamcenter product configuration to these large projects.

[For an introduction to CALM, see blogs.sw.siemens.com/teamcenter/introducing-teamcenter-for-capital-asset-lifecycle-management-calm.]

Q: When will authoring [design] software like NX be on the cloud?
A: The cloud is a major trend, and we are looking at how to bring more of it to our customers. We are working on the authoring side, but the real strength of the cloud is on the collaboration side. So, for instance, we are bringing more collaboration to the authoring software.

Q: Revenues of your division for the year?
A: Siemens does not report divisional revenues [such as for Siemens Digital Industries Software], but maybe that will change in the future, like in two years. We are outgrowing our competition every quarter.

Q: How is simulation, CD-Adapco doing?
A: Overall it is doing well. Simulation is core to the digital twin of vehicles and plants. Our simulation revenues are equal to the revenues of the market leader [ANSYS]. That gets lost in our large portfolio of software.

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

This is an era where, it seems to me, some CAD vendors concentrate harder on collecting subscriptions from customers than improving their software. So it is good to see Siemens going all out by loading up this year's release of Solid Edge with lots of new functions.

During the launch event, the host introduced Solid Edge 2021 to us by saying, "We bring the technologies of tomorrow to our customers today." But some new features -- like sub-d modeling and electrical design -- were long needed to catch up with competitors AutoCAD and Solidworks, respectively. The improvements to fluid simulation were, I suspect, in reaction to Discovery Live fluid simulation added by PTC to Creo last year. Other new features, like the "AI"-enabled interface, are trickle-downs from earlier releases of NX.

Solid Edge 2021 is expected to ship in late September. The 30-day free trial can be downloaded (after registration) from https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/store/en-us/trial/solid-edge.html. It is free for students (including self-learners) and startups (in business under three years, still under $1 million in revenues).
https://solidedge.siemens.com

[This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine and is reprinted with permission.]

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And in Other News

Here are some of the articles posted on the WorldCAD Access blog recently:

Letters to the Editor

Congrats on covering CAD for 35 years. I was working at Colorado State University at the time and remember it well. I hope you continue your work for many more years.Â
– Terry Wohlers, president
Wohlers Associates, Inc.

Re: Open Design Alliance DevCon 2020

I tried using IFC when using the educational version of Tekla. I wanted to go between Inventor and Tekla, one way or the other. Could not be done. I tried it with other CAD software and found it could not be done.

The reason is because of the extensive amount of time and energy that goes into telling the IFC converter all the data for each and every structural part, if at all available in the software itself, and if it is the same in the other software. I quickly discovered that there is no IFC standard per IFC standard!

And if you let the software do the metadata exchange for you, it'll screw you every time. If you can manage to work your way through the process, you’ll be so exhausted by the time you’re done, that it makes the process untenable.

My limited experience says that “details in BIM are too low for CAM” is a low estimate. I’ve found that “details in BIM are too low for most of the fabrication and construction involved”.

The reason is because the fab shops can’t get sufficient dimensions off BIM drawings to “cut and fit.” That is, if the drawings done right, which is nearly never, due to the cost-cutting which hires novices to make the drawings.

That lack of sufficient BIM dimensional info is why they farm out the structural to structural detailers, the reinforced concrete to concrete detailers, the miscellaneous steel to steel detailers, the plumbing and piping to specialists, the machining...

Thanx for your ‘invigorating’ reporting!
– Chris Cadman

The editor replies: The problem is that IFC was never meant to handle architectural data exchange. It was invented in 1994 by Autodesk with Release 13 to deal with data stored in custom (user-defined) objects, made possible by the then-new objectARX API. BuildingSmart is working at making it work.

Martyn Day, editor of the British AEC Magazine, has been pounding on the lack of the BIM-construction link. Autodesk spent a billion dollars to join the already-crowded construction monitoring software market, instead of on the BIM-CAM link that would have given them a leg up over competitors.

