We're very proud to announce that our own Jeffrey McGrew will be giving one of the keynote presentations at this year's Autodesk University.

With over 9,000 people attending, this is very exciting news indeed! We'll be briefly sharing the story of Because We Can and some of the work we've done. Buy a robot and change the world!

We're also giving a more formal hour long presentation on 'The Five Myths of Digital Fabrication'. We'll cover the five most common mistakes (and how to avoid them) that we see people make when they first get into making things via Digital Fabrication.

We'll also be doing a bonus talk, more informal, in The Lounge about how we made the tails for the Serpent Twins (that we made a recent Instrucable for).

We hope to see you in Vegas!

We're going to be speaking about digital fabrication at the Revit Technology Conference later this month. So we're going to have the first-ever BWC L.A. meet-up while we're out there. We're very excited about it! If you're in the area for the conference (or the wonderful Dwell on Design show), we'd love to see / meet you.

So no June EatFoodTalkShop, instead it's a L.A. Meet-up. EatFoodTalkShop returns next month!

We'll have details posted to our blog and twitter feed later this month. We'll see you in beautiful Los Angeles! Thanks everyone!

The wonderful Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture series is one of the standard books on Revit. Highly recommended. Put together by this crew of knowledgeable folks, it's currently available from amazon and soon as a downloadable version.

In additional to all the BIM basics, there are extra chapters on all sorts of great work being done via Revit. The one on Revit in the movie industry for set design is stunning! We got to help out on this one too, in that we wrote the extra chapter on BIM-to-CNC fabrication.

So go and grab your copy today!

There is only one more day left of the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. If you get the chance to go, check out the booth we made for Unity Technologies. It's hard to miss them on the trade show floor, as they are front and center! And their booth looks a little differently from everyone else's. Instead of the hard plastic and pop-up look of the booths around it, we made them a booth with inviting wooden furniture and a dramatic feel. It's all sustainable materials too! The main elements included: A big big wall with Unity Logos and Flat screens A podium A Standing Reception Desk A Triangular counter table for 3 iMacs A station for 4 iphones Two Long Counter tables for demo stations Six cabinets with signage for their affiliates (shown here standing back to back) Thirteen little stools And a lounge area!

BIMForum was amazing. We were honored to be included! The presentations were all great. It's certainly wonderful to see the newest developments out there within our industry. As always, the steel fabrication guys are way ahead of the curve. We got to see a presentation from Chris Fischer of Schuff Steel where they talked about going from BIM models (Tekla, in this instance) to their fully automated steel shop, where huge CNC plasma machines and automated conveyer systems process massive steel beams all day long. It's just like we do, except a whole lot bigger and heavier! We also got to hear from my old boss Ken Sanders and a fellow Gensler friend Shawn Geile with a stunning presentation on the epic towers Gensler is working on. One of which was just finished at the LA Live! Center. It was great to see that building complete, as I helped out in the early stages of it years ago when I was still at Gensler. A very complex project that could only be done via BIM, yet a complex project to do with BIM! When it came our turn to talk we focused on our in-house process we use for fully leveraging CNC and BIM together for creative interiors. Happy to say that it went over very well and that we hope to get a video of it up soon. Best thing about the conference was all the new friends we made. There are some amazing people out there doing simply incredible things. Specialty contractors making mountains for Disney, civil engineerings using automated robotic grading machines, huge contractors coordinating whole skyscrapers, to programmers developing totally new ways of collaborating together: across the board, everyone we met was up to something mind-blowing and awesome. We're sad that our schedule won't allow us to make the next one in June. But we certainly hope to go again soon!

So with all the talk recently both in favor of and the rather cynical counter-take on the 'new industrial revolution' I figure that it might be good for someone who's personally involved to share their thoughts as well. Take it for what you will, for this is just my view, but so far most of what I've seen written about it hasn't come from anyone directly involved with it.

So then who am I to talk about it? Well, a few years ago my wife and I bought a CNC routing table without much idea for what to do with it beyond making cool stuff. As a matter of fact, it's the very first blog post on this blog. We'd never even used a CNC machine before, actually never even seen one before in person. But we figured that we could figure it out, and with help from others online and the company we bought it from we got it running. We started making stuff for ourselves. Then friends. Then friend's friends. It blossomed into a business. Pretty soon we quit our day jobs, and now we're even hiring people. We were the first ones to bring a CNC router to Maker Faire. Hell, my wife and business co-founder's picture was on the poster for the first two years of Maker faire. So we're smack in the middle of this 'movement' I think.

