Go go gadget BIM… | Blog

Go go gadget BIM… | Blog

Original Posted by: James Austin at  http://www.bdonline.co.uk/comment/blogs/go-go-gadget-bim%E2%80%A6/5022604.blog


2 August 2011

I was a little bleary eyed on Sunday morning when I turned the TV on, so I was pretty happy when I realised it was time for BBC Click. I slowly realised it was all about Rapid Prototyping and 3D printing, and then I woke up pretty quickly, because they were doing exactly what I did when I discovered about this technology – scanned their heads!
It was an interesting piece, and it struck a chord with me because it is a technology that I’ve been watching. Because of what I do, I try to keep an eye on what is going on around the edges of BIM, and I’m constantly looking to see if there is something that might be relevant to what we do. I thought I would share a list of some of my current favourites for this week:
Laser scanning

I’ve already written a couple of blogs about this, so I’m not going to dwell too much on this subject, but I thought it was interesting last week to see it mentioned twice – once in the Manchester City Library article in Building, and also here, where it is forecast that the Laser Scanning market will double by 2015, as costs lower and volume increases.
Rapid protoyping and digital modelling

This ties together a few things that I think have real potential for the construction industry. Photogrammetry has come a long way in recent years, and we are now able to model objects quickly and accurately with relative ease – Autodesk’s project Photofly is a good free example of this, and the latest version now supports fbx transfer to Max , as well as a 3D printing format. Great for early stage projects and design options, and we’re investigating opportunities for integrating it into our rapid energy modelling workflows.
From the rapid prototyping front, Autodesk is also keen to push into the “maker movement” and has recently released 123D which certainly looks worth a peek.
Mobile models

Source: http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/inventor-publisher-viewer-brings-3d-assembly-instructions-to-android/

One of my favourite apps right now is the Inventor mobile viewer. Using that, I can carry around projects with full installation, safety and demolition instructions for fully attributed 3D models. The opportunity for buildings in this is massive – we just need to work out how to get them onto it first, but imagine construction information on a mobile platform from assembly to demolition through management.
I’ve also been watching a few other SAAS services develop BIM capabilities too – based on IFC format data, there are a few ways of “making BIM” online. Check out bimserver and Asite, also cadfaster and goBIM.
QR tags and RFID
I first came upon RFID (radio frequency ID) tags when I spoke at the precast concrete association annual conference, and I was immediately interested. Basically the idea is to “chip” each part of a building before its built, with a unique ID. This got me thinking – if they could be aligned with a BIM, we’d be part way there to automating assembly. Tekla then showed me where they had done it in real life, which was awesome, using RFID-tagged steel to manage the construction of a stadium in the US.
Now imagine what could be done when demolishing a building that had been constructed using RFID tags, and had assets with QR tags all linked to a BIM… Great stuff.