AEC Magazine March / April 2022 by X3DMEDIA

RIMAC CAMPUS IMAGE COURTESY OF 3LHD ARCHITECTS

Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology for Architecture, Engineering and Construction

The need for speed Inside Rimac’s hypercar campus

New beginnings

Workstations galore

The metaverse

Exciting new tools for AEC workflows

12th Gen Intel Core, Nvidia RTX + more

An opportunity for architects?

March /April 2022 >> Vol.119 p01_AEC_MARCHAPRIL22_Coverv2.indd 1

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Industry news 6

Nvidia RTX A4500 42

Autodesk boosts XR aspirations; AMD launches new 64-core pro CPU, while Nvidia unveils new pro viz GPU and takes Omniverse to the cloud, plus lots, lots more

We get hands-on with Nvidia’s new pro-viz focussed workstation GPU

Hypercar campus 16

What do 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs mean for CAD? We find out in this in-depth review of Scan’s latest workstation

3LHD architects were engaged to design the futuristic new production and R&D facility for Croatian electric hypercar innovator Rimac Automobili

Spaces for iPad 22 We’re impressed by a unique new conceptual sketch and modelling tool for the Apple iPad from Cerulean Labs

Snaptrude 24 The first of two BIM start-ups we cover this month comes from India and attracted funding while CEO Altaf Ganihar was still an undergraduate

Arcol BIM 28 When a new software tool is backed by ex Autodesk co-CEO, Amar Hanspal, it has to be taken seriously. We look at cloud startup Arcol that aims to simplify BIM

Toric 32

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This US start-up promises to integrate, transform, visualise and automate project data from multiple sources

Scan 3XS review 46

HOK: navigating the metaverse 52 What role can architects and designers play in shaping this exciting new immersive world?

Zaha Hadid: the metaverse opportunity 56 ZHA’s Patrik Schumacher on the metaverse and the integration of real and virtual communication spaces

Reducing CO2 by AI design and robotics 60 Tal Friedman on why AI design strategies and automated smart manufacturing will change our industry for good

Drawing automation 62 We talked with Gräbert’s CTO about the company’s efforts to better link 2D to BIM

AI in construction 36

The Golden Thread 64

How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can deal with complexity in the building industry

How effective can the Golden Thread of information be and when? Microdesk’s Martin Couling shares his thoughts March / April 2022

24/03/2022 12:51

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News

Autodesk to acquire The Wild to boost presence in Extended Reality (XR) utodesk has signed a definitive agreement to acquire The Wild, an AEC-focused cloudconnected, extended reality (XR) platform, which includes its namesake solution, The Wild, and IrisVR, which it acquired in 2021. Autodesk says the acquisition will help meet increasing needs for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology advancements within the AEC industry and provide a natural extension to its digital ecosystem. “A convergence of events makes this the right time for Autodesk’s acquisition of The Wild’s talent and technology as the foundation of Autodesk’s XR journey,” said Nic Fonta, general manager of XR at Autodesk. “Accessibility, affordability, as well as the future of digital twins and metaverse, create the right environment and business rationale for advancing XR technology within the AEC industry.” The Wild offers tight integration with a range of desktop AEC software, including

Revit, Navisworks, Rhino and SketchUp, as well as Autodesk BIM 360 It enables AEC teams to present, collaborate and review projects immersively and interactively from anywhere. It’s cross-platform, so

collaborators can join from VR (Oculus, SteamVR, Windows Mixed Reality), desktop (macOS and Windows) or AR (iOS). ■ www.thewild.com ■ www.irisVR.com ■ www.autodesk.com

What AEC Magazine thinks The Wild was relatively late to the game of AEC-focussed VR software but was arguably the first to place such a big emphasis on collaboration. The company’s cloudconnected software was designed from the ground up for distributed AEC teams. The company’s stock rose considerably in 2021 when it acquired IrisVR, one of the pioneers of ‘push button VR’ and the first to offer an optimised

March / April 2022

workflow from Revit to VR. Autodesk is acquiring not one, but two AEC-focused XR tools. The Wild concentrates more on early-stage ideation and collaboration, while IrisVR caters to coordination, issue tracking, and the exploration of BIM data. Both tools are well respected. While The Wild already had an established workflow with Autodesk BIM 360, Autodesk’s Nic Fonta, general manager of XR, told AEC magazine that there are

plans to integrate the technology more seamlessly with Autodesk Construction Cloud, Autodesk BIM 360 and Autodesk Forge. Getting live project data in to the hands of the right people at the right time is essential in order to improve efficiency in the AEC sector, as is getting timely feedback from design / review sessions and from the construction site. Having this data flow in real time will be key. The acquisition looks to diminish the importance of Unity, with whom Autodesk formed a strategic partnership in 2018, when it gave it the keys to the city of Revit, offering much tighter integration than was available through the standard Revit API. Development of Unity Reflect Review, the company’s VR, AR, iOS, Android and PC design review software, however, has

been slow. Customers are still waiting for the ability to feed annotations back into BIM 360, a feature originally previewed at Autodesk University in 2019. Fonta, however, says nothing will change in Autodesk’s relationship with Unity as a direct result of this acquisition. “We are going to remain super open on our platform and the way we work with our partners,” he says. “We see a lot of value that these different partners, including Unity and others, bring to the ecosystem.” The big benefit of bringing The Wild into the fold is that it puts Autodesk’s XR destiny in its own hands. Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost says XR is a must-have business imperative for today. It will be interesting to see where Autodesk takes things in the future, and how quickly.

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News

ROUND UP Vectorworks boost

Dell launches 12th Gen Intel Core ‘Alder Lake’ desktops

Vectorworks 2022 SP3 presents a range of new features, including Unity-based 3D modelling viewing technology for both web and mobile versions, new storage integrations with Vectorworks Cloud, and updates to Datasmith file exchange for a direct link to Twinmotion ■ www.vectorworks.net

Cyber secure The UK Government’s Cyber Defence and risk team (CyDR) has awarded Asite a top security accreditation. This enables Ministry of Defence information to be stored and processed through Asite’s cloud-based construction platform ■ www.asite.com

Navisworks interop The Open Design Alliance (ODA), which provides interoperability solutions for CAD and BIM software developers, now offers export support for Autodesk Navisworks files from its BimNv SDK (Software Development Kit) ■ www.opendesign.com

Secure collaboration Egnyte has introduced several new capabilities to its Egnyte for AEC product offering for cloud content security, compliance and collaboration. The AEC-specific features include expanded BIM file process support and enhanced integration with construction management software Procore ■ www.egnyte.com

Hyperloop prototype Engineers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are building a fullscale prototype for the Hyperloop high-speed transportation system, including the vacuum tube. The prototype of the high-tech concrete tube is being designed using Allplan ■ www.allplan.com

Lumion enhanced Real-time viz tool Lumion has introduced two key new features for the 12.3 release: a volumetric light effect for omni lights, so architects can cast a ‘glow of light’ across their project, and the ability to import custom decals, to give an ‘extra touch of character, style and texture.’ ■ www.lumion.com

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ell has launched three new desktop workstations for 2022 with the latest 12th Gen Intel Core ‘Alder Lake’ processors, DDR5 memory, and pro graphics options from Nvidia and AMD. The Precision 3660 Tower stands out with a completely redesigned chassis with a liquid cooling option to ‘run heavy workloads with minimal noise’ and frontaccessible bays for ‘convenient and secure’ removable storage. It features a choice of 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs up to the 125W Intel Core i9-12900K, up to 128 GB memory, and a wide range of GPUs up to the Nvidia RTX A6000 (48 GB). The Precision 3460 SFF is a small form factor design for space-constrained workspaces and offers a smaller choice of 12th Gen Intel Core CPUs up to the 65W

Intel Core i9-12900 vPro. The smaller chassis also brings trade-offs in other areas with a maximum of 64 GB of memory and low-profile graphics options up to the Nvidia RTX A2000. In contrast, HP’s equivalent, the HP Z2 SFF G9 includes 12th Gen Intel Core K-Series processors, up to 128 GB memory and more powerful graphics options including the Nvidia RTX A4000. The Precision 3260 Compact is Dell’s most compact workstation with a tiny 2.3 litre chassis. Despite its size, it offers the same CPU, memory and GPU options as the ‘SFF’. However, it’s more limited in storage with a choice of M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs and 2.5-inch SATA HDDs, and not 3.5-inch SATA HDDs which offer more capacity and a better price per GB. ■ www.dell.com/precision

Lenovo delivers slimline CAD laptops enovo has introduced two new thin and light mobile workstations, built around the 12th Gen ‘Alder Lake’ Intel Core i7 processors. This includes the 14-inch ThinkPad P14s Gen 3 and the 16-inch P16s Gen 1. Features include a choice of 16:10 aspect ratio displays, an optional Nvidia T550 GPU, FHD 1080p camera, up to 48 GB of

DDR4 memory and 2TB of PCIe Gen4 NVMe storage. Lenovo is also branching out in aesthetics. In addition to traditional black, the new machines are available in storm grey with an aluminium ‘A’ cover. There continues to be a big emphasis on reliability and durability. The P16s Gen 1, for example, passes 26 MILSPEC testing procedures.

Other features include, a wider touchpad, blue light reduction, X-Rite factory colour calibration, Intel Wi-Fi 6E and optional 4G. ■ www.lenovo.com/workstations

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News

Lenovo updates entry-level desktop workstations

smallest desktop workstation. With a volume of less that 1 litre, Lenovo says it is 96% smaller than a traditional desktop. The micro workstation is also powered by 12th Gen Intel Core processors, but the smaller chassis comes with some tradeoffs. It has half the memory capacity of the P360 Tower (up to 64 GB), NVMe SSDs only for storage, and comes with the CAD and BIM-focused 8 GB Nvidia T1000 GPU, rather than an RTX graphics card.

he Supervisory Board of Nemetschek (the owner of Graphisoft, Allplan, Solibri, Vectorworks, Bluebeam and others) has appointed Yves Padrines as chief executive officer (CEO). In addition to leading the overall Nemetschek Group, he will be responsible for Media & Entertainment (M&E) and Nemetschek Venture Investments business units, while overseeing merger and acquisition activities. Prior to this appointment, Nemetscheck was seemingly run by a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), in conjunction with the supervisory board. AEC Magazine sees this appointment as an essential step to add focus to the Group’s activities, which has tended to operate as a cluster of separate, but related, companies. In the future we expect to see further consolidation, more integration between brands and more acquisitions.

