CAD, BIM & 3D

Today, when I went to the Autodesk Students website ( http://students.autodesk.com ) I was greeted with a " Product Selector ". By answering a few basic questions, the most appropriate (Autodesk) software for your purpose is suggested. While I was not surprised at the answer, it was plain obvious that whatever you choose that is related to architecture, building or construction, the answer would be " Revit " in almost every single case. Select a project > house > Revit Select a project > building > Revit ... Select a field of study > Building and Infrastructure Design > Architectural Engineering > Revit Select a field of study > Building and Infrastructure Design > Architecture > Revit Select a field of study > Building and Infrastructure Design > Civil Engineering > Revit, Civil 3D, Infrastructure Modeler or AutoCAD Select a field of study > Building and Infrastructure Design > Construction Management > Navi...

My newest tutorial video explains how to evaluate an ArchiCAD model with Solibri Model Checker , using IFC . It is quite long (over 50 minutes) and again in Dutch. It handles the main workflow and shows how to adjust some parts in the ArchiCAD model to have better results. I'm interested in providing English translations, but that would fall outside of my teaching work so I need to find another way of supporting this effort. Would captions be an option? (still a LOT of work) As always, everything is recorded using Screenflow on a Mac, but everything I show works exactly the same on the Windows versions of ArchiCAD and Solibri.

It's in Dutch so maybe not for everybody, but I recorded a few video-tutorials discussing how to get a model from ArchiCAD into Revit in a more or less editable form, so you can still do some things with it. Using IFC and Solibri to inspect the exported model and see what is indeed exported but missing upon import. Inside Revit, we make a Schedule and notice that the room does not pick up the ArchiCAD Zone Height properly and the category needs special attention to get through. Important lessons: some ArchiCAD model simplification can make life easier (e.g. a SEO between wall and roof resulted in the window being placed one floor below its opening). Not sure if going back and forth between ArchiCAD and Revit to finetune IFC export is feasible for many people, but we have to deal with the current intricacies of the IFC implementations as they are today. FWIW, Revit 2013 was running inside Windows 8 in Parallels, whereas ArchiCAD 16 and Solibri Model Checker 8 were running n...

Last week, I got a question from one of our master thesis students. She is working on a historical reconstruction project and received some old files from the architectural office, responsible for a renovation project in 1993. They used ClarisCAD. The files had no extension and the software is, obviously, part of CAD history. Recovering the software ClarisCAD is not available anymore, but on Macintosh Gardens , an archive is maintained with downloadable installation files. You can download the full software freely and it runs without requiring to enter a serial number. I assume, as the software is abandoned, that using it can be considered as some kind of "fair use". I did not fully investigate though and as it was only used to recover some files, I think it is OK. Recovering the operating system To be able to run this on a current computer, you need to emulate the Operating System (unless you have the actual hardware still running around somewhere). Luckily, there a...

So I haven't had the chance to post a lot, lately. That is not because I had nothing to say, but because I was busy. As anybody else, I guess. In fact, most of the people I meet are more than busy and getting eaten up by work, responsibilities... Well, this isn't a post about complaining, beware. I thought I'd share a little thing, which might appeal to some of you. I'm working quite a lot with IFC files lately and while I clearly recommend to at least use a good viewer to check what you are exporting from your BIM software of choice or when checking an IFC you get from somebody else. But from time to time, you need to dig inside the raw IFC data . The well-structured but otherwise not-meant-to-be-read IFC text code. So you load up Notepad (on Windows) or TextEdit (on Mac) and open an IFC file... Well, better stop at this point. For one, notepad is nowhere up to any serious text editing task and secondly, well, it'll frustrate you. You need at least a decent...

Motivation I have worked literally day and night on a expanding series of video tutorials. They are made as part of my teaching assignment at KU Leuven and are meant for our students of Architecture Engineering to replace to a large extent that traditional class-room based sessions. Partly out of necessity, as it becomes harder and harder to support large groups of students and partly out of didactic motivation, as the speed with which students learn CAD and 3D software differs widely. For some, it is always too fast in a class setting, so they give up and start entering Facebook or messaging on their cellphone. For others, they are frustrated as they are already ahead of the explanation, exploring other tools. The actual tutorials So here is the full YouTube page where I'll post all current and future video's in separate playlists. stefkeB - all YouTube video playlists At the time of writing, there are videos about  ArchiCAD (3 series), AutoCAD (2D basics), SketchUp...

I have a few books that were publishing by Packt Publishing . They are specialized in IT books and ebooks and have a wide offering. Books I bought handle Drupal, Blender, Unity and SketchUp (for use with Unity) as discussed in an older post . If you register on their site before the end of this month, they will present you a nice free offer (not purchase required) to celebrate their 1000th book.  The books are priced fair, they are delivered for free and when you combine a paper book with its ebook, you get a good price reduction. All paper books I have where in Black and White and if you are looking for quite graphical software (e.g. Unity) the images sometimes tend to be a bit dark. The ebooks are in full color.