Mr Cadman responds: At least ODA hasn’t sat on their thumbs with AutoCAD. Maybe if Autodesk worked up a translation app that exchanges data between their various 3D software, we’d have our solution already. One has to wonder where all the subscription $ goes, considering the little they do to substantially improve their software year after year.

The editor replies: Autodesk has a 3D translator meant primarily for MCAD but does not work with AEC.

*4806

Posted at 07:00 AM in Interviews, Q&A, Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, September 21, 2020

Siemens in 2020: New Initiatives (part i)

Issue #1,066 | September 21, 2020

by Ralph Grabowski

Siemens has a perspective unique among MCAD software firms: it's the only one operating as a manufacturer. Other big MCAD vendors, like Autodesk and PTC, have presentation centers in which they show manufacturing at tiny scales, but Siemens is a manufacturing behemoth that last year made CAD$115 billion -- 20x more than its largest CAD software competitor, Dassault Systemes.

The CAD division at Siemens is unique also in that we never know for sure what its name is. Today, it's Siemens Digital Industries Software. Before, it was Siemens PLM Software, earlier Siemens PLM Systems, and before that Unigraphics and EDS. The high-end NX CAD software got its new name following the merging of Unigraphics and I-DEAS. Only its mid-range Solid Edge CAD program kept its name constant throughout the decades.

NX and Solid Edge were birthed by the oldest CAD companies in history. Unigraphics began in 1969 as "Uniapt" CAM software from United Computing. The same year, Intergraph launched as a CAD-oriented mapping company. Solid Edge is the result of a 1995 experiment in building next-gen software, but it didn't fit Intergraph's product line, so no one was surprised when Intergraph sold Solid Edge to Unigraphics after just three years. NX and Solid Edge arrived at Siemens through the German company's 2007 acquisition of Unigraphics.

The Future Is the Cloud -- Perhaps

Siemens is the largest CAD vendor to resist today's notion that design software must run on the cloud, a position that is in direct contrast to competitors who find customers still clinging to desktops irritating. For Siemens Digital Industries Software CEO Tony Hemmelgarn, design belongs on the desktop -- end of story. "We will never have to have that hard discussion with customers about them having to make a difficult transition of technologies [from desktop to cloud]," he said.

What does belong in the cloud is collaboration, and so Siemens is working at making its popular Teamcenter collaborative software run on the cloud, under the name of Teamcenter X. You can see how this makes sense: engineers have powerful desktop systems running NX, collaborating with each other and fieldworkers through the cloud.

When it comes to the cloud, Siemens offers unusual flexibility. You can have software hosted by Siemens (on Amazon), on private or local cloud providers, on your premise, at the edge, and hybrids thereof. No one else offers this.

You Pay Your Way

Siemens insists customers should have a choice in how to pay for software, whether through permanent licenses or by subscription. Mr Hemmelgarn says he is surprised at how many of his competitors have forced customers onto subscriptions.

Despite his declaration, the company is nevertheless pushing forward with software that can only be paid for by subscription. It turns out that CAD vendors who go to the cloud have no choice in the matter, because software that runs non-stop on the cloud has to be paid for non-stop to cloud providers like Amazon, and so customers also have to pay non-stop.

Siemens emphasized the cloud over desktop-bound software during July's presentation to the CAD press. While NX was mentioned often by customer testimonials, Solid Edge and simulation division CD-Adapco got no attention at all. Never mind that Siemens' simulation division makes as much as market leader ANSYS ($1.5 billion last year) and more than all of PTC.

Siemens' Future is Mendix

If we understand nothing else about the future for Siemens, it's that it is based on Mendix. This platform with the unusual name has an unusual history: it began as a cloud-based visual programming service for business applications, like human resources and scheduling. Two years ago, Siemens bought it for CAD$950 million, and then applied it to CAD.

We can think of Mendix as a combination of Autodesk's Forge API and PTC's Onshape/Atlas platform. It has a three-fold role at Siemens:

A set of software for running businesses
An API [application programming interface] for customers to customize
The underlying technology that powers all cloud apps for Siemens

"We are launching a lot of applications based on Mendix," said senior vp of Business Strategy and Marketing Brenda Discher, formerly of Autodesk marketing.