■ www.lenovo.com/workstations

■ www.nemetschek.com

Tiny by name, tiny by nature: Lenovo’s new micro workstation

enovo has given its entry-level desktop workstation portfolio a boost with the introduction of the ThinkStation P360 Tower and the ThinkStation P360 Tiny. The P360 Tower features 12th Gen Intel processors, up to 128 GB of RAM, supports a range of GPUs up to the 24 GB Nvidia RTX A5000, and comes with a choice of NVMe SSDs and 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). The P360 Tiny is billed as the industry’s

Scan launches cloud workstation service can Computers has launched Scan Cloud, a new service for GPU-accelerated workstations and servers in the cloud. Powered by professional-grade Nvidia RTX GPUs and vGPU technology, Scan says the new service offers all the capabilities of its 3XS desktop systems

from any device, anywhere. Virtual machines can be specifically tailored to meet customer requirements in terms of number of users and performance profiles for CAD, CAE, AEC, and BIM. There’s also a complimentary CPU/GPU 3XS Cloud Rendering service.

www.AECmag.com

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File sharing boost for VDI

carbon calculation capabilities to infrastructure digital twins. The integration will allow users to incorporate engineering data created by diverse design tools into a single view using the Bentley iTwin platform, generate a unified report of materials and quantities and share it with One Click LCA via cloud synchronisation.

anzura and IMSCAD have formed a partnership to help accelerate deployment of graphical applications for VDI in the cloud, including 3D applications such as CAD. IMSCAD will now offer the global file system Panzura CloudFS as a core file collaboration and data resiliency solution to work alongside its CAD-optimised VDI solutions using either Citrix or VMware and Nvidia vGPU and GPUs. The Panzura solution is said to help distributed teams to ‘simultaneously and efficiently’ work on multiple projects, assignments and applications.

■ www.oneclicklca.com ■ www.bentley.com

■ www.imscadglobal.com

■ www.scan.co.uk/business/scan-cloud

Digital twins to address sustainability entley Systems has teamed up with One Click LCA, a developer of lifecycle assessment (LCA) software, to help engineers reduce the environment impact of infrastructure projects. One Click LCA’s software can now be integrated with the Bentley iTwin platform to deliver integrated workflows for lifecycle assessment and embodied

Nemetschek appoints CEO

March / April 2022

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News

AMD unveils Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series in Lenovo ThinkStation P620 n summer 2020, AMD announced the Threadripper Pro 3000 WX-Series of processors for single socket workstations. Based on AMD’s ‘Zen 2’ architecture, the CPUs combined high core counts, high frequencies and high memory bandwidth with pro technologies for security and manageability. Threadripper Pro 3000 WX gave AMD a long-lost seat at the table of the major workstation manufacturers. It marked the launch of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620, the first AMD-based workstation from the big four of Dell, HP, Lenovo and Fujitsu in almost 15 years. 18 months on and AMD has now launched its next generation, the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series. The Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series offers the same number of cores as its predecessor (12 to 64) but takes advantage of Zen 3’s higher Instructions Per Clock (IPC), as well as higher frequencies. This gives the workstation CPU a performance uplift in both single threaded workflows, such as CAD, and multi-threaded workflows, such as rendering, simulation and reality modelling. Like its predecessor, the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX boasts 8 channels of DDR4 (ECC) memory, giving a significant benefit over consumer Ryzen processors in bandwidth hungry applications such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Finite Element Analysis (FEA). There are a total of five Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series processors. The top-end Threadripper Pro 5995WX has 64 cores, 128 threads, a base frequency of 2.7 GHz and a boost of up to 4.5 GHz. There’s also the 32-core 5975WX, the 16-core 5955WX, the 12-core 5945WX, plus a new 24-core model, the 5965WX. As core counts drop, base frequencies increase but the 4.5 GHz turbo remains the same.

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2nd Gen AMD Threadripper Pro (right) will be initially available in the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 (below)

As with first generation Threadripper Pro, the new processor is available initially in the Lenovo ThinkStation P620 workstation. However, AMD has stated that other partners will be introducing workstations using AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 processors later this year. We wonder if this will include Dell or HP, who continue to rely solely on Intel CPUs for their workstations. For the launch of the new processors, AMD pointed out that Threadripper Pro is not just about hardware. The team also works closely with software development partners to help deliver ‘continuous performance enhancements.’ AMD highlighted improvements made to simulation software Ansys Mechanical that delivered a significant performance uplift. According to AMD, Ansys Mechanical v2021.R2 with optimised AMD BLIS CPU libraries is up to 2.3x faster than Ansys Mechanical v2021.R1 when run on the same AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3995WX workstation. There have also been improvements in rendering engines Autodesk Arnold and Chaos V-Ray, plastic flow simulation

software Solidworks Plastics, and AI-assisted design tool PTC Generative Design. We expect more to follow.

The competition Threadripper’s biggest competitor is currently the Intel W-3300 series of processors, which feature between 12 and 38 cores. Based on Intel’s ‘Ice Lake’ scalable platform, these single socket processors launched back in July 2021, but have not been taken up by any of the major workstation manufacturers. According to AMD, this is because it does not deliver the enterprise class features of the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series. In fact, some of the ‘mid-range’ workstations on sale at the moment, such as the Dell Precision 5820 and HP Z4 G4, feature ‘Cascade Lake’ Intel processors which date back to 2019. It is only new entry-level workstations, such as the Dell Precision 3660 Tower and HP Z2 Tower G9 that feature modern Intel CPUs, but these are “Alder Lake” Intel Core and are limited to eight cores. With its ThinkStation P620, this currently puts Lenovo at a huge advantage when coveting customers whose workflows will benefit from a sizable number of cores. However, with the possibility of Dell or HP introducing AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 workstations later this year, and with the expected launch of Intel’s new “Sapphire Rapid” CPU, it remains to be seen how long this lasts. ■ www.amd.com ■ www.lenovo.com/workstations

www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 12:53

News

Nvidia RTX A5500 workstation graphics card launches, along with new mobile GPUs vidia has launched the Nvidia RTX A5500, a new professional desktop workstation GPU with 24 GB of GDDR6 memory. The company also announced six new ‘Ampere’ RTX GPUs for mobile workstations, including the Nvidia RTX A500, RTX A1000, RTX A2000 8GB, RTX A3000 12GB, RTX A4500 and RTX A5500.

The Nvidia RTX A5500 With the launch of the desktop Nvidia RTX A5500, Nvidia now offers a total of five professional workstation GPUs with which to target the mid- to high-end pro viz market. These include the single slot Nvidia RTX A4000 (16 GB), and the dual slot RTX A4500 (20 GB), A5000 (24 GB), A5500 (24 GB) and A6000 (48 GB). The introduction of the Nvidia RTX A5500 (and the RTX A4500 in November 2021, which we review on page 42) is as much about improving supply of product, as it is about providing customers with more choice to hit different performance levels. As with many workstation components, supply of the Nvidia RTX A5000 has been patchy over the last year. According to Nvidia, the RTX A5500 enables it to use components from different products to deliver more pro GPUs to the market, as Bob Pette, VP of Nvidia’s professional visualisation business unit explains. “If we struggled with inventory and supply on the [RTX A]5000 we [now] have the [RTX A]5500. “One of the things we could have said is ‘sorry, just go buy the [RTX A]6000.’ But the 6000 is burdened with cost from a 48 GB frame buffer that maybe not

The Nvidia RTX A5500 is tuned for design viz workflows

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everybody needed. So, it’s really about giving customers choice.” Memory capacity aside, the RTX A5500 has specs that are closer to the RTX A6000 than the RTX A5000 (see chart on page 45). Nvidia says the RTX A5500 offers twice the performance of the previous generation ‘Turing’ Nvidia RTX 5000. The Nvidia RTX A5500 is available now with an estimated street price of $3,600. Workstations from BOXX, Dell, HP Z, Lenovo and Supermicro with the Nvidia RTX A5500 will follow.

‘Ampere’ mobile Nvidia RTX GPUs The Nvidia RTX A5500 will also appear in mobile workstations with 16 GB of memory and fewer CUDA, RT and Tensor cores. There are also five other new pro laptop GPUs including the RTX A500 (4 GB), RTX A1000 (4 GB), RTX A2000 (8 GB), RTX A3000 (12 GB) and RTX A4500 (16 GB). The big news here is that RTX technology will now be available in a much broader range of mobile workstations, from entry-level to the high-end. In particular, the Nvidia RTX A500 and RTX A1000 will give a much lowercost of entry for those looking to adopt AI and ray-tracing technology in their

AEC workflows. While the A500 and A1000 will unlikely be powerful enough for those serious about design viz, they should offer full compatibility with next generation graphics engines for CAD and BIM software, based on the Vulkan and DirectX12 graphics APIs. The new engines will combine rasterisation with ray tracing techniques to deliver a much more realistic viewport. The idea is that CAD users will be able to flip into ‘ray traced’ mode, in much the same way they currently do with shaded, wireframe and realistic. For more information, see Autodesk’s new One Graphics System (www.tinyurl. com/Revit-GPU), which should make its way into Revit, Inventor and other Autodesk applications, and Dassault Systèmes’ Project Romulan for Solidworks (www.tinyurl.com/inventor-GPU). Nvidia has also doubled the memory capacity on its mid-range mobile GPUs. The Nvidia RTX A2000 now offers 8 GB instead of 4 GB and the RTX A3000 offers 12 GB instead of 6 GB. The new mobile GPUs will be available in pro laptops starting Spring 2022 Meanwhile, turn to page 42 for a review of the Nvidia RTX A4500. ■ www.nvidia.com ■ www.pny.com

Nvidia RTX hardware ray tracing is now available from entrylevel to high-end Nvidia mobile workstation GPUs