Everyone seems to be having a hard time figuring out exactly what to call what we're doing. We've had this problem too. In fact, I have yet to hear anything that really nails it. But this guy comes close with the thought of calling it 'punk manufacturing'.

Let's take a brief look at punk rock then. OK, so just before punk, let's say the mid 70's, to be in a great rock band you'd need to be either a big rock star or a talented virtuoso (or both). Get signed by a big label and all that. Rock music was mostly about big production, big ideas, big marketing, and 15 minute guitar solos.

But then along comes punk. Suddenly, anyone with passion and good ideas can have a great band. Get rich? Probably not. But at least have a chance to be something more than whatever they were before. Have some great stories. Maybe even make enough money to just play music and not have to work some crap job.

And for most that was enough. I mean, heck, leisure for half the people on this planet is a full stomach, so getting to play music for a living, even if it's a lower middle class living, sounds like a hell of a deal to me. Sure, by the second or third wave you had punk bands like Green Day making a killing, and all that big media stuff getting back into it, but even those Green Day guys were starving teenage punks at one point, just playing music because they loved it, and riding that for as long as they could.

So now we've got the 'Makers Movement'. The new industrial revolution. But honestly, it's just a bunch of folks that via new possibilities can do what they have always wanted to do: make stuff. I think that both extremes of the Wired article and Gizmodo's response totally miss the fundamental point: it's really about freedom. Freedom for those of us who have only wanted to make things, to be able to do so, and make enough of a living that we can spend all our time doing what we love.

The sad reality that I have seen today is that anyone interested in making things goes to school for many years with the hope of being able to make fantastic things. Then they graduate, only to work on soul depraving things for years on end. Either pushing lines around in a CAD program drawing bathrooms, or designing headlights to purposely break in around five years. Only after working for a very long time, or playing well at political games, or becoming an academic to support themselves, or being really, really lucky, only then do they even have a chance of being in a leadership role; deciding what's getting made. I know many disheartened engineers, architects, and industrial designers. Once in the real world, they've found that no matter how good their ideas are, or how much passion they have, or how hard they work, it simply dosen't matter. Until they fight their way to the top they aren't going to be doing much other than making someone else's ideas real.

We all went into this wanting to make stuff, and came out not making much of anything.

So along comes cheap hardware, cheap CNC machines, and the Internet. Suddenly, we can all make stuff. All the stuff we've always wanted. And, hopefully, we can find lots of people to make it for. People who love it. Heck, maybe we can even keep our day jobs, and make stuff on the side. Or we can start our own business 100% and see if our ideas will really fly. We can make the stuff that our friends will love. We can make the stuff that we love. It opens up vast new areas. Just like with punk rock, all it takes is an instrument and an idea and you're on your way. Are you going to be a rock star? Get rich? Probably not, but who cares about all that corny self-centered stuff when you're having this much fun simply doing it?

So will it change the world? You know what, us Makers really don't care. We're having too much fun doing what we love. We're free to simply follow whatever idea we've got as far as we can. If you think for a second I'm not going to ride that for all I can, when all I've ever wanted to do in my life is make great things, then you've got a strange idea of how people work.

Honestly, I wonder if the cynical counter-response is partially from someone who's bitter at being stuck at a desk job. What's wrong with a bunch of new small business sprouting up all over America? Small business built this country, small business are the backbone of this country, and frankly, big business have little interest in a lot of local issues. Small businesses are all about local issues. If this movement launches a slew of new small businesses, I think it will indeed have an impact on our world, every bit as much as the Internet has.

The Gizmodo article does raise one very valid point: not everyone is going to be part of this thing. Which is fine, really. Everyone having access to guitars didn't make us all punk rockers. Everyone having access to a computer didn't turn us all into programmers. Everyone having access to a worldwide publishing system didn't make us all interesting bloggers. So everyone having access to manufacturing capability isn't going to make everyone suddenly a professional Maker. And that's OK.

Let's look at it this way: I'm now a small business owner, making a middle-class life for myself, and starting to employ others. While over the last three years the world famous Architecture firm I used to work for has laid off almost half it's staff. Working for a big company is no more stable than what we're doing, and heck, what we're doing seems to be working pretty well so far. It's certainly a lot more fun. I'm adding a lot more value to the overall GDP and my local community now then I was when I was working for that big firm. I'm creating real value, here, in my backyard. And while I loved working at that big firm, and running our own thing is terribly stressful at times, man, I wouldn't go back unless I had absolutely no other choice.

In other words life isn't just about profit, nor is that the only meter one should measure a business with. I feel both Wired and Gizmodo missed the point here: it's about freedom and happiness, plain and simple.

