Revit

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!

Finally we're able to share some exciting news: we've been invited to compete in this year's Cut&Place Design Slam at Autodesk University 2009!

What is Design Slam? It's a frantic on-stage 20 minute design competition, done live in front of an audience. Three folks go head-to-head on a preset design problem, each working out their solution live (with their monitor mirrored onto a huge projection screen above them), doing a whole project in 20 minutes. At the end of the brief work time the judges decide who's got the best designer chops right there and then. Woo!

We're going to be in the Revit Architecture competition "Dangerous Liaisons" (natch) Tuesday night and get this: we're up against someone from HOK, and someone from Burt Hill. Both great firms that we have tons of respect for. We're very excited and honored to be included, if not a little intimidated going up against multi-national Architecture firms with hundreds of people and fancy Flash-driven websites...

We'll be the scrappy underdogs, straight outta Oakland I guess. Because We Can!

We just got the design brief last week, and we're already buzzing with ideas and excitement, as well as working on some special Revit API tricks to help out. We wanted to bring a robot to fab stuff live on stage too, but then it wouldn't even be a fair fight. ;-)

Now, other than practicing for the 'Slam, there is one other vitally important issue to resolve prior: What music to play while working? They pump techno onstage while the Slam is going on, but we're able to bring our own music and headphones to help focus. This has sparked lively debate here at the Because We Cannery, with the only strong contender to date being "It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" by Faust being a clear front-runner, as well as some Detroit Cobras, Polysics, and Epoxies songs. "Sister Ray" by The Velvet Underground and anything by Deerhoof being decided to be too noisy in the middle, no matter how much we might love it. And while I'm all for Funkadelic's "Super Stupid", it's too guitar wankerish for Jillian (of course, I mean it's Eddie Hazel on that track after all...).

Wish us luck, and if you're coming to AU, please come and cheer us on!

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 ??? and 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.

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!