CAD, BIM & 3D

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...

I assume that everybody will at least have heard about the Kinect from Microsoft. It is a mainly a camera that sees depth and color. In addition, it has a whole image interpretation library that is used to detect gestures and poses from people standing in front of it. However, a use that seems more directly applicable to architects and designers is 3D scanning. While there are more accurate methods, especially using terrestrial laserscanning that captures millions of points accurately and fast and photogrammetry, that uses plain images, but requires more extensive 3D reconstruction algorithms, the kinect is very attractive, as it is cheap (around $100-150 standalone), is working on "any" computer, partly due to the Open Source drivers that have become available, but also more recently by the Microsoft SDK, although this only works on Windows. That said, the majority of architects and designers are not really into coding. Luckily, there are some free and cheap ready-made s...