We're honored to be included in this year's BIMForum conference in Phoenix, AZ! We'll be giving a talk about BIM-to-CNC fabrication on Thursday afternoon, January 14th, at 3:15 pm. We'll be focusing a lot on our in-house process we use to go from BIM to Digital Fabrication. We'll also be talking about the big changes that have been recently happening in that space. With a few fun things to show off, we've got high hopes that it will be a great talk!

In the past, CNC machines were used to solve one of two problems: either you needed to make a whole lot of something quickly, or you needed to make something that wasn't easy to make by hand. CNC machines were all about high production rates. And they had to be, for they were ungodly expensive, and the software and know-how even moreso. But now with CNC machines getting cheap enough, and the knowledge widespread enough, so that anyone can use them for almost anything they can think of, well, it really changes the whole game. And that's exactly what were going to be talking all about!

The BIMForum conference is held twice a year by the Associated General Contractors of America, an industry group akin to the AIA or AIGA but for builders. With a focus on emerging technology and it's use in the building industry, BIMForum looks to be wonderful conference of AGC people. People who are really making changes and making things work. So many of these technology-focused building industry talks can wander into the tall reeds of theory. So we're rather interested in talking to a bunch of people who are more about the day-to-day realities of getting things built! We're really looking forward to meeting everyone.

Hope to see you there!

We're proud to share that we recently won the Design Slam Competition at Autodesk University earlier this month!

The Design Slam is a intense challenge of design, skill, and presentation, all compressed into 20 minutes. Run by Cut&Paste these mini design competitions are for all sorts of different toolsets, from Photoshop to 3D software.

Three competitors are given a design problem (or "brief" as it's sometimes known) a few weeks prior, and are only allowed to bring a handful of pre-made pieces with them. No notes, sketches, or anything else, and all the pre-made stuff you bring gets reviewed by a panel for fairness. Then it's off to the races, you've got to do the entire project in 20 minutes, live, in front of everyone at the same time, and then present your idea. Best person wins. So it's a balance of technical ability, design chops, and presentation skills that wins!

This being at Autodesk University, Autodesk's great get-together, the competitions were all focused on one of their tools. We were invited to participate in the Revit competition, up against heavy-hitters from HOK and Burt Hill, William Lopez Campo & Arman Chowdhury, two amazing people from amazing firms. One of which had already won one of these things in Germany. Stiff competition!

The design problem was to make a temporary pavilion at a French historic site: The Royal Salt Works of Claude Nicolas. Called 'Dangerous Liaisons' it was to help visitors encounter the site in new ways, inform and entertain them, while expressing the site's rich history, both Architecturally and culturally.

Here was the pitch for the judges: Salt crystals grow mathematically from a single introduced flaw, chaos controlled via structure. Supplanted by Culture & Tourism, Salt is no longer the power to France it once was. So we proposed that we turn the Salt Works into a Cultural Works for a summer by reviving the old factory buildings with the temporary installation a CNC router, and in turn fabricating onsite a whole series of elements to celebrate the site and the culture of France.

Not only a series of towers, a view platform, a bandshell, and cafe pavilions would be generated onsite, but also sellable designer products made from the scrap of the sustainable plywood left over.

No two of any of these items would be alike; for the use of parametricly-driven elements, consumer-driven customization, visiting designers-in-residence, and a simple randomizer script would make creating unique items easy and affordable.

The towers would collect power via draped solar panels, which in turn would drive a site-specific wifi network running an augmented reality application for common smart phones for the visitors to interact with.

This application would not only label everything onsite when viewed thru the smartphone, and show visual ghosts of what was to be historically, it would lead the assembly of the various elements via 2D barcode tags attached directly to the onsite fabricated parts. Thus turning the act of building into a celebratory group effort, a structure that wants to be built, and a new utopian model for our current times reflecting the original utopian ideals woven into the site and it’s history.

Finally, everything shown here is ready for CNC fabrication, right now, from this model, ready to go, and we made and brought along a prototype model to prove it! We really wanted to focus on something that was more build-able, less conceptual.

So the images you see here are nicer renderings and a slightly more detailed version of what we did on stage in 20 minutes. A very intense 20 minutes indeed!

Here's the image that Jeffrey created in the Design Slam itself, where he only had time to do one rendering.

We also have a video of it, and we'll post here on our blog again once the 'official' video goes live on the Cut&Paste site!

Also for those Revit heavies out there, we'll be following up with a more Revit-specific post about how we made the towers, complete with some Families for y'all to download and play with!

