3D Model for Construction

[angelo]

A recent tour by co-workers to the Denver Art Museum (by Daniel Libeskind) revealed some pretty amazing techniques.

 

The contractor has built a complete 3D model of the building that is used on a daily basis for coordination of all the utilities (3D collision detection).

 

The Xsteel structural model is being used as the baseline, with everything else being referenced off it. They are even using the model for setting 3D points for their concrete pours (and they haven’t had any mistakes yet). form*Z is being used for the modeling (nice, but it must be a major pain to update things).

 

I am impatiently waiting for these techniques to trickle down for use on fairly basic buildings. It would save a lot of coordination issues during construction, and drastically cut down on change orders.

 

It’s not as glamorous as presentation images for a project, but it gives credence to creating a 3D model for almost every project…

 

What are your thoughts?

[gus_webb]

i would love to see full computer models integrated into the construction process. exploded axonometric drawings, as well as renderings of construction details would go a long way towards improving construction quality. think about the last thing you bought that you had to assemble. if the instructions that came with that IKEA dresser looked like the average architectural drawing set, there would be a lot of wobbly dressers out there. and let's face it; a lot of builders don't pour over architects' drawings with a microscope, catching all the little details we've put in. a lot of things they do the way they're used to doing them, whether or not its what was intended. more legible illustrations would go a long way toward fixing that communication barrier.

we're SLOWLY working toward integrating something like this in our office, but it's a long ways off. a lot of software issues involved in making something like this feasible...

[csven]

"3D collision detection"? could you explain?

[mbr]

Collision detection is like in video games or some websites, which basically gets the xyz coordinates of one object, then compares them to the xyz's of the other object to see if the overlap, if they do, then it tells you that they overlap, thereby detecting any 'collisions'.

[csven]

now that i know.

 

i'm not in the architectural field so i'm curious how it's used. VR walkthroughs only? or is there more to it?

 

actually, i need to research the process you guys go through. as an industrial designer my toolset is different (Maya, Pro/Engineer, Alias Studio). could anyone quickly lay out your (typical) process and tools? my college roomie was an archi, but that was a while back. it sounds like there are a number of similarities in how we work, so maybe there's some worthwhile crossover to be had.

[angelo]

The local AIA Chapter has been putting on a breakfast series called “The End of CAD” (I know, it’s a bit fatalistic, but hey, they need some way to get people to show up).

 

I found it both enlightening and frustrating. The highly innovative stuff being done with BIM (Building Information Model) was all with ArchiCAD and Bentley Triforma. The international interoperability standard (IFC) has been embraced by these software developers, but to my knowledge Autodesk has been dragging their feet on this. I have heard that Revit is in the process of adapting some sort of variant, but no concrete evidence.

 

The ability to plug-in to 3rd party structural packages, energy analysis, cost estimating, etc. is a huge plus.

 

I was very impressed by Onuma’s talk. He seems so far out in front of what most arch firms can even conceive that it was kind of cool to see the “future” now.