March / April 2022

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Nvidia opens up access to Omniverse collaboration platform through the cloud vidia is looking to make its Omniverse collaboration platform more accessible to a wider audience with the introduction of Omniverse Cloud. The new service allows design teams to collaborate using GPU-accelerated virtual machines without having to invest in IT infrastructure. Among Omniverse Cloud’s services is Nucleus Cloud, a ‘one-click-to-collaborate’ sharing tool that enables designers to access and edit large 3D scenes from anywhere, without having to transfer massive datasets. Nucleus Cloud was first shown at CES earlier this year, but the big news for this new announcement is that support for Omniverse Cloud will now extend to Omniverse Create and Omniverse View. It means that Omniverse Create, for interactively building 3D worlds in real time, and Omniverse View, an app for non-technical users to view Omniverse scenes, can now have full simulation and rendering capabilities streamed using the Nvidia GeForce NOW platform, powered by Nvidia RTX GPUs in the cloud. Designers can ‘instantly’ invite other collaborators to join a session by sending a link. And those collaborators don’t have to own Nvidia RTX hardware. They can use any device to access the service — Chromebook, Mac, or tablet. In his keynote address at Nvidia GTC at the end of March, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, showed a demo of the future of design featuring three human designers and one specialist Omniverse Avatar AI designer collaborating virtually in Omniverse Cloud, making design changes to an architectural project. The team conversed using a standard web conferencing tool, while connected in a scene hosted in Nucleus Cloud. One human designer ran the Omniverse View app on their RTX-powered workstation, while the other two streamed Omniverse View from GeForce NOW to their laptop and tablet. Cobus Bothma, director of applied research at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, shared his thoughts on Omniverse Cloud. “At KPF, a global leader in architectural design, we value the ability of our designers to collaborate as seamlessly as possible by making cloud-

March / April 2022

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first technologies available to them when they need it,” he said. “Omniverse Cloud fits perfectly into that practice with the promise of excelling our visual and 3D design collaboration abilities by enabling our teams to work in Omniverse from any device, anywhere.”

favourite Hydra delegate-supported renderers and the Omniverse RTX Renderer directly within Omniverse Apps. Betas are available for Chaos V-Ray, Maxon Redshift and OTOY Octane, with Blender Cycles, Autodesk Arnold coming soon.

Platform enhancements

Nvidia is seeing a significant growth opportunity for using Omniverse with digital twins. In addition to plugging in design data, Kerris explains that sensors for digital twins such as LIDAR scanning, ultrasonic and images, are now connecting to the platform. “You can use a mobile device today and go use the LiDAR scanner that’s in the current models of many of them, and capture data that’s USD data and bring it into Omniverse, for example.” he says. “We’ve started a concentrated effort to talk with a number of the companies that are making these sensors and other companies that do ecosystems out to those sensors as well. The idea is anything that can be connected should be able to be connected to Omniverse.” To help process these huge datasets, Nvidia announced Nvidia OVX, a computing system architecture designed specifically to power large-scale digital twins. According to Nvidia, the OVX server, which consists of eight Nvidia A40 GPUs, is built to operate complex simulations that will run within Omniverse, enabling designers, engineers and planners to create physically accurate digital twins and massive, true-to-reality simulation environments.

There have also been several new developments to the Omniverse platform in general, including an expansion to products that plug into the Omniverse ecosystem. These include a new connector to Maxon Cinema 4D and an enhancement to the workflow with Unreal Engine. Bentley Systems has also announced the availability of visualisation software LumenRT for Nvidia Omniverse, powered by Bentley iTwin. According to Richard Kerris, VP of Omniverse, this is very different to the many plug-ins available for the platform, as he explained to AEC Magazine, “This is them [Bentley Systems] committing to and using Omniverse as a compute engine underneath the hood of their products. So, what customers will experience is using LumenRT, but the benefits they’ll get are from the technology that Omniverse provides to them. “This is the first in a number of companies that we’ve been in active discussions with about using the compute engine of Omniverse to power their next generation product,” he added. Rendering support has also been enhanced in Omniverse and users can now integrate and toggle between their

Omniverse for digital twins

■ www.nvidia.com/omniverse

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News

Exodigo launches subsurface imaging platform

AI optimises sequencing on High Speed 2 I-construction software specialist Alice Technologies and Align JV (a joint venture of Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine, and VolkerFitzpatrick) will be expanding their partnership on the UK’s HS2 project. Align initially came to Alice with a goal of “pressure testing” its existing construction schedule for the Colne Valley Viaduct. The team wanted to find opportunities to optimise the sequence and resources to minimise cost and environmental impact. With the AI-powered platform, Align generated millions of sequence options – along with fully loaded construction schedules – for the planning team to evaluate. The team explored a variety of “what if” scenarios to ensure they had the most robust programme of work. For example, what if the teams that installed the concrete pile caps worked on Saturdays? And what if they increased the size of the team? The software also helped find the optimal mix of teams required on the substructure in order to increase the utilisation of their crews and minimise downtime.

sraeli startup Exodigo has launched a non-intrusive subsurface mapping solution for construction and utility companies. Carried by drones or small carts, the Exodigo system combines advanced sensors, 3D imaging and AI technologies to help give a clear picture of underground conditions so companies can make more informed decisions before they start design, construction or resource excavation. It can generate a digital geolocated 3D map of buried assets – from man-made pipes and cables to soil layers, rocks and groundwater ‘across any terrain’. “It is time to finally break ground on a safer, more sustainable and infinitely

more precise method for subterranean discovery,” said Jeremy Suard, co-founder and CEO of Exodigo. “Our powerful combination of advanced sensor technologies and proprietary AI platform provides users with a safe, fast way to get a complete view of what lies beneath the surface. “Ending the era of blind digs, Exodigo gives companies an accurate, easy-tounderstand map of what lies beneath the surface – empowering their teams to save time, money, and lives. Think of it like combining the scanning power of an MRI, CT scan and ultrasound all into one image of what is beneath the ground.” ■ www.exodigo.com

■ www.alicetechnologies.com

Symetri acquires US VAR Microdesk uropean Autodesk Platinum Partner, Symetri has bought US Autodesk reseller, Microdesk for an undisclosed sum. Symetri acquired UK reseller Excitech last year and appears to be hoovering up Autodesk Value Added Resellers (VARs) to be a global player, as the channel condenses. Symetri had revenues of $170 million with 450 employees in over 20 offices in Europe. The deal will add a further 300 employees to Symetri and will mean the group will serve more than 20,000 customers and 250,000 daily users. This will make Symetri the largest global Autodesk Solution provider. The company was founded in Sweden 1989

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and has been part of the Addnode Group since 2006. Autodesk’s route to market is quickly changing. Once, the company had over 2,500 VARs but, over the years, this has consolidated down to a significantly smaller number, which now manage tens of thousands of customers. As Autodesk has taken on more direct sales and moved to subscription, the old VAR network has shrunk, as margins to dealers lowered. This year, VARs have been rebranded as Autodesk Solution Providers and will get less income from product sales and will be expected to rely more on developing their own tools and adding value to customer’s product experience. ■ www.symetri.com

■ www.microdesk.com

Sustainable construction ekla Structures and Structural Designer 2022 offer a dynamic embodied-carbon calculation function for design and drilldown processes using the Embodied Carbon Calculator. The visual and dynamic calculation tool is said to allow users to quickly and accurately assess the environmental impact of their design decisions directly in Tekla software.

■ www.tekla.com/2022

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AC25_A4_UK_Source.pdf

2021. 07. 20.

10:22

Duke Ellington School of the Arts Architect: cox graae + spack architects / LBA Joint Venture Photo © Chris Ambridge

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NXT BLD 2022

NXT BLD: future AEC technology NXT BLD returns to London’s prestigious Queen Elizabeth II Centre on 21 June to explore the very latest in emerging technologies from leading researchers, practice, universities and the AEC development industry

or the last two years, the vagaries of Covid meant we had to be dynamic and resourceful to keep our annual NXT BLD event happening in some form. But now it’s full steam ahead for our 2022 event, as it returns to London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre this summer. Please put 21 June 2022 in your diaries! NXT BLD isn’t like other events in our industry. It’s not a BIM conference, per se, it’s a ‘beyond BIM’ conference and exhibition, where the editorial team of AEC Magazine collates speakers on topics based on the latest research and active in-house development of exciting new technologies the industry might adopt in the future. In the past this has meant talks on robots in construction, digital fabrication, DfMA, knitted buildings, 3D printed buildings, blockchain, VR design tools and many more. If you have never attended, or want to remind yourself on the past speakers, nearly all the talks are available at www.nxtbld.com/videos. The conference has been going long enough now, that many of the embryonic topic areas covered have started to become daily used technologies.

Speaker highlights For 2022, our two-track conference will cover a wide range of topics. We will have in-practice R&D, university research, new software firms, industry thought leaders and speakers Michael Marks was co-founder and CEO of unicorn off-site construction firm, Katerra

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From ICD Stuttgart: collaborative, autonomous multirobot systems which integrate the design and construction phases of architecture into one process

from parallel industries, providing lessons from design and fabrication. Last year’s talk from Cathal Loughnane of Aston Martin (www.nxtbld.com/videos/ cathal-loughnane) went down well and we will look again to peek into advanced digital design focussed industries. We are still pinching ourselves that Michael Marks has agreed to present at NXT BLD this year. Marks is an American businessman, investor and entrepreneur, and is possibly best known as co-founder of unicorn off-site construction firm, Katerra. Formerly he was CEO at Flextronics (now called Flex) a huge electronics contract manufacturer, which has expertise in supply chain logistics. He was even interim CEO at Tesla! He has a passion for the AEC industry, and has a number of new companies in the offing. Marks will share some of what he has learnt from his adventures in large-scale manufacturing. Looking at past, present and future, he will analyse technology’s role in supporting the needs of the industry and how modular and prefabrication can deliver constructed buildings in weeks, as opposed to months. Greg Schleusner, principal / director of design technology at HOK, will return to build on his 2021 talk (www.nxtbld.com/videos/gregschleusner) and on the topics covered in AEC Magazine’s recent ‘BIM is bust’ article (www.tinyurl.com/BIMisBust). Last year, he presented analysis and some potential solu-

tions. This year we will see actual proofs of concept, which HOK has undertaken to deliver on the vision of open collaborative work between mixed tools, while taking advantage of existing technologies. This work is to spawn a larger collaboration between leading AEC firms to jointly develop missing industry solutions. Richard Harpham, VP at Slate Technologies (p 36), together with Skanska, will explore the benefits of deploying AI on structured and unstructured data, in complex construction projects. Samuel Leder, research associate, Institute for Computational Design (ICD) Stuttgart, will share the latest on his unique research into collaborative, autonomous multirobot systems which integrate the design and construction phases of architecture into one process. The robots not only pick and place structural members but also pick and place each other, to complete the next task in the process. It’s an ingenious concept. The following video was the state of its development back in 2019 (www.tinyurl.com/Leder-robot). We can’t wait to get an update. This is just a small selection of the inspirational speakers we have lined up this year. Visit www.nxtbld.com for the latest info. A limited number of early bird tickets are available now for £49. Tickets include an all-access pass to the conference and exhibition, as well as tea, coffee, lunch and drinks at the beer / wine social mixer. The editorial team of AEC Magazine look forward to seeing you on the day ■ www.nxtbld.com/tickets-2022