Hey, just a quick note: we won the Design Slam at AU 2009! W00t! We'll follow up with a more detailed blog post soon, showing what we did, but wow, we're both excited and humbled by the whole experience. Both HOK and Burt Hill threw down great solutions, and frankly at the end I thought HOK had it in the bag. Maybe my flashy Fluevog Boots I had on that impressed the judges. Honestly though, there is no way I could have possibly won without the support of my whole crew. BWC FTW! Now onto our classes!

So we're honored to be in this year's Design Slam at Autodesk University. We've already won just by being included. But it would be nice to beat HOK and Burt Hill! ;-)

Anyways, I can't share anything about our entry prior, and sure will be posting about it after, but in the mean time wish us luck and enjoy the final playlist.

We can plug into music to help us focus and work better. I really use music a lot when I work, so this was a natural for me! I did consider just putting on some Gamelan music, which I just adore, but figured I needed something more rocking to overcome the techno they pump on stage.

So here's the (approximate) 20 minute playlist:
1. "Sound System" by Operation Ivy. Two things. We're Oaklanders. East Bay. Wanted to Represent. Second, this song is terribly uplifting, and I'll need that to calm my nerves and have fun.
2. "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" by Faust. We were supposed to have French themes in the competition. We wound up with German ProgRock. Sigh. We're doomed. But it's a driving song. I love drone-y music to work to. Probably should have picked something by Stereolab instead.
3. "This Magnificent Bird Will Rise" by Deerhoof. Another local. The combination of noise, exuberance, art, and well, plain rocking in this track always gives me chills.
4. "Hey! Mashed Potato, Hey!" by the 5,6,7,8's. OK, guilty pleasure. I've been working out to this song a lot lately, and figured it would keep me going through the 'hump' of the middle.
5. "Kingdom Farts" by MC Chris. Yeah. Nerdcore. A rap song about how awesome he is at and how much he loves Video Games. I figured this would be a good finale, very fitting for the activity at hand, and well, I just love this song! Even though I love MC Frontalot more overall...

Wow! Where has the time gone. Less than two weeks left until Autodesk University 2009, where we'll be networking, teaching, pontificating, and competing! Getting to be part of the DesignSlam has been a great experience so far, and we're not even on stage yet. Just getting the chance to dig into some tools we haven't used fully within Revit has been a wonderful (but challenging) experience. See you there!

So Autodesk has put a lot of work into making it easier to move from tool to tool. New UI elements, certain features, and things like the ViewCube all come into play. But let's take things a little deeper, and talk about what Revit could learn from the other big tools of Autodesk's, and vise versa:

What Revit could learn from Max:

1. Robust selection tools. The ability to pre-filter your selections in Max, so that you'll only be able to click on Cameras, or Lights, is very helpful. As is the various ways one can select multiple items and save selection sets. Also the ability to 'loosely" select things, draw selection boundaries, and with organic 'falloff'. Sure, in Revit one can make Schedules to pick multiple specific things, and one can cut-and-paste Element ID's, but both aren't nearly as nice as some of the tools in Max. I still find myself hitting Tab endlessly, or cursing that the Filter tool isn't specific enough, or having to expand out the Family tree in the Project Browser and dig down four levels of branches to get the item I need.

2. Full control over rendering materials. While I understand that it's 'Mental Ray Light' in Revit, and it's been really useful to us here to have a better rendering engine directly in Revit, it certainly would be a lot nicer if we could make more complex materials. The ProMaterials Revit uses are nice and all, but trying to do something a little more complex, like make a 'mist' material or getting a fabric to UV wrap onto a chair properly are both a major pain in Revit. Even just having the ability to make procedural materials, or materials with more than one layer to them, would save us tons of time that we spend now making 'uber' bitmaps in Photoshop. While I don't think it needs to be nearly as complex as Max, the ability to have better material controls in Revit would be a huge help.

3. Modifiers. Man, is it nice to be able to simply throw a Modifier on some geometry, and have it do something fast and easy. Also being able to randomize elements, or non-distructively play with geometry, to auto-optomise a mesh are all huge. In Revit, we can make things Parametric, sure. But then it's still up to use to make it random. Placing random plants is a huge timesuck. I can make different Types to play with the design, but it's more cumbersome and I can only control the things I've planned ahead to control. And optimization? By hand!

