Migrating to Udemy: Free Artlantis Course available

I recently got a chance to take a few online courses on the Udemy platform. This is an online market-place for courses, which are mainly video-based. It serves both as a teacher and student platform and is (deliberately) not meant as an academic platform.

When approved, you can become an instructor too and publish your courses and put a price on them.

When you put a price on your course, it takes an additional approval step for the teacher, but after that, the system does everything: registrations, payments (using Paypal) and even entering into promotions and discount offers.

As a teacher you can generate discount/coupon codes, so you can give selected audiences free or cheaper access to your course. I plan on making my future tutorials available in English on this system and maybe have a discount code for my students, but that depends a bit on my employment situation…

The course system is well structured, with sections, lectures and quizes, with the possibility to add accompanying material too.

With the online web viewer, you can watch the video and have course outline, comments and even custom notes on the side, which seems very handy.

With the mobile viewer, you have less interaction, but you have the added option to speed up the video. I tend to do that, usually at 1.25 or 1.5x speed. It sounds a bit less natural, but (as I learned from my own students), sometimes teachers are simply too slow and even a bit boring…

Themes & Topics

The primary focus seems to be video-tutorials (60% of each course should be video), but the topics vary. There is obviously a quite large IT-focus in the courses (development, web design) but there are several business and hobby-related topics too.

3D and CAD is available, but BIM is still quite limited. There are some Revit tutorials (even on the Revit API) and one (Spanish) ArchiCAD course. There are a few oriented to SketchUp, but much more on 3ds Max, Maya, Blender and the Adobe Suite, obviously, as they target a wider audience.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and migrated my Artlantis Introduction Course (formerly on Youtube, but I’ve removed it now) into Udemy. At this point in time, the course is free (but is in Dutch, so beware!). Since it uses the previous version of Artlantis 4.1, I decided to not charge for it at this time. There are already several people who registered, but being free obviously helps.

Comments

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

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

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 9 - using IfcConvert)

This is part 9 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss the IfcConvert utility from the IfcOpenShell Open Source IFC Library to preprocess an IFC model for integration with Unity. This is (finally?) again a coding post, with some scripts which are shared to build upon. Conversion of IFC into Unity-friendly formats The strategy with this approach is that you preprocess the IFC-file into more manageable formats for Unity integration. Most Web-platforms do some sort of pre-processing anyway, so what you see in your browsers is almost never an IFC-file, but an optimised Mesh-based geometric representation. However, it wouldn’t be BIM-related if we’d limit ourselves to the geometry, so we will parse the model information as well, albeit using another, pre-processed file. IFC to Wavefront OBJ I used a test IFC-model and used the IfcConvert-utility converted it into OBJ en XML formats. The default way to use it is very simple:

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 8 - Strategies to tackle IFC)

This is part 8 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss IFC as a transfer format towards Unity. As with the previous post, this is not a coding post, although hints and examples are provided. Open BIM and IFC Everybody who ever met me or heard me present on a conference or BIM-lecture will not be surprised to hear that I’m a strong believer in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open standard, with already two versions published as an ISO standard, being IFC2x2 and IFC4 (but surprisingly not IFC2x3 which is widely used). In the ideal world, this would be the format to use to transfer BIM data into another environment, such as Unity. So what are our options? Looking in the Unity Asset Store Assimp is a library which supports multiple formats, including IFC. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/trilib-unity-model-loader-package-91777 I did a few attempts, but alas without any success. It is possib

CAD, BIM & 3D

Search This Blog