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Cover story

Hypercar campus Croatia’s Mate Rimac is often described as ‘Europe’s Elon Musk’. In just ten years, he has quickly risen to the forefront of electric hypercar design and battery production, even acquiring Bugatti. 3LHD architects were engaged to design Rimac Automobili’s futuristic new production and R&D facility not far from Zagreb by Martyn Day

merican and European automotive firms have been caught out by the rapid rise in startups producing commercial electric vehicles. While Elon Musk has led the charge (no pun intended) in making Tesla one of the most desired vehicle brands worldwide, you might not be so aware of a Croatia-based firm called Rimac Automobili, which has trailblazed the development of electric hypercars. Capable of a staggering 258 mph they are the fastest in the world. Rimac Automobili is owned by 34-yearold entrepreneur Mate Rimac, who has a passion for electronics and inventing. In 2007, while trying to get into car racing, the engine of his 1984 BMW Series 3 blew up. Despite not having any automotive engineering experience, he converted the car to electric and then proceeded to break several world records for electric car performance. By 2011 Rimac had created his first supercar from the ground up, called the Concept One. Those of you who are keen watchers of Amazon’s The Grand Tour may remember Richard Hammond’s test drive of the Rimac Concept One, which ended with him rolling and destroying the oneof-a-kind prototype, valued at £1 million. While making amazingly fast electric vehicles, the company that Rimac built became widely respected for its battery R&D and powertrain designs, attracting 16

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major investment from Porsche, Hyundai and Camel Group. Rimac currently provides electric drive and battery technology to Renault, Jaguar, Aston Martin, SEAT, Koenigsegg and Pininfarina. In 2021, Rimac took the majority share in a partnership; Bugatti Rimac (Bugatti, of course, previously owned by Volkswagen and makers of the incredible Bugatti Veyron.) The rise of the Rimac brand has been meteoric, despite coming from a country that has no real history of car production. (Although it has to be said that Nikola Tesla grew up in a village (Smiljan), that lies in modern day Croatia). With rapid expansion and a filling order book, space had become a constraint, both for production and R&D. Rimac Automobili needed a big new home.

Rimac Campus The story goes that Mate Rimac was out on his bicycle in the countryside, about 20 minutes’ drive from the centre of Zagreb, when he came across an abandoned castle. He thought that one day it would make a great HQ for his company. Roll forward a few years and Rimac acquired the land around the castle. While refurbishing the castle itself was not practical, in 2019 he planned to build a headquarters for his company there. The idea was that the facility would comwww.AECmag.com

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Rimac is a vegan and wanted livestock on the campus, especially in front of the restaurant, to remind people of the animals they were eating, in case they wanted to change their minds!

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The Rimac Campus, complete with racetrack and a lake that sits between the castle, the production facility and the R&D facility

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Cover story

bine car production, high-capacity bat“We took the largest flat surface for the tery production (hundreds of thousands production facility, and we wanted to of units per year), power train production somehow create the relationship between for other automotive firms, R&D, a muse- the production facility, the R&D facility, um and, of course, a professional-level and the castle – the three largest volumes racetrack for test-driving sports cars. on the site. Rimac started an international competi“In between, we placed a lake, which tion for architects to design the whole reflects all three buildings and keeps them campus, to accommodate a potential in balance and connects them all with a 1,000 employees. With a detailed brief, ‘topographically ‘invisible’ building, the firms were given one month to submit campus restaurant. their ideas. Local architec“The production facility ture firm, 3LHD Studio won is the largest building, the competition and came 400 metres long and The design of the being up with a futuristic cam200 metres wide. Unlike park is inspired most automotive firms, pus, which covers over 95,000 square metres, of by the flow of the Rimac makes all the parts which 35% will be covered for the car on site. They air over race in vegetation. don’t buy parts from the cars. Seamless As the scheme develother companies, but they flow was oped, the company grew, produce and assemble evedespite COVID, and is now important to the rything on site.” being built to accommodate design, as to how For 3LHD, it was very up to 2,500 employees, important to make the campeople move over double the company’s pus as high quality as posaround the current headcount. sible for working and for Marko Dabrović, one of campus, between living. Dabrović explains the founders of 3LHD that his team spent considbuildings explained the rationale of erable time working out the winning design, “To how to minimise noise, toxbetter understand the comins, humidity and maximpany we are working for, we always find ise efficiency, hiring a consultancy from out what their key values are. For Rimac, Stuttgart to help design the climate needs, these were: speed, balance, growth, fami- both indoors and outdoors. ly and openness. With that in mind, we “In such a large production facility (havanalysed the site and the topography. ing the area of almost seven football pitch“The castle was, of course, the most es), people need access to outside places to prominent building, set on the high have comfort. So, we designed an atrium ground - the roof of which gave us the in the centre or building and smaller atrimaximum height. ums near the offices,” says Dabrović.

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The Rimac Nevera: 0-60 mph - 1.85 secs Top speed - 258 mph

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The restaurant, which connects the production facility with the R&D facility, is central to the campus design, as Dabrović explains, “It represents the family and openness because in Croatia, everybody’s invited to the table! This green-roofed restaurant caters to all the employees from production offices, R&D and visitors. It’s where the whole campus can meet. “The Rimac R&D and office building is an envelope built around two large unique atriums. One is planted with trees and the other one is a big assembly hall, for all-hands meetings. The atriums are directly linked to the restaurant. This building is really open with beautiful views to the forest, to the lake, to the castle and to the south. “The design of the park is inspired by the flow of the air over race cars. Seamless flow was important to the design, as to how people move around the campus, between buildings. Mate Rimac didn’t want to have any fences so the whole campus was to be accessible.”

No boundaries One of the complications, or should we say idiosyncrasies, with the design brief relates to the restaurant. Mate Rimac is a vegan and wanted to have livestock on the campus, especially in front of the restaurant, to remind people of the animals they were eating, in case they wanted to change their minds! However, combining the design objectives of sportscar racetrack and livestock with the other constraint of ‘no fences’, 3LHD had to research to find inventive solutions. They ended up deploying a technique which originated in 18th Century France, an idea which was then taken up by the landed gentry in the UK at the time. The unusually named ‘Ha-Ha’ fences, are optical illusions, as they are sunken fences, which consist of a deep dry vertical ditch and wall on the inner side, with a steep grass slope opposite. From afar, they give an illusion of continuous rolling lawn, but livestock can’t cross the hidden ditch boundary. This solution is used to keep the animals away from the extremely fast electric hypercars. 3LHD also had to investigate with veterinary experts, as to which animals could be put together and would not destroy the plants. This turned out to be Geese and Sheep. The lack of any barriers will make the Rimac campus probably the only advanced Automotive Research Facility which does not have a fence. www.AECmag.com

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The Rimac Campus castle (top left) R&D facilities (top), and production facilities (bottom) with an area of approximately seven football pitches

The road around the interior of the campus also doubles as a racetrack. Never having designed a racetrack, 3LHD hired traffic and race consultants, the net result is a track which has a series of corners inspired by parts of famous racetracks around the world. In the original brief, there had to be at least one corner where they could drift their cars. Since Rimac employs a lot of young people, they wanted to have a kindergarten, so this was also added to the plan, and further relates to the firm’s key value of family. This means the kids grow up next to the parents, who just so happen to be creating one of the craziest supercars in the world! The Rimac campus prides itself on having numerous amenities, and a few quirky elements. Apart from having a racetrack, a kindergarten, a restaurant, sheep, geese and no fences, it will also house a car museum. Visitors are also www.AECmag.com

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welcome to take a tour of the factory. This will not just feature Rimac cars, but there will be a tribute to car development. It will include Mate Rimac’s original green BMW conversion, together with all the new concepts, car parts developed for the other companies, as well as their new Bugatti cars.

Embracing sustainability Long term sustainability is of paramount importance for the Rimac Campus. This is being addressed in many different aspects of the design, as Dabrović explains, “We are trying to make the buildings as compact as possible to minimise energy losses through the facade and to keep it cool by overshadowing windows. “We are using energy from the solar panels on the roof, heat energy from the ground water as well as air source heat pumps. So, all this energy should be renewable. The function of the lake is to

reflect, but also to collect the rainwater to cool and reduce the heat, attract wildlife to the site and to produce a calm working environment.” Dabrović explains that long term sustainability is not only linked to the architecture and materials, but also to those that inhabit the campus. In addition to employees, this includes animals and visitors as well. Part of the brief was to provide temporary accommodation to allow visitors, foreign employees, and customers to stay overnight. Instead of building a traditional hotel on campus, 3LHD took a more stripped back approach, as Dabrović explains. “We felt we already had this perfect balance between the three buildings. We went to the trouble of hiding the restaurant and all the amenities, so they should not stand out. So instead of designing a hotel, we proposed to create a small village of wooden March / April 2022

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The Rimac Campus at night, complete with illuminated racetrack

buildings which people could use, a bit like ’glamping’. “Visitors and guests can acclimatise, find some friends, and get to know the place. We made a community house which had a fireplace where they could meet each other during the nights, when the factory is not working.”