What Max could learn from Revit:

1. More and better types of Views. Max can be a mess of multicolored geometry, difficult to navigate, and difficult to understand. Just having something as simple as Revit's Orient to View and Section Boxes would be huge. Or the ability to have a proper, easy to define section. Instead of having to endlessly manage visibility of elements via layers or elements, better views would make it much easier to get at what I need and change it quickly. Also I would never show a client a live Max model, whereas we model live in Revit with clients all the time. This really cuts into our ability to use Max as a design tool of any kind.

2. A consistent UI and workflow. Oh man, I always have to sit in amazement when people talk about how hard Blender is to use, or how the 2010 UI in Revit is 'a mess'. You want to see a mess? Try Max. It's like seven different UI's over the top of each other, there are five ways to do anything, and settings for any given thing are in three different disparate places that are all in floating overlapping Windows. If I worked with Max here, I'd get a multiple monitor rig just to support it. They have made this a lot better with 2010's Ribbon and better Render Window mind you, but it still pales in comparison to Revit's rather straightforward and structured UI and workflow. I spend half my time with Max simply remembering where to go, or searching help files, when having to adjust even simple things like Exposure and the Sky in a rendering.

3. Worksharing. The ability for more than one person to work on the same thing at the same time. It's amazing to me that Max, which costs as much as Revit, doesn't have the innate ability to have more than one person work on the same model at the same time, like you can in Revit. This means that even on project where Max would make more sense for us to use, we're more than willing to put up with Revit's faults just because we can then all work together on the project.

One final 'Shame': That you can't work in perspective views in Revit. This something so basic and that I was doing over 15 years ago in Caligari on an Amiga! Max has always had this too. What's up with that, Revit?

Tomorrow I'll be part of the AIA TAP conference in Chicago, via teleconference and video!

We were honored to be included in the annual AIA convention this year. Back in April, the San Francisco Digital Design Breakfast Club, an informal local group of designers who get together monthly to talk technology, organized a short Pecha-Cucha style series of short talks for the AIA.

We were invited to give a short presentation on our in-house process, and had a great time boiling that process down into a quick five minute talk. You can see the videos here.

There is a sub-group within the AIA called TAP, or Technology in Architectural Practice, that focuses on uses for new technology and process within our industry and holds a conference from time to time. These talks were part of a mini-TAP conference, as a leadup to their main conferece this month in Chicago.

Much to our delight, some of those videos (including ours) are going to be reshown at that big main TAP conference, and we'll then be on-hand via teleconferencing to answer questions.

That's right Chicago, I'll be a giant head on a video screen tomorrow morning! Mwuhahaha!

Honestly we're really excited to be part of the TAP conference, and are looking forward to it!

So technology in general I feel always goes through four phases as it gets woven into our lives.

Phase one is the Univac Stage. The technology is very new, very rare, and very special. Hardly anyone knows or understands it. It lives within the confines of large organizations, like Universities or Corporations, and gets awed news articles written about it.

Phase two is the Wood Paneling Stage. The technology is now publicly available, but people still don't really know what to do with it. So it takes the form, and acts like, something people already understand.

Phase Three is the Natural Stage. The technology is now pretty well understood, and is allowed to take a form that's actually better suited to itself. Sometimes changing it's outward appearance and behavior a great deal, but still fulfilling the same function.

Phase four is the Nothing Stage. The technology is now so ubiquitous, and understood, that it just gets subsumed into something else and just becomes part of a larger item. People don't really think about it anymore.

The first music synthesizers were huge, complex instruments that hardly anyone really understood and were very rare and special. Like the Moog Modular. Next came along the wood-paneled Mini-Moogs and ARPs; Piano-shaped Organ-work-alikes that anyone could buy and use and understand. Then the arrival of digital synths, with sampling and more complex synthesis, along with new interfaces, allowed for the music synithizer to really be what it wanted to be; a universial sound machine able to make totally new or convincing copies of sounds. Then, finally, music synthizers became so common that they can be made from a single computer chip, or totally copied via software, and are put into things like cellphones and greeting cards to make music.

The first 'CADCAM' programs were run on huge mainframes, and were only used for expensive, special projects. The machines cost a fortune, and could only be afforded by huge insitutions. Eventually CADCAM becomes more accessible and affordable, and it moved into the CAD era of the 80's. Wood Paneled, for certain, for the software mostly just did what people already did on a drafting table, just now it was on a computer. Eventually, the technology becomes understood and cheap, and fast enough to take on it's own natural form: fully 3D parametric solutions. Programs such as Solidworks and Revit are the 'state of the art' currently within the market.

So this leads me to ask: what's next? What is going to replace fully 3D parametric modeling? What comes after Revit?

I think the answer is something larger, something different, that simply swallows up the modeling software. Something that has all the features of a Revit (or enough features at least to be useable) within a single module that's just part of a larger system.