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

Siemens places the emphases on the right areas. Design belongs on the desktop; subscriptions ought to be optional; automatic upgrades are pausable; collaboration should be hostable anywhere. These are policies that reassure customers that their future with Siemens is a stable one.
https://solidedge.siemens.com

- - -

Next Week: You get a look at what is new in Solid Edge 2021, plus an extended Q&A with executives from Siemens.

[This article first appeared in Design Engineering magazine and is reprinted with permission.]

And in Other News

The following posts appeared on the WorldCAD Access blog during the summer:

- - -

Vectorworks ships its namesake software, Vectorworks 2021, with a new Project Sharing server and multi-threaded Vectorworks Graphics Module cache that offers up to 5x faster file loading. https://www.vectorworks.net

- - -

Bentley Systems files for a third time to do an IPO [initial public offering], in which its Class B shares will be made available to the public starting at $17-$19. The valuable Class A shares, owned by the founders, are not being offered. Analysis of what this means through Monica Schnitger at schnitgercorp.com/2020/09/10/bentleys-s-1-shines-a-light-on-how-private-companies-grow-with-engineers-in-charge/.

Letters to the Editor

I just fired up my old copy of Generic CADD to do some drafting and realized my memory is not as good as I thought it was in using it. This [Inside Generic CADD ebook] will come in handy to refresh my brain cells.
– J. G.
The editor replies: I am glad to hear it helps. I notice that I produced the book first in the print version in 1993.

- - -

I've been reading your blog on and off for the last few months--I have a lot to learn from your technical knowledge. Thanks for being so passionate about CAD software,
– Clifton Harness

Re: Architecture firms to Autodesk: We're no longer happy with Revit

For Autodesk, Revit became the Perfect Storm. With the grip on the DWG file format waning, another strategy had to be put into place. They did it with Revit:

Government contracts mandating its use
A file format not backwards-compatible
And a subscription model.

I know BIM is a "process," but I saw many contracts which essentially stated the application was not mandated, but the deliverables had to be in RVT format. BIM by its very nature requires an open file exchange format, tools for data exchange, and collaboration. When that didn't happen, the only thing left was the single-source option.

This needed to be an industry-wide effort, as MIDI was in the music industry. Even in the earliest days, we could see there was so much which needed to be standardized to make the dream of BIM a reality, but it never happened (even using a single source). It could still be done but a lot of money and time has already been spent and I'm afraid "the horse has left the barn."

No one listened then, maybe they're listening now.
– Dave Edwards
Dave Edwards Consulting

- - -

There are more professional CAD and BIM software products to consider these days than waaayyyy overpriced Autodesk products. I've never understood why larger practices and some individuals don't explore the market to recognize this fact and thus end up being VANILLA-CAD users and out of pocket. Instead of this tenuous lobbying, just change your CAD HB-pencil!

List of alternative CAD/BIM products than Autodesk:

4MSA IDEA - Architectural Design (IntelliCAD)
AutoDesSys - Form-Z
Bentley - Architecture
Bricsys – BricsCAD / BricsCAD BIM
Cadline Network Ltd – ArchLine-Xp & LT (light) version
CadLogic - Draft it Architectural
CADSoft - Envisioneer
Chief Architect
DataCAD LLC – Software for AEC Professionals
Elecosoft – Arcon Evo Visual Building Premium
FreeCAD Arch Xeometric – EliteCad Architecture
Gehry Technologies - Digital Project Designer
Graphisoft - ArchiCAD
IMSI/Design – TurboCAD Professional
NanoSoft - NanoCad Construction
Nemetschek - Allplan Architecture
Nemetschek - Vectorworks Architect
ProgeSoft – ProgeCAD Architecture
Robert McNeel & Associates - Rhino 3D + VisualARQ
Softtech – Spirit Pro
Trimble – SketchUp Pro
ZWSOFT - ZWCAD Pro

– Clayton Taylor
Trotman & Taylor Architectural Consultants, England

The editor replies: The problem lies in the file format. Once a model is in Revit, it is not effortless to move it to another system. IFC helps, but is not perfect; full RVT support from ODA is a year away.