Design technology 3LHD started off using AutoCAD running a traditional 2D architectural workflow. Early on it migrated to Archicad and totally bought into adopting a BIM process, which it uses from initial concept design through to completion. Dabrović’s first company was an architectural visualisation company and so, as

one might expect, the practice has a great reputation for strong in-house rendering quality. The firm is currently using Epic Games’ Twinmotion, which Graphisoft added support for recently. While being heavy users of BIM, 3LHD has also, somewhat accidentally, gone into software development, having created its own collaboration and management tool, called volum3 (see below). Dabrović explained that 3LHD started developing software in house in 2004, as the company needed a solution to track the working hours. Using Javascript, the team created a simple browser-based time logging system, which then led to developing an expenses system, handling all the supplies and payments to subcontrac-

tors. As the firm started to design ever bigger hotels, 3LHD realised that it was getting very complicated to produce the bill of quantities and the specification of materials in Excel, which is not a structured database. In 2011, 3LHD created an in-house system to capture specifications, materials, furniture, lamps, walls, frames - anything that can be felt or touched. Dabrović explained that this is especially important in hotels, where you have to be very specific about what the designers want, the type of veneer and then how that veneer is laid down and how it is treated. By 2013 Dabrović realised that it was not sustainable to write software just for 3LHD. It was not only challenging to cre-

Pump up the Volum3 (volume) Volum3 is a collaboration platform for architects, managers, engineers, project managers, construction firms, facilities management and owners. It provides a single environment to upload all the drawings and for easy dissemination. Data is stored per project, stages are defined, as well as teams. Then drawings can be easily shared, together with related task management and meeting notes. It also allows specification of materials and

product specifications. Drawings are turned into PDF, are rasterised to save file size, and can be viewed and marked up. As the software is cloud-based, volum3 can be accessed from anywhere and used on mobile devices. The system is tried and tested on a daily basis with 3LHD utilising it on its projects. What’s even more interesting is that volum3 is completely free. It’s funded by the manufacturers to have their data in the speci-

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fication database, as well as by the owners when it comes to large projects. ■ www.volum3.com

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The Rimac assembly line

ate, but also expensive to maintain. He decided to develop something that other firms can use too and applied for a European Union grant. “By the time we started to work on projects in China, Canada and Switzerland, we added another layer of complexity to our coordination issues, working on multilingual projects meant two or three languages”, explained Dabrović. “We think and work in Croatian, but then have to translate everything into English, and then it has to be translated into German or Chinese. This meant we needed to create each data set with three languages - meeting minutes, task lists etc - so we designed a task management tool with connectors for meeting minutes, that can work in any

language you want. We got a grant from the European Union for €300,000 and set up a software company.”

Conclusion Designing the Rimac Campus would have been daunting for any architectural practice. Not only considering the scale, but also meeting the highly detailed brief, together with some unique quirks from the client. Mate Rimac appears to have been a very hands-on client, involved in nearly every aspect of the process and the design rationale. 3LHD had also never designed a factory, racetrack or catered to sheep before. Similarly, Rimac had never defined a brief for a building before!

3LHD’s holistic approach to design and open communication with the client has successfully got the project to the construction phase. We look forward to visiting and driving the circuit when it’s complete. ■ www.rimac-automobili.com

Construction on the Rimac Campus started in 2021. Rimac plans to move the first parts of its production into the factory building by the end of 2022 and hopes the whole campus will be finished by the end of 2023. The cost of the first phase of the campus, without any production equipment or infrastructure, is about €110-120 million. Adding equipment for testing, machining, as well as IT, furniture etc. will cost more than another €100 million.

3LHD Architects 3LHD Architects started in 1994 with four founding partners – Marko Dabrović (pictured), Saša Begović, Tanja Grozdanić Begović and Silvije Novak – who have since been joined by Paula Kukuljica. The company now employs 60 people from its offices, a converted cinema, in the capital city, Zagreb. The firm has carried out work on many different private and public projects. These include bridges, the Croatian Pavilions for EXPO

exhibitions in Japan and Spain, Hotel Belvedere in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Hotel LN Garden in Guangzhou, China, and Port Lands Sport Centre in Toronto, Canada. The largest project 3LHD has completed so far is the redesign of a substantial part of the beautiful Venetian seaport of Rovinj. The project included the design of two large hotels: Hotel Lone and Hotel Grand Park, together with outer pools, public beach, waterfront and marina.

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Rovinj is located on the western part of the Istrian peninsular. The old town, built on a hill, has been kept as a heritage site, with the old waterfront merging with a collection of modern hotels and marina. Hotel Lone is an exceptional modern hotel, with swooping curves and balconies. 3LHD pooled together many young Croatian artistic talents, such as furniture designers, graphic designers and artists for the interiors. ■ www.3lhd.com

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Software

Spaces for iPad Cerulean Labs has developed a unique conceptual sketch and modelling tool specifically for the Apple iPad. While this market segment is crowded with players, Martyn Day thinks this one stands out as a tool for the masses

onceptual modelling tools seem modelling but has intuitive editing tools to why it would get priority over other to be like London buses; you to add curves and rectilinear massing more conceptual features. However, after wait an eternity and then a edits, in both plan and profile (changing some discussion with Campbell Yule, bunch of them show up. The con- the slope of a façade), enabling more than founder of Cerulean Labs, and seeing the ceptual side of BIM has never had so much the typical blocky basic conceptual tools. results, it does give the impression of a development dollars and time thrown at it, The ‘live building model’ means you more realistic model, vs the blocky, vector as we have seen in the last three years. always instantly see what changes your and facet models we are used to seeing. Who knew there was such a dearth of edits produce both physically and in the It also happens to be very easy to massing tools? It is true that nobody has live reports of the space allocation break- define a cladding style and apply it to the completely got conceptual design right, down. It’s also possible to generate cut model. If you edit the model, the cladding and, despite all this effort, the big daddy of sections to explore the model further. overlay seamlessly regenerates, reacting the genre is still Trimble SketchUp. As with all conceptualising, there are to the changes – no tedious editing. This Tools such as Hypar, Digital Blue going to be iterative branches and design can be used for curtain walls, shading Foam, Testfit, the Modelur extension for dead ends. Spaces offers a ‘Design systems or combinations of both. SketchUp are all impressive, but come Options’ capability within the same projSpaces has the potential for a user to with complexity and toolsets that push ect file, to allow experimentation and alter- simply sketch four intersecting arcs and them to solve niche problems or are more ation. Should it all go wrong, the architect instantly get a five storey 3D model with tailored towards developers than design- can switch back to the original option. a predefined cladding style attached. This ers. What is there for the masses? There is also, obviously, an undo capa- can be geometrically edited in real time, What tools are portable, as well as opting to try out difdon’t require a cloud connecferent cladding styles at the tion, are low cost and combine click of a button. While these The sketch and instant parametric model cladding ‘frills’ would sketching and modelling? We paradigm is very clever and means it’s fun undoubtedly be stripped out think we have found a good contender in Spaces by to use and there’s not a lot of wrestling with and replaced in a BIM system Cerulean Labs. Revit or Archicad, it’s an the geometry to make it bend to your will like Spaces is an iPad app and interesting feature of Spaces. it’s been written from the User interface ground up to be a lightweight parametric conceptual design tool that bility, but as of yet there’s no tree capabil- With iPad apps the skill is not to clutter leverages the Apple pencil and the touch ity to edit out previously applied edits the interface and here Cerulean Labs has screen interface. The screen is split into a which you might want to remove retro- done a good job of providing useful infor2D sketch plane and a 3D model display spectively. This means you have to hit mation around the display edges, such as and can literally take sketched outlines of undo to go back to that edit and then redo scale/meniscus, annotation, zones, site, arcs and lines and immediately generate the work you had done again. import etc. The Sketch and the Model multi-storey massing models. spaces are separated via a slider. This The freehand sketches can be auto Context means you can maximise the area for dimensioned and altered, driving the Spaces can bring in site data in underlay sketching, or modelling or opt for a medichanges instantly in the model view. maps or models, so it’s possible to model um setting to see both the underlying Alternatively, changes can be made in context, or model and then bring in the sketches and the resultant model. directly on the model, down to individual site information to do studies such as To me, the whole tablet world tends to spaces. Floor heights can be altered at shadowing. The team has big plans to get fixated on being a portable device on any stage, collectively or individually. extend the kinds of analysis that can be which to consume data, as the apps availThe basic idea is for the user to sketch added to the program, so the benefit of able are always cut down or feature limitclosed volumes and, as each floor is site analysis is set to grow. ed. While it’s early days for Spaces, it’s altered, Spaces feeds back the areas, clear to see that the trajectory of developwhich can be broken down into spaces of Cladding ment is to create a professional applicausage – e.g. car parking, circulation, com- Given that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tion that really couldn’t exist in any other mercial, hospitality, landscaping, plant / conceptual tool cater to display cladding, computing medium, due to the portabiliMEP, residential, retail etc. especially one so young in development, ty and pen input. It’s very much intended The system doesn’t yet use Booleans for this feature had me scratching my head as to be the digital notebook for architects

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1 As the user sketches and models, real time feedback can help with space planning 2 Buildings can be shaped through simple sketching 3 Cladding can be assigned to building faces to create curtain walls, shading systems or combinations of both

and because it doesn’t rely on the cloud, you can literally model anywhere.

Output The underlying model is essentially an IFC definition. Soon this will be able to be exported and used as a basis for detailed design in your favourite BIM tool (this feature is limited to the subscription level). Spaces has a capability to share projects with other Spaces users, who can use the free (or paid) version to open and view the models. If anyone makes any edits, it only applies to the version on their tablet, as opposed to your original.

Pricing There is a feature limited free version of Spaces which allows three projects. A standard version at $39 a month has unlimited projects and features shadow studies and cloud backup. Q2 2022 will see the introduction of Spaces Pro at $99 which adds IFC export, space planning and room briefing. Spaces is available on the App Store or, for multiple copies, via the Spaces website.

Conclusion Spaces might look like a pretty simple tool, but it’s actually got a lot of hidden depth and capability, even though it only launched October 2021. The sketch and instant parametric model paradigm is very clever and means it’s fun to use and there’s not a lot of wrestling with the geometry to make it bend to your will. This isn’t Rhino Grasshopper or Hypar for architects who can script; it’s a tool for every architect. It’s going to be interesting to see how Spaces develops and how adoption grows. It’s very much a product for the masses, an area where SketchUp has dominated. It’s clear to us that the iPad presents a perfect environment for sketch-based design and modelling and we are sure this will soon become a contested area. In the AEC world, tablets are finally contending against laptops for professional applications, as opposed to being mere second tier data consumption devices.