We already see this within the high-end manufacturing tools. Catia and Siemens, both 'PLM' or Product Lifecycle Management systems, are huge packages designed to manage ALL of a product's production. The actual design part, the part that does the modeling, is just one of many parts of a much larger production system. There are tools for managing orders, inventory, material flow, people, and more; all in one big modular app. Many parts have nothing to do with modeling at all, but moreso management of information, and have totally different toolsets and interfaces.

This leads me to guess that what will replace Revit eventually isn't something better then Revit, but something totally different. Something more akin to a Construction and Facilities Management tool that also happens to do BIM modeling. A 'BLM' or 'Building Lifecycle Management' system.

While Revit is slowly growing in that direction, I don't know if it's going to make it. While BIM is touted as the solution here, I think it's really going to be about what comes after Revit. This is because of a few simple things.

First off, we can't easily query Revit models from outside of Revit. So that puts an end to those Revit models being the 'center' of a BLM. If we're going to have wildly divergent tools all touching the same data, that data has to be accessible in many ways, not just via a single 'heavy' tool focused on designers and engineers. In a PLM, one doesn't have to be in a modeling environment to manipulate information about the product. We'd need the same for our BLM. We'd need to still have the designers and engineers modeling away, but we'd also need for there to be many other interfaces to the project better suited to the other stakeholders.

Secondly, we'd need something truly collaborative over the web. Revit requires special hardware to run remotely, and even then it's not exactly a great experience. Something more akin to Microsoft's Sharepoint, or Google Documents, or even a simple Wiki; where multiple people can work together at the same time one the same thing from almost anywhere would be needed. Where everything is tracked and versioned, so that changes can be tracked back to those responsible for them.

Third, our industry would have to change to support such model-centric workflow. While that's starting to happen with IPD, it's still such a new and undefined thing. PLM isn't just software, it's a whole workflow for making products that's now over 20 years old. It's pretty well understood. IPD isn't yet, and until a new workflow 'settles down' within our industry that is model-focused, tested, and proven, our tools will most likely be fragmented and kept to their silos.

Last, I think there would need to be a major shake-up within Autodesk itself. They are still very much a 1980's software company, with a business model of getting people locked into their proprietary tools and selling updates and software instead of a more IBM or Google-like selling of services or ads.

Imagine if Google made Sketchup! totally collaborative over the web, tied it into Google Docs, gave it the ability to produce proper drawings for permits, made it parametric, and then stocked the Google Model Warehouse with smart real models of building products. They could give the whole thing away for free, track the market data of who's useing what products in their buildings, and make bank by selling that data back to the industry. As well as selling placement and ads within the libraries. Maybe they would charge for the 'pro' version, that has more features and more uptime. Maybe you could buy your own BLM server, and run it in house, like you can for Google Earth. And people would use the heck out of it, even if it only did about 50% of what Revit does today.

Just from how often we're asked by people within Autodesk why we're not using Inventor to do what we do (silos!) and how they are getting better with SEEK when it comes to content, but still have a long ways to go, doesn't give me much hope that Autodesk will give us a 'BLM'.

So imagine Revit grafted into Navisworks as a module, with a robust web interface and really good change management, along with some Construction & Project Management tools mixed in there, and I think you'd be close to the 'BLM' system that Autodesk could produce.

But probably won't.

Back in April, we were invited to give a brief talk at the AIA conference in San Francisco. You can download the video here, and the slides are available as a PDF here. No embed, sorry, don't know why the AIA site decided to go with a download for the video.

The talk is a five-minute overview of the five-step process we use here at Because We Can to make stuff, and we're pretty happy with how it came out.

While the AIA puts on a different conference just for technology-focused topics called TAP, for Technology in Architectural Practice, they also had a 'mini-TAP' if you will during the main larger AIA conference.

The San Francisco Digital Design group, an informal breakfast club we're part of, did a group presentation as part of that 'mini-TAP'. It was a http://www.pecha-kucha.org format, i.e. 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide, with ten different people presenting. We were excited and honored to be one of the presenters, as our other nine co-presenters were all terribly smart and experienced experts. I highly recommend watching all the presentations!

Just a quick note, we'll be presenting at this year's Autodesk University in Vegas in December. We're leading two hands-on labs & one open panel:

Model to Marvelous Goes Mental: Realistic Approaches to Photo-Realistic Design Visualization With Autodesk® Revit® 2010

From Fabulous to Fabrication: Real-world Digital Fabrication and BIM

Lean, Last Planner, Agile and Scrum, Oh My! Modern Processes for Production

We're really excited about it! One of the labs is on BIM-to-CNC fabrication, and it is really hands on. Rather than just talking about digital fabrication & BIM, we're actually all going to make stuff. Everyone in the lab is going to get to fabricate their lab model right there at the end of the lab & take it home with them!