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Robert G Findlay, Australia
Gijs Willem Sloof of Talenting Investments, The Netherlands (two donations)

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are these:

$25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25
$150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150
$750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750

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Posted at 07:00 AM in Software | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, September 14, 2020

Open Design Alliance: DevCon 2020

Issue #1,065 | Celebrating 35 Years in CAD | September 14, 2020

From the Editor

It was this month in 1985 that I began writing about computer-aided design, as CADalyst magazine hired me to be their new technical editor.

Now it's 35 years later, and thanks to you amazing readers, I'm still reporting on our favorite software.

- Ralph Grabowski

Open Design Alliance

DevCon 2020

Compiled by Ralph Grabowski

We were supposed to be in Munich for this event, but then coronavirus ruined the trip. The Open Design Alliance’s DevCon 2020 was, as a result, online, just like other CAD software conferences this year.

In ODA president Neil Peterson overview of the industry, he noted that this is a down year for BIM [building information modeling], but then expects it to grow by an annual average of 14.5% through to 2025. Some of the issues (pro and con) that define the market are the many design programs available, multiple data formats, a growing number of stakeholders, and the biggest problem of all: the gap between design tools and offsite prefabrication, as details in BIM are too low for CAM [computer-aided manufacturing].

The ODA wants to make BIM (and other aspects of CAD) transparent: to view, publish, collaborate, exchange data, and manipulate data openly. (See figure 1.) The idea of an open standard created by industry stands in contrast to those proprietary formats preferred by software vendors. ODA backs up its slogan "transparent BIM" with SDKs [software development kits] named BIMrv (for Revit) and BIMnv (for Navisworks).

Figure 1: The technology stack from Open Design Alliance
(all images sourced from DevCon prsentations)

ODA + bSI + OGS

Last year, ODA partnered with buildingSmart International (bSI) to provide the SDKs for the IFC [industry foundation classes] format used by the BIM industry to exchange data. This year, ODA inked an agreement with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); the two are exploring how they might work together. I assume ODA will make SDKs for OGC.

There has always been an obvious link between CAD and GIS [geographic information systems]; indeed, that is how Intergraph got its start in 1969. As long ago as 2007 GIS-CAD became “3D information management,” because more than just CAD data works with GIS, such as BIM. (See figure 2.) And so OGC agreed this year to work with ODA.

Figure 2: The sorts of things handled by OGC

This Year’s IFC v4.3

IFC v4.3 includes more of the built environment, while two dozen object types have been deprecated or replaced by new schema. Built environment means physical structures, such as roads, canals, and shopping centers. (See figure 3.) IFC schema have to be proved by actual implementation before they can be approved as ISO standards, and so for 4.3 this is happening through a number of railroad and road organizations in North America and Europe.

Figure 3: The built environments supported by IFC 4.3

The nomenclature has changed: bSI replaced the x in version numbers with ., so the old (and confusing) 4x3 is now 4.3.

The Future IFC 5

IFC version 5 will be more efficient and less confusing.

More efficient, because IFC data will become available in a larger number of file formats, such as adding XML, OWL, JSON, HDF5, and so on to the current STEP; UML [unified modeling language] will be the primary format. HDF5 [hierarchical data format] in particular offers smaller file sizes and faster load times due to compression and structure; see ogc.org/standards/HDF5. (See figure 4.) We talked about HDFs in upFront.eZine #1,058.

Figure 4: The advantages to using HDF5 with IFC

Less confusing, because right now model view definitions (MVD) allow software vendors to cherry-pick parts of IFC to implement in their software; the idea was that they wouldn't need to implement the entire standard, which is huge. But if an IFC file is exported according to one MVD, and the recipient software package is written to another MVD, then confusion reigns when there is insufficient overlap between the two MVDs.

MVDs will change in the future. The replacement will be IDS [information delivery system] in which the vendor says what information is needed from an IFC file.