■ www.spacesapp.io

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Software

Snaptrude The first of two BIM start-ups we cover this month comes from India and attracted funding while CEO Altaf Ganihar was still an undergraduate. Martyn Day had an early demo during lockdown in 2020, and it’s now commercially available

hen Snaptrude founder The user uploaded a photograph of a Altaf Ganihar was study- hand drawn rectilinear floor plan, and ing at university, he was the cloud-based software would then involved in a project to auto generate rectangles based on the digitally reconstruct the sketch. The user then clicked UNESCO cultural heritage on each space to allocate site of Hampi, India, in 3D. Snaptrude is room type, which the softDuring this process, ware then auto recognised as certainly Ganihar thought the archian editable room. The rough worthy of tectural tools he was using sketch was turned into serious were extremely slow and a boundary defining geomelaborious in both 3D and investigation try, which could be grabbed 2D. Given his studies in and moved. By simply by any firm computer vision, graphics moving the mouse to each that is looking room’s edge, live dimensions and geometry processing, he started to develop a modto take control would automatically appear ern system which would of conceptual while the boundary was automate the manual tasks manipulated. This could to design as a hobby project, which then instantly be seen as development 3D model. got traction with architects and builders who saw it. A simple click on the numworkflows Ganihar ditched his aspiraber of levels and it was tions to do a PhD and purinstantly arrayed to five sued the life of an IT entrepreneur. floors. Using this technology, it was very When I first saw Snaptrude in 2020, it quick to go from sketch to parametric 3D lacked a user interface but demonstrated model. The parametric engine combined some very interesting base capabilities. with the UI were really powerful and

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allowed the easy creation of user-inferred constraints. It also featured other interesting capabilities such as the auto-load outs for rooms (bedroom has a bed, a desk, wardrobe etc), so once the spaces were defined 3D content was auto-placed. Roll forward 18 months and Snaptrude now has over 4,500 users and they have modelled over 10 million sq ft of buildings. There’s a free version (limited to 3 projects), a monthly ‘Professional’ subscription of £39 per user per month (adds collaboration and API access) and an ‘Organisation’ subscription at £90 per user per month (adds centralised materials and asset management, advanced security, licence management tools and activity logs). The product has also seen a lot of development. The user interface takes its lead from SketchUp, being simple, with menus mainly at the top and bottom. Design starts with a 2D sketch, with the automatic live dimension capability really working well. While it can’t handle complex curves or nurbs, it does do arcs. Alternatively, ‘sketches’ can still be imported as image www.AECmag.com

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files in JPG, PNG or BMP for optical vertex recognition. These get turned into massing models for editing. Here spaces are allocated – bedroom, balcony, living room etc. and then the Snaptrude ‘‘Create Building’ magic button can be pressed. This automatically takes the masses and creates a BIM model with materials based on the space definitions, external walls, internal walls, balconies, deck, water body and slabs. You can go into the settings and alter the defaults on each project – internal, external and parapet walls can all have different properties and can be changed at a granular level, if required. Snaptrude is undoubtedly a seriously fast way to go from sketch to BIM model, albeit with rectilinear limitations. For modelling and moving around the geometry, it’s astoundingly intuitive (the snap in the name is there for a reason), enabling geometry to be referenced while adding components such as slabs. There are a few measuring tools on offer, and views can be quickly selected (front, top, side, sun study, shadow analysis). www.AECmag.com

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Collaboration Snaptrude collaboration works like Google Docs. Just invite somebody in, even if they are a non-user, and it’s like jumping on a Zoom call. As a non-user, you can only have view permissions or edit permissions or comment permissions. Every operation / change that is done is assigned to a person, stored in the file structure. This has yet to be exposed in the UI, but the basics of history and tracking are already in there. Snaptrude does not yet have any 2D documentation production capability. The models created can be exported to a BIM system (RVT, IFC, FBX) or drafting tool for production drawing so, for now, it’s a rapid conceptual tool that can feed into the workflow. Ganihar explained, “We have not yet done the documentation part, it’s not our immediate focus. We happily port our models to Revit, because we feel its documentation has more capabilities. It’s harder to catch up with them. Design is something they’re really bad at, so let’s focus on that. Later half of this year we will do doc-

umentation, at least for the housing / residential market. It’s here that Revit becomes overkill, saturating production documents and construction drawings.

Who’s going to use this? What Snaptrude does, it does well. But there’s obviously a long way to go before it would compete with the likes of Revit in breadth and depth. However, there’s enough functionality in the current offering to generate some excitement as to where this could go. The company has already been working with signature architects to get feedback and assess which features to develop next. Obviously if you create generic rectilinear architecture, or are a developer looking for a rapid conceptual model, this is a serious player in early mass to BIM phase. Not so much if you create crazy Grasshopper-derived buildings. Ganihar explained the challenge, “There’s the mid-market, where the buildings look to have a simpler modelling complexity and, on the other side where you have the star architects with March / April 2022

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Software 1

1 Snaptrude gives feedback and insight at each stage of the design process 2 Snaptrude collaboration works like Google Docs. Just invite somebody in, even if they are a non-user, and it’s like jumping on a Zoom call

their curves. However, the commonality is that both of these groups are suffering. Revit is a tool which serves the design and documentation phases. But designers, people who really design, are handicapped because Revit is not meant for design, it’s really good [for] documentation and that’s where these firms figure out they should use SketchUp, while the larger ones go for Rhino for massing and conceptualising. Again, these are good tools, but very horizontal, and have their own flaws. When you try and fit them in a design or construction workflow, you keep losing data, because every time you iterate, you’re working with data from two different origins. It’s especially noticeable at the intersection of from going from concept to schematic, or going from Rhino to Revit. “We identified that design decisions are extremely important. When you’re doing an iteration, you make design decisions, you should be able to see what the impact of this decision would be - on the budget, compliance, sustainability impact. “All this without actually having to take the design to a certain level of specification, before being able to crunch some numbers in Excel, and realise you have gone down the wrong path, wasting a couple of weeks. We tried integrating data in as much as possible to smooth the progress of design. “Automation is needed to help streamline the process. We need things to be automated, but not the design part because architects still want that control of designing. Our opinion of generative design tools is that architects don’t like things which are served on a plate. They need the ingredients, through which they can mould and sculpt. So that will still be there, but it’s possible to automate things like trimming, or not having to delete an edge, or produc26

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ing a model from a mass. We are very focused on automation in the process.”

What’s coming next? From working with signature architects, Snaptrude is developing splines and NURBS-based geometry. The company has a working prototype and is engaged in bringing that up to speed. For 2022 here’s a list of scheduled features: • • • • • • • •

Switch between massing and BIM Create parametric objects Create NURBS and splines Advanced boolean operations Live link to Revit Quick costing and Bill of Quantities Features for sustainability analysis and climate studies Basic drawings

Conclusion In short, I’m impressed. Snaptrude is certainly worthy of serious investigation by any firm that is looking to take control of conceptual to design development workflows. Those that use SketchUp or start off with massing in Revit specifically would

find using this approach productive. For now, it’s clear that it already shows some innovative approaches to rapid conceptual modelling and collaboration. As a full-service BIM tool, for now it’s nowhere near a Revit competitor but, with time and some additional funding to flesh it out, I could see this becoming a popular product. On the negative side, the geometry capability needs to improve, the graphics are a tad ‘8 bit’ blocky and the whole documentation phase is missing, but Ganihar says these are all a work in progress. It’ll be interesting to see how this product develops. Does the industry need better, more modern, faster Revit? Is BIM constrained by the whole concept of design tools which are predominantly about modelling to just generate drawings? Will industry workflows move away from being all about producing 2D drawings, to more direct fabrication? There’s certainly a trend amongst design IT directors who would like to fully automate drawings and save millions of dollars and spend more time using the computing power to come up with better design options. ■ www.snaptrude.com

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Feature

Arcol BIM A

In all mature markets, leading software applications eventually face competition from up-starts that benefit from fresh new approaches. Today’s established BIM authoring tools have looked fairly secure, with few daring to take them on. Arcol is preparing to give it a go

s software matures, and users gain expertise while file formats lock in legacy data, it gets very hard - even daunting - to consider switching to a competitive application. Practices must consider the cost of retraining, the possibility of being out of step in a collaborative world, and the loss of all that past investment. It’s not something to be taken lightly. There are, of course, times when switching makes sense. You might feel the software you use lacks innovation with few additional productivity gains, or the costs go up and the past investment seems to have locked you into a dysfunctional relationship. Historically speaking, the biggest driving force in customer migration comes when there are fundamental changes to the technology platforms on which software has been written. In the past this happened when business computing went from Unix to DOS and again in the change from DOS to Windows. If the software vendors are to be believed, the next platform is the cloud which could lead to another potential extinction level event for market leading software applications. The BIM software market is an interesting segment to analyse. We have a market-dominating central player, Autodesk with Revit, together with Nemetschek’s Archicad, Allplan and Vectorworks, plus some geographic local winners such as Italy’s ACCA. BIM first dominated the architectural design sphere and then slowly grew in structural and then Mechanical Electrical and Plumbing (MEP). The built environment market has always been slow to adopt, and the change from 2D drawings to 3D models still has some way to go. If anything, many are using BIM as just another way to produce drawings, which are still the lingua franca and contractual basis for much of the industry. Revit holds a very dominant position, with well over a million seats globally. While talking with frustrated architects who don’t understand why there aren’t 28

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3D modelling in Arcol

more applications to choose from, the reality is that unless you are established and have an installed base, it’s very tough to enter what is essentially an oligopoly. In discussions with venture capitalists and business angels who have considered developing a Revit competitor, they estimate the amount of money required being upwards of $20 million - some suggesting $100 million! Part of this is because with market leading and established tools having had 20 years of development (OK, maybe 15!), a new tool from a start-up can only offer a fraction of the capability. Above the cost of development, the start-up would have to spend a fortune in marketing to convince existing customers to change horses. That is not a task to be taken lightly. The reason there have been so few BIM start-ups is because the risk/reward is so high compared to venture capitalists funding yet another massing tool, or collaborative data environment application, which might get acquired by one of the big software firms.