AU has been a great learning and networking experience for us. Early registration has just started. Hope to see you there!

So while this is old news if you're in the 3D world, it's still sad for me: Caligari Truespace is no more.

Microsoft, who bought them to try to be like Google (with it's buy-out of Sketchup) or something, is now pulling the plug on the whole thing.

While I stopped using it a looong time ago, it was the software that really got me started on 3D in general. Teaching myself how to use a bootleg copy of Caligari on my old beloved Amiga 2000 played a rather large role in my future. The ability to edit complex (for the time) 3D models in perspective with gestural input really made me fall harder for what one could produce creatively with a computer, instead of learning more about the computer itself via programming or electronics.

When Caligari went to Windows with Truespace I followed, and owned my own copy that I did a fair amount of work with. Solid models in AutoCAD R14, export to Truespace, and render away.

Last version I used was Truespace 5, which while great in some ways I remember being somewhat buggy and crashing a lot. Once Revit came out I switched and never went back, for it as more stable and faster while producing pretty much the same quality. And then I got into Blender, and that was that.

But anyways, thanks Caligari, for showing me that computers could be used as creative tools and inspiring me to do something neat with them!

AUGI AEC Edge is out, and it looks great! Lots of great articles. And we're not just saying that because some of them were written by our friends!

We are heavy users of Building Information Modeling. We not only share as much information as we can early in the process, we also directly fabricate parts of the project from the very same models. Parts we sometimes hand off to contractors for installation, sometimes it's even just templates and jigs that help the contractor install things faster or better. Anyways, we're very open and share tons across the board with those we work with.

We just gave a talk on what we do at the TAP preview that's part of the larger AIA convention that just breezed through town. When we give talks on what we do, and how we work, we always get one or two Architects saying something to us along the lines of "well, that's great you can work that way, I could never do that because of all the liability" or "if I share my models, I'll just get sued".

While those concerns are legitimate, I do feel that they are overblown. People always fear the unknown, and this whole BIM / IPD workflow is pretty new and uncertain. CNC production is almost jetpack-future territory. However, getting sued over sharing a CAD file or a BIM model with a contractor or fabricator I think is a bit of a boogyman. I have yet to hear of someone getting sued over it, yet everyone is scared of it!

Honestly, the elephant in the room I feel is in the Contract Administration, the Implementation, in the project execution itself. Change orders, omissions, coordination errors, and other big CA problems are all very expensive and very real. And chock full of frightening levels of legal liability. Everyone in the construction industry has heard of someone getting sued over problems like these. It's likely that we'll get sued over one of these at some point in our careers, it's almost impossible to avoid.

Wouldn't you think that having the opportunity to possibly reduce such problems should be taken advantage of as much as possible earlier in the process? Simply using BIM instead of a traditional process we feel helps reduce these problems; IPD and direct CNC fabrication workflows even moreso.

Sharing more information leads to better coordination and therefore less liability we feel. Actually, as an industry, I think that we should embrace a significantly more open workflow, and change how we all work together.
It's a big part of why I left Gensler, and started a design-build firm. I saw an opportunity to embrace this new way of working, and to see where it might go. CNC-enabled Design-Build negates those big worries, and lets us just get down to building great things.
Which is why we all became designers, engineers, or architects in the first place!

So we've been speakers at Autodesk University, Autodesk's big yearly conference and grand poo-bah get together, in the past. It's always been a great time to connect, teach, learn, and hang out with some old friends.

This year they are doing something a little different, they are opening up the conference sessions to a general vote. Which we think is awesome! Once you sign onto the AU website, you can vote on which sessions you'd like to see this year.

So if you're going to AU, and you'd like to see us talk again, please take a moment to vote for one of our talks:

Model to Marvelous Goes Mental: Realistic Approaches to Photo-Realistic Design Visualization with Revit® 2010

From Fabulous to Fabrication: real-world Digital Fabrication and BIM

There and Back Again: Getting anything out of and into Autodesk Revit

Lean, Last Planner, Agile and Scrum, oh my! Modern Processes for Production

Thanks, and we certainly appreciate all the support we get from everyone out there!

We've been helping out a local Oakland-based developer with some housing projects, and run into a small snag.