The new information delivery standard of IFC 5 means there will be a single IFC base for all programs for long-term . The root of IFC will have fewer updates for stability (every three to five years) with entity definitions having more frequent ones to keep current (every one to three years).

IFC will be publicly available on GitHub. The ODA demo’ed using IFC files in HDF5 format. Their IFC viewer for Windows and MacOS supports the newest IFC versions. It does all the tasks we expect of viewers today, such as sections, but now also displays shadows and handles collision detection. It exports the IFC model to PDF. Anyone can download it fro free from openifcviewer.com

SDKs for Revit and Navisworks

The ODA supports Revit file formats up to today's RVT 2021 (see figure 5).

Figure 5: The capabilities of ODA's BIimRv API

During the online conference, we saw some of the new functions being made available from the ODA:

Several kinds of sectioning (see figure 6)
Color-filled 2D plans based on function
User worksets, which isolate grouped elements by name
Conditional load/unloads that save can 1GB RAM, on average

Figure 5: Sectioning of Revit models by BimRv

While the ODA’s BimRv SDK reads and displays Revit files, the big deal (and tougher job) is creating RVT files, which also means being able to edit them. This is still under development. The ODA has a road map to show which functions will be released over the next sixteen months. (See figure 7.) Creation functions include curves, custom parameters, connectors, materials, view-based elements (sheets), forms, families, Boolean operations, and openings.

Figure 7: Roadmap from ODA for BimRv

We also saw the progress being made with Navisworks compatibility, which for Autodesk is a kind of universal file format on the AEC side. See figure 8 for the roadmap.

Figure 8: Roadmap from ODA for BIMnv

Bricsys told us how it uses the ODA’s SDKs for DWG, civil, BIM, and mechanical components. As of v21 BricsCAD will import RVT files, not just IFCs as in earlier releases. RVT elements are translated into native geometry, which for BricsCAD means DWG format. The translated elements can then be directly modeled, sectioned, and edited – and saved as DWG files for use in other software. (See figure 9.)

Figure 9: BricsCAD v21 with RVT-format model

BricsCAD v21 will place RVT files as underlays, which means they can be seen as references, but are not editable. Specific entities, such as walls, can be imported from the underlay, I think they said. BricsCAD 21 is due to ship by the end of October, 2020.

Q&A

Ralph Grabowski: I did not catch the line by Mr Ouellette about IFC. Does he think IFC can handle all forms of data (like DFM, digital twins) -- or not? If not, then what is the alternative to accessing that data?

Jeffrey Ouellette: The simple answer would be the use of linked data methodologies. bSI is exploring the use of IfcOWL, as well as implementations of JSON / IfcJSON to make it easier to link to other data sources and exchange them on a transactional basis.

Grabowski: I am not sure we heard exactly what is ODA doing with OGC?

Neil Peterson: We are looking at cooperation in a similar manner to the cooperation between ODA and bSI, where ODA would provide implementations for certain OGC standards. For example, CityGML has been discussed as a possible first project.

Fabio: Regarding Civil SDK, how much of API has been migrated to .Net? Is this SDK the same as AutoCAD Civil SDK?

Ivan: Currently, we wrapped all Civil into a public API. The API is the same as the C++ ODA Civil SDK.

John: The main point is I notice that the library seems more granular now.

Sergey: You can get an idea of the optional modules that you can skip from docs.opendesign.com/td/tdrawings_libraries.html

John: Is there still an ActiveX install?

Sergey: Yes. It's still supported

Ralph Grabowski: Is the Android ODA viewer for anyone, or just members of ODA?

Alexander Federov: This application is for the ODA members, as a sample of using our Visualize SDK under the Android platform.

John: What are the main differences between Drawing vs. Visualize SDKs?

Alexander Federov: Visualize SDK is for the rendering of the different kinds of the data. It is not connected with some specific format. But strictly speaking, since Drawings SDK uses Visualize SDK for rendering contents of the DWG files, it is possible to transfer data to DWG first, and then render it with Visualize SDK as a contents of the DWG database. But such a transformation is sometimes not possible or efficient.