Green shoots Picking back up on the change of platform, venture capitalists now rarely

invest in applications which are written for the desktop. If you have an idea for a software application that resides on a hard drive on a PC, you’re going to get little love from the money men. They know the business model of the future is cloud and subscription and oddly, Autodesk is showing the way here. The thinking is, the first developer to properly produce a cloud-based BIM tool could well steal the lead on the incumbent desktop tools. Tie that in with wellpublicised grievances of customers over lack of development and cost of ownership and there are a number of new players rising to the challenge.

New kid on the block It’s unusual for us to write about a company with software not yet even in beta, but a new start-up called Arcol recently came to our attention, publicising a manifesto (www.tinyurl.com/Arcol-BIM) stating its development goals and aims, with respect to the grumblings permeating the industry. The company is headed up by Paul O’Carroll, who comes from a games development background, and established Arcol to create a cloud-based building design and documentation tool www.AECmag.com

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which runs in a browser. He recently moved to the United States and has managed to get $3.6 million in seed funding from some very interesting people, who know the AEC industry very well. One is Amar Hanspal (CEO of Brightmachines), formerly of Autodesk, where he ran all product development. The other is Procore’s CEO Tooey Courtemanche. Hanspal knows Revit’s faults and has his own ideas as to what a modern BIM tool would look like, while Courtemanche is in a daily knife fight with Autodesk for the construction documentation and management layer with Procore vs Autodesk’s Construction Cloud. Arcol also already has 7,000 firms signed up for a trial. Arcol’s manifesto opens-up with a strong statement that is clearly fighting talk: Most design tools are from the late nineteen hundreds. We need to bring the magic back to design. We need something powerful, intuitive, and collaborative. Think of how much technology has changed in the past two decades. Google docs. Slack. Zoom. The iPhone. While almost every product we touch has become web-based, collaborative, and consumer focused, for some reason, our design tools are still stuck in an ancient desktop paradigm of the 1990s. We believe that 3D building design tools should be powerful, yet easy to use. Web-based, intuitive, and most importantly collaborative. CAD went mainstream in the 80’s, and BIM came soon after, but since then it seems like tools have lost the magic. Over time they’ve gotten clunky, slow, unintuitive, and driven by greed — incumbents are public companies and therefore they’re [sic] only growth metric is profit. O’Carroll then explains that he has been inspired to develop a BIM application from seeing new generations of tools like ‘figma’ (www.figma.com), a graphical application for collaborative diagramming. With this application, multiple users can work simultaneously on virtual whiteboards, designing interfaces, templates, or map out UI/UX design. By having a look at the figma website you’d get a clear idea at how this could potentially work in a collaborative BIM design environment. It would be a centralised system on which all designers simultaneously worked. By starting afresh, O’Carroll believes that he can change the paradigm by rethinking the way design authoring applications should work. The first fundamental is web-based, browser-accessiwww.AECmag.com

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ble, enabling centralised collaborative workflows, with no install. Addressing collaboration, O’Carroll identifies Slack as a great example, “Slack allows you to have that information indexable, searchable, trackable and allows you to organise asynchronous communications independent of a singular closed silo. In a similar way we are building a tool to contain the entire history of a project — markups, comments, sketches… all the work that happens on the periphery while designing a building.” Obviously Arcol will deliver 2D and 3D capabilities and, for this, O’Carroll takes inspiration from PTC Onshape, a mechanical CAD modelling tool (www.onshape.com), which competes against the mainly desktop-based world of Dassault Systèmes Solidworks, Autodesk Inventor, and Siemens Solid Edge etc. Autodesk is also challenging with its cloud-based Fusion, but despite millions of dollars spent, the cloud-based apps have yet to make a dent in that industry’s 800lb gorilla – Solidworks, which is based on Windows and decimated the UNIX modelling tools in the 1990s. One could argue that if cloud was the next platform, then why hasn’t it taken off in the manufacturing space, where there are already two mature cloud-based systems? The added complication is that, essentially, we’re talking about a replacement market, as opposed to virgin territory. As a start-up, your potential new customers have already invested in something, increasing their cost of moving.

Innovation The one danger is producing a new product that just replicates the old. Being on the cloud does not make for a better product. O’Carroll identifies several areas where he’s looking for Arcol to differentiate itself from the competition. One of the fundamental differences will be an infinite workplane, so users don’t need to flip-flop between interfaces and modes to create drawing sections and elevations. “ Ske t ch i n g, drawing and editing should be as intuitive as possible. This is the lowest level form of interaction we have in CAD — yet these tools really haven’t been innovated upon

much in the last 20 years.”, explains O’Carroll. “We believe that it shouldn’t take you an hour and a half to create a window component with a curved top. We had a thought: rather than having to edit a family in another window in some other editor, what if you could simply make changes to a sketch of the window to add the curve? In Arcol you can do just that. “Every 3D component is built from an underlying 2D sketch. You can easily access the base sketch, make changes directly in the model, and then save your changes to have them cascade to the 3D representation.” I can’t fault either O’Carroll’s enthusiasm or existing software inspirations. Even though we’ve seen no software product there’s plenty to chew on and project. The problem with new modelling software for architecture, is they come out so limited in functionality early on, that they are always compared to SketchUp, or described as being ideal for conceptual modelling. Mature incumbents benefit from having decades of feedback from professional users, enabling their software to handle many real-world edge cases - these are all the nuances that get added into commands to handle niche conditions to give flexibility. e.g. all the improvements to staircases, MEP routing, 2D representation, structural detailing, requests based on different standards etc. Getting the fundamentals right is key, but getting the level of functional detail and sheer breadth of features is climbing the north face of the Eiger for any challenger. In total, Arcol has $5 million to flesh this out, and now has two backers with plenty of industry experience and, to a certain extent, axes to grind. Arcol will be in beta testing in 2022, with the first public release scheduled for later this year. ■ www.arcol.io

Arcol is drawing inspiration from cloudbased mechanical CAD tool PTC Onshape

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Sponsored by AMD

AMD ProRender is an advanced and very quick renderer that’s extremely well integrated into Rhino . It does a fantastic job of providing our customers with a free solution for rendering on the GPU, especially AMD Radeon PRO hardware. Andy Le Bihan, Robert McNeel and Associates ensure that your ‘current renderer’ is set to ProRender. You can then dive into the options and controls for all aspects of your scene, whether that’s an HDR image for lighting and scene set-up or a ground plane control. It’s also worth exploring the ground plane options within Rhino. ProRender for Rhino adds a new material (ProRenderShadowCatcher). This is applied to ground planes to ‘catch’ shadows in a more realistic manner and can be applied to any required geometry, rather than Rhino’s default Ground plane.

CPU-based renderers, unless the workstation or software is tuned, and CPU cores are ring fenced, the system can grind to a halt. This can make it hard to do any other work on the same workstation until the render has finished. AMD Radeon PRO GPUs are very good at multi-tasking. The GPU’s asynchronous compute engine allows compute and graphics tasks to be performed at the same time. Even when the GPU is crunching through a render in Radeon ProRender 2.0, it will remain snappy and responsive when the designer needs to move the 3D CAD model in the Rhino® viewport.

THE POWER OF THE GPU Unlike most physically-based renderers, which rely on the workstation’s CPU for the complex ray tracing calculations, AMD Radeon ProRender 2.0 is based on OpenCL™, an open standard, so it can use CPUs or GPUs. One or more AMD Radeon PRO W6400 (4GB), W6600 (8GB) or W6800 (32GB) GPUs are good choices for GPU rendering. They not only deliver the computational performance that can render scenes quickly but the higher end models have plenty of memory to store data for large scenes. This is particularly important when rendering at high resolutions. All three AMD RDNATM 2 GPUs have another trick up their sleeves in the form of hardware raytracing, which is designed specifically to boost rendering performance. Dedicated ‘Ray Accelerators’ built into the GPUs are architected to efficiently handle the complex intersection of ray calculations.

MULTI-TASKING One of the challenges of ray traced rendering is its large computational demand. With

COMMAND LINE Radeon ProRender 2.0 for Rhino benefits from its simplicity and tight integration with Rhino. While you are good to go with the default settings, there are several options to experiment with, as your requirements and scene/materials demand. There is now full control over the number of ray bounces for reflections, refractions, shadows and more; the higher the number, the more realistic the result. That said, there are many instances where adding more bounces is not beneficial (for example, if you have no transparency in your scene, there’s no point in increasing refraction bounce count). A careful balance needs to be struck to achieve the best renderings, but without overly complicating the scene and computation process. The Ray offset toggle is also worth noting, particularly if you are rendering transparent objects which share the same 3D space. This will help ensure that the interaction of light and material at the point of co-existence is accurately rendered. The final set of options

to consider are the Render Modes. These control the quality of the render and which hardware devices are used. While ‘Ultra’ gets you the finest quality results and uses your GPU fully, for quick sanity checks and proof of concept renders, the other options get you a result much more quickly, but won’t have all of the bells and whistles of realism and take advantage of the CPU/GPU in a hybrid manner.

SUMMARY Radeon ProRender 2.0 gives Rhino users a fast no-cost alternative for the creation of photorealistic imagery. As it works directly inside the Rhino viewport it can help make physically-based rendering an integral part of the design workflow. And if you want to get renders back even quicker, think about investing in a faster GPU, rather than a brand new multi-core workstation. AMD RADEON PRO GPUS

amd.com/radeonpro

AMD RADEON PRORENDER

amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender CHECK OUT THIS RADEON PRORENDER FOR RHINO VIDEO TUTORIAL

tinyurl.com/ProRender-Rhino

Mainstream Performance. Upgraded, and Always by Your Side Introducing the Dependable Radeon™ PRO W6400 GPU Delivering 4 GB of High-Performance Memory, Hardware Raytracing, Optimizations for 2 Ultra-HD HDR Displays, Accelerated Software Multi-Tasking, PCIe® 4.0 for Advanced Data Transfer Speeds, and Certifications for Many Popular Applications.