We're all over the BIM thing. From waaaay back. We even feed our BIM models to our CNC router, and directly produce the project from the BIM models.

So it's somewhat ironic that we're having a heck of a time finding a local Revit-using Structural Engineer who does smaller projects like houses and small-ish multi-family buildings.

We'd love to be swapping whole models, and doing the full BIM and IDP style workflow. But the only people I know doing that sort of thing are too big for projects like this. That's what I get for working for Gensler, I only know other BIM people doing big things!

Anyways, if you know of, or are, a Bay Area based Structural Engineer who's Revit-savvy (or looking to be, we could even help on that front if the fee is lowered some) who does single-family hillside homes and multi-family projects, boy, would we love to talk to you!

I'm a big fan of something called Croquet, a 3D SDK built from Squeak, a Smalltalk-based programming language.

Smalltalk is... well... weird. Really weird. But really cool. It's also really old, and Squeak is a more modern take on the whole idea. Croquet takes Squeak, and turns it into an SDK for other people to build 3D applications.

See, the crazy thing about Croquet is that it makes it easy to build 3D multi-user collaborative web-based applications. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty mind-boggling:

So we get designers asking us sometimes about how we work with Revit and CNC tools together. Or they say that they tried doing it, and didn't have it really work out very efficiently. They wonder what special tool or bit of software we're using that makes it work.

Well, it's not about technology or tools. It's about people and process. We here at BWC have worked out a process that allows us to quickly and efficiently go from a BIM model in Revit to CNC-produced physical elements.

The thing that most designers don't understand about a CNC workflow is the CAM software, isolation of elements for export, and general fabrication and modeling methoids and limitations. It's all about the process in how you use these tools, and how you link them together, than in the tools themselves.

Having decent CAM software is a big part of this being sucessful. We use something called Aspire from Vectric, and we love it. It's great for three-axis work, which is what our CNC router is. We're not simply dumping out whole messes of models and feeding it to the CNC machine directly as if it was a 3D printer, we're exporting descrete elements from Revit, importing them into the CAM software, setting up the jobs within the CAM software, and then running those jobs on the CNC.

So we model things in Revit in a way where we can easily separate out all the bits. Good families, view templates, sections in families, lots of isolated 3D views, and more go a long ways to making this work. By exporting clean 2D sections of flat parts as DWG/DXFs, or 3D solids as DWG/DXF/SAT files, you can import those parts into CAM software for proper toolpathing.

We also at times use Revit families as a placeholder for a more complex model, or sometimes have a simpler representation in Revit of something we know we'll add more details to in the CAM software. For example, we might start with a solid in Revit, export that to Blender, manipulate it further, and then bring that into the CAM software. Or we might simply have two solids overlap in Revit, and within the CAM software we'll insert in the vectors requred for toolpathing the proper joint.

The final thing really is that we know how things go together. We know fabrication and construction, and a lot of Architects and designers simply don't really know how to build things. A huge part of making the CNC work is the actual craft of the thing, understanding tolerances and material strengths and weights and joinery details.

So it's really a whole process, not just a single tool or bit of software that makes it work. I'll be talking about this at the upcoming TAP pre-AIA conference, and I'm hoping to talk more about this at AU this year. With an actual demo of making something via a CNC or laser cutter on the spot if they will let me!

Also, if you are an Architect or Designer looking to go from Revit BIM models to CAM software and CNC production, well, give us a call. We love to help people out, and we're fast and reasonably priced, as well as being fun to work with! We've helped a number of designers as CNC consultants with modeling, toolpathing, and actual production and fabrication of their ideas, and we've got a proven track record of using BIM and CNC together.

OK, so truth be told, we've stated more than once that we felt that Autodesk was still very much stuck in the 80's as software companies go. It's not made us terribly popular at the Autodesk conferences at times, but it seemed to us that all they understood sometimes was selling very expensive software on CD's to a group of semi-locked-in end users. But we're happy to report that they seem to be moving in a more modern direction, even if it's still a little "Internet 1.0" at times.

When you present at AU, you get lots of feedback. The event organizers setup a nice website where folks can not only rate how well they thought you did, but can also tell you exactly what they thought of your presentation. It can be a little stressful!

So the results from AU2008 are in, and we took best lab overall with our Mental Ray & Revit class. Not only that, we got the highest score out of anyone in the whole conference. Huzzah!

A huge thanks goes out to our lab helpers, Robert Manna, Nauman Mysorewala, Tyrone Marshall, and Adam Lega. Without your wonderful help we couldn't have done it!

Thanks again everyone, and hope to see you next year at AU!