Fabio: Is it possible to use .Net C# to integrate all stacks (DWG SDK, Visualize, Publish) in order to develop cross-platform -- Windows, Mac, and mobile (IOS and Android)?

Alexander Borobikov: We provide wrappers for C++ code. Wrappers are generated for a large set pf SDKs: Drawings SDK, Visualize SDK, Publish SDK. But for now our wrappers are Windows-only.

Guido: Does Visualize support huge point cloud data that might not fit into memory?

Alexander Federov: Yes. We have the RCS [Re Cap source]-based point cloud object, which allows the use of LOD [levels of detail] for the huge point cloud data. Yesterday [at the conference], there was a demonstration of such a technique. It will be possible to see the recordings of yesterday's presentation and find some details about it.

Guido: Do you have any plans to support AR [augmented reality] or VR [virtual reality] in Visualize?

Alexander Federov: We created a VR sample two years ago. But it was frozen since then. We have a plan to reanimate activity with it next year. With AR, no plans yet.

Ben: Will recordings of these presentations be available later?

Alexander Borobikov: We will upload the materials to our Youtube channel, so they will be available.

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

The importance of the Open Design Alliance is that it sets the pace for other CAD systems. In this way it is like the firms that produce kernels: numerous CAD systems depend on the capabilities delivered by updates to kernels, and likewise on the ODA.

Fortunately for members, the ODA sees DWG as more than just a file format, and so over the last decade has created a framework for application development around DWG. With its APIs and SDKs, members can create software like 2D/3D CAD programs that handle solids, custom file viewers of multiple file formats, PDF import/export, revisioning, and so on – for software running on desktop computers, Web browsers, and mobile devices. (See figure 10.)

Figure 10: Mobile version of DWG viewer and its capabilities

Perhaps the key to the ODA’s success is that it is a member-owned non-profit, ensuring long-term support. Being member-owned means that members determine the direction of development; being non-profit means that it does not need to satisfy a Wall Streetian demand for higher profits that comes at the expense of customer needs.
www.opendesign.com

And in Other News

The following posts appeared on the WorldCAD Access blog during the summer:

Letters to the Editor

I miss your Quotable Notables. I thought the irony was great.
- Paul Bertram

The editor replies: It became, frankly, hard work for me to hunt down a steady supply for each week. I am glad that you liked them. If you want similar irony, follow @managerspeak on Twitter. Here is one of his aphorisms:
"90% of success is showing up. We’re going to have to do that on Zoom for a while."

Here is a bonus one, to be filed under 'Spin Doctor of the Moment':
"This account was incorrectly actioned. This has been reversed and the account has been reinstated."
- Twitter

Re: Spaceclaim Success

It's hard to say how successful Spaceclaim's marketing was. And my experience is that nobody knows about Spaceclaim outside the CAD-nerd echo chamber -- and actually most CAD users have no clue what direct modeling is.

So if nobody knows about Spaceclaim, and it was not successful in terms of selling many seats, then can we say that their marketing was successful?
- Istvan Csanady, CEO
Shapr3D

The editor replies: They certainly gained mindshare, fostered the push in mainstream MCAD to emphasize direct modeling, and then disappeared from the CAD-nerd echo chamber with their acquisition by Ansys.

Re: Nobody owns 3dconnexion

Nice detective work. Thanks!
- Greg Morehouse (via WorldCAD Access)
New Zealand

- - -

This is in response to this guy’s complaint, “Their unwillingness to offer any sort of help to repair or replace my far superior Performance MX mouse with a failing left-click button.” Tell him he may be able to open the mouse, and then buy a replacement switch from DigiKey. I’ve done that to my mouse before, so maybe it’s possible for him? Doing so requires minimal mechanical and soldering skills.
- Chris Cadman

- - -

Commenting on 3Dconnexion/Logitech, I ran across this last month. They are indeed separate from Logitech. I was surprised. See the last post in this forum topic:
3dconnexion.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=35706
-Brian Cranston, CAD Administrator
LSI Industries

The editor replies: Yah, there is a lot of confusion on this. 3dconnexion could help by making it clearer on their Web site.

Re: Dassault Systemes vs Solidworks, Part II

This is really a great eye-opening article. I use Solidworks every day at work. Though cloud-based has its benefits, I live in an area that sometimes has a poor internet connection. I rely on this software to get my job done and to get accurate and high-quality production drawings for our production facility.

If Solidworks starts getting phased out to introduce a new system, it will cost us years of learning and hard work to get our drawings where they are. Thank you for the eye opening article. I will be keeping closer tabs on this and will think towards what our future may look like in the Solidworks and 3D design world. Thank you so much for this article.
- Josh Hixon
Duluth Tree Service Pros

Re: RetroCAD Is Hip

Ah, those where the days! Nth Engine's birds-eye view was the thing I missed most when switching to Matrox graphics cards.

I also remember the fiddling with jumpers / rocker switches on network cards, graphic cards and other ISA cards to get them to use different IRQ, DMA en I/O addresses. And particularly to optimize the I/O space so QEMM [Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager] could make the most of upper memory. Oh, well.
- Simon Weel (via WorldCAD Access)
The Netherlands

The editor replies: AutoCAD for a time also had a bird's-eye view (DsViewer command, expired in 2012), but I never found it particularly useful as it tended to be small, so as not take up much screen real estate (see figure below, credit cadforum.cz). If, back then, I could have afforded two monitors (they tended to be around $1,500 each in the 1990s), then a bird's eye view in one monitor might have been pretty nifty.

Bird's-eye view window at left

Thank You, Readers

Thank you to readers who donate towards the operation of upFront.eZine:

Bricsys (small corporate donation)
Dave Edwards Consulting

To support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are these:

$25 for individuals > paypal.me/upfrontezine/25
$150 for small companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/150
$750 for for large companies > paypal.me/upfrontezine/750

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for 25 years, reporting on the business of the computer-aided design industry

Monday, November 23, 2020

Trying Out Thangs

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Readers Respond to Revit's Shared Parameters

Thank You, Readers

Notable Quotable

*4771

Monday, November 16, 2020

Drawing Optimization

The Third Discipline: Civil Engineering

Point Cloud Processing

BIM

Drawing Composition

Revit Editing

Mechanical Assembly Design

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

== 3D Data Translation Software Tailored to Solve Your Problems ==

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Readers Respond to Revit's Shared Parameters

Thank You, Readers

Notable Quotable

Monday, November 09, 2020

Global Licensing

Rejiggered BricsCAD Lineup

What's New in BricsCAD V21

Direct Modeling

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Parallel Computing in CAD

Thank You, Readers

Monday, November 02, 2020

And in Other News

Thank You, Readers

Monday, October 26, 2020

Guest editorial by Roman Lygin, CAD Exchanger

Q&A

Sponsor

And in Other News

Thank You, Readers

Monday, October 12, 2020

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Addressing the problems of digital twins

Re: Open Design Alliance opens up the Revit file format

Re: When the cursor gets erratic, it's the mouse's nano-receiver at fault

Thank You, Readers

Contact!

About

Monday, October 05, 2020

Barriers to Implementation

Generative Design LT

Setting Up a Generative Design Study

Establishing Initial Constraints

Introducing the House Contents

Finishing the Study

Running and Reviewing the Study

Problems to Solutions

Conclusion: Question the Answer

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Autodesk joins Open Design Alliance

Re: Open Design Alliance DevCon 2020

Re: Bentley Files for IPO

Re: How Programming CAD Goes On, Behind the Scenes

Re: My First Software Manual

Thank You, Readers

Monday, September 28, 2020

Q&A

What Ralph Grabowski Thinks

Sponsor: Okino Graphics

And in Other News

Letters to the Editor

Re: Open Design Alliance DevCon 2020

Monday, September 21, 2020

The Future Is the Cloud -- Perhaps

You Pay Your Way

Siemens' Future is Mendix

== 3D Data Translation Software Tailored
to Solve Your Problems ==