3D performance in McNeel Rhinoceros® Larger is Better. Relative Mesh, Object & Model Data Stress Tests at 4K 1.2

All as Standard with AMD Radeon PRO W6400 Graphics amd.com/RadeonPROW6400 © 2022 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, RDNA, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group, Inc. Rhino is a registered trademark of Robert McNeel & Associates. 1. Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs as of December 10, 2021 on a test system comprising Intel XeonW-2125 (Skylake-W) at 4Ghz, 32 GB system memory, Windows 10 Pro, Radeon PRO W6400 GPU pre-production sample with Radeon PRO Driver 21.40 Pre-release version / AMD Radeon™ PRO WX 3200 GPU with AMD Driver 21.Q3. Benchmark Application: Holomark 2 Benchmark/ PC manufacturers may vary configurations, yielding different results. Performance may vary based on use of latest drivers, production drivers and production silicon. RPW-393 2. Testing conducted by AMD Performance Labs as of December 10, 2021 on a test system comprising Intel XeonW-2125 (Skylake-W) at 4Ghz, 32 GB system memory, Windows® 10 Pro, AMD Radeon™ PRO W6400 GPU pre-production sample with AMD Driver 21.40 pre-release version or Nvidia Driver 471.68 with Nvidia T600 GPU. Benchmark Application: Holomark 2 Benchmark. PC manufacturers may vary configurations, yielding different results. Performance may vary based on use of latest drivers, production drivers and production silicon. RPW-394

Rhino DPS - Rev 8.indd 3

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Toric

BIM is not just about modelling to get drawings, it’s about modelling to create building information. The problem is, the data comes from multiple sources, can be ‘noisy’, conflicting and suffer epic quality failures. New American start-up Toric enables users to integrate, transform, visualise and automate project data

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Toric certainly destroys the idea that the industry should be trying to shoehorn as much data into the BIM model as possible. Distributed project information need not be a problem and allows the best tool to be used for each part of the design and construction process 32

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Toric can be used to compare two versions of variations of a building design

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Software

hile drawings are symbolic representation of a design, Building Information Modelling (BIM) software opened up the opportunity to embed all sorts of useful information regarding the components, the materials, the serviceable items within the evolving design data. For many reasons, the digitisation of the design and construction market is still a black art and tough to keep on top of inside one company, but as most projects involve 25 or more companies creating data in multiple applications, what should be structured data can quickly turn into chaos. Toric is a cloud-based construction analytics platform which can access construction data from over 20 applications – CAD, BIM, CSV, SaaS services, project management, 4D sequencing and accounting and juggle, filter and merge to create real-time data pipelines. All this data can be displayed on custom dashboards and created reports. In short, it’s an ELT platform- it Extracts the data, Loads the data and Transforms it. It’s capable of making sense of all the distributed data that is generated by a project, and then can be used to apply data transforms to serve up essential project metrics. The Toric service was the brain-child of Thiago Da Costa, a serial entrepreneur, who has sold at least two companies to Autodesk over the years. With his last sale, Lagoa, a cloud-based 3D mechanical collaboration and visualisation company, Da Costa stayed on at Autodesk to work on the company’s cloud-based solid modelling tool, Fusion, for five years, being the company’s director of data. After getting itchy feet and having never been directly involved in construction (but having an interest in it) Da Costa decided to go into building development. He brought his uncle out of retirement to help him build a twenty-unit apartment block. The experience did not follow the BIM utopia that he was used to hearing about at Autodesk, especially when project data was mainly held in spreadsheets, which were almost always out of date, as Da Costa explains, “It was not uncommon to spend an entire design review session trying to find out why a change was made, who made it, and if it was agreed upon or not.” In short, he saw data problems everywhere and the project was completed six www.AECmag.com

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months late and 10% over budget. Da Costa saw a problem that needed solving and so started to develop Toric. “I started talking to construction companies all over the world to understand their pain points with data,” he explains. “I learned that spreadsheets are indeed what runs most of all professional construction projects. Even companies running $100M+ projects are still relying heavily on them for all kinds of problems.

er using templated (or user defined) workflows to reorganise and filter the data to give project teams insights from data analytics intelligence algorithms. This produces insights into all sorts of things. What’s wrong with a project’s data? How much does something cost? What are the quantities? What’s the carbon implication? And many more. While this sounds incredibly complex, the interface of Toric is very simple and

Toric can suck in the data from the most used AEC applications

It is not uncommon to see spreadsheets with 100+ tabs. Companies report that 60% of the time is spent chasing data they don’t trust or cleaning up data before it’s ready to be used.” The net result was an 18-month stealth project to flesh out a system to try and automate the collection and filter of fragmented design and construction data, to automate user-defined data workflows. Toric has a rather unique take on the common data environment and is a bit of a Swiss Army knife in terms of data analytics.

The data warehouse Think of Toric as a warehouse of data, it’s a service that can suck in the data from all the most used applications in the AEC market. Each connection is called an integration, should that be to Autodesk BIM 360, Procore, Revit, Archicad, Google Sheets, Salesforce, Navisworks etc. It has the ability to bring in data from multiple systems and blend them togeth-

crafting your own data workflows is very similar to Grasshopper’s ‘box and cable’ graphical interface but there are a whole load of templates that already come with it. Toric has an innate understanding of the structure of each construction format and can link up the corresponding data inputs. While a lot of this is in spreadsheet format, with columns and rows, the software also has a display window to graphically see design geometry, linked to the spreadsheet data. Mini transformations can be applied to help sort this data, such as by element (walls, doors windows, etc.), spaces, and get summaries. This could be used to count all the instances of one type of light in a project, or to get summaries of floor areas / usage. Toric takes the data, ‘normalises it’ and then derives reports from end user run queries. Results can be numerical or displayed graphically, such as by pie chart. An example could be that Toric is fed March / April 2022

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Software

1 Toric can be used in the design phase to calculate a building’s embodied carbon 2 With the Toric app, users can access dataflows and smart reports on the go

the data from a project being run on the Procore construction platform and the user wants to see how much the project spend was on openings and interior finishes. This whole report can be fully automated in Toric. The product would pull the quantities data continuously from Procore and ingest it, along with a pricing data and, through a user-defined pipeline, it would summarise the spend data and could produce a live report with a number of ways to visualise it. Alternatively in the design phase, Toric could compare two versions of variations of a building design. It would ingest the BIM files and calculate the quantities and cost providing the cost difference between the two, as Toric found the area had changed and there were more walls. “What we see a lot of people want to do is quantify, to control quality, and integrate data, these are the top three things”, explains Da Costa. “There’s also the ability to warehouse data, which is a real powerful thing. Architects are increasingly interested in getting embodied carbon reports and they need to calculate the amount of concrete used in the entire model. “The user just assigns a car2 bon value and Toric can go through the model, find all the concrete and then calculate, by volume, how much carbon. This is really useful in the design phase and a lot of our customers are doing that and they want to do that at scale. “Basically, every time a model is changed, they want to see how 34

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that carbon variable changed. The alternative to Toric at that point is to dump out an Excel file, do the calculations, and then go back to the model, change the model….and then do that whole process again… dump out the Excel file, redo all the calculations to build a report. “An architect could spend a week or two to just figuring out the carbon thing. We have a template already that just does that - takes the model and spits out all the quantities for all the materials.” Toric comes with dozens of built-in templates for setting up common data flows, from clash detection to model audits, and more are being added all the time. But the user can create their own templates, which can obviously be used time after time. Toric offers hundreds of data tools like data remapping, ‘find and replace’ filtering, grouping, sorting, summarising - every-

thing you would imagine you can do to a database, plus there’s a bunch more.

Conclusion For people that understand the problems that bad data causes in construction, Toric will immediately seem like an incredibly useful tool to have access to and to apply liberally, developing their own templates. For those that don’t have a data-centric view of BIM, the business and project metrics Toric is going to provide will seem like it was conjured up by wizards. Toric certainly destroys the idea that the industry should be trying to shoehorn as much data into the BIM model as possible. Distributed project information need not be a problem and allows the best tool to be used for each part of the design and construction process. Talking with Da Costa, he explained why he thought products like Toric were important, “You need to use some tool because otherwise you’re not assisted by the computer, you’re literally doing the work that the computer should be doing. “It baffles me that a lot of people are not realising that their BIM model quality is bad. If you have a typewriter, it doesn’t mean what comes out of it will be good, if you don’t have any kind of review of what gets written, if you have to review 200 sheets of PDF, it’s going to be awful, because you’re not going to be able, as a human, to optically distinguish every error that there is in those PDFs. And that’s where the industry is. It’s fascinating, why isn’t the model quality better? Why do people have to fix things at the PDF stage? Because nobody saw it in the BIM model! And now opening that BIM model is a pain, because the team already moved to another project.” ■ www.toric.com

www.AECmag.com

23/03/2022 17:11

Artificial Intelligence in construction

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www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 12:45

Interview

With the explosion of terms like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in construction, AEC Magazine caught up with Senthil Kumar, CTO and head of AI at start-up Slate.ai to discuss how the technology can assist the complexity in the building industry

Senthil, it’s always great to meet a new face in AEC software. Can you tell us about your previous work and what you do at Slate?

A: I’ve been working on advanced data technology in global software companies for over two decades now. I’ve helped pioneer multiple technological endeavours during that time, including AI, Blockchain, dge, cloud computing, metaverse, IoT, swarm robotics, system autonomy, and Big Data computing in industries spanning autonomous vehicles, fintech, smart buildings and cities, geospatial engineering, insurance, health care, and medicine. I’ve also helped develop the emerging AI Industry standards, such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and also work in numerous industry think tanks and advisory boards of well-known academia and startups. Recently, my pioneering AI work was cited in the wall street journal and was recognised by the World Economic Forum. I joined Slate 12 months ago as CTO, to build a new team of engineers and data scientists focused on delivering the most modern software and technology approaches to leverage data across building production. www.AECmag.com

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Q: AI and Machine Learning are often greatly misunderstood. From your point of view, explain what they are? A: I agree these terms have been misused interchangeably. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computational science that enables the creation of smart intelligent machines and systems. AI offers the promise of a bridge between humans and machines in smarter ways, mimicking human cognition and enabling the creation of a smarter harmonious ecosystem interplay by understanding a human’s needs and intent. Now, while AI is a broad science, machine learning is a specific subset of AI that trains a machine on how to learn and helps one build AI-driven applications. In a sense, ML is how computer systems learn and develop their intelligence. Q: Does that mean you can have AI without Machine Learning? A: Yes, as much as it may surprise us, we can have AI without ML. While model training, ML methodologies, and selflearning techniques have grown exponentially in recent times, there are aspects of AI that can be on their own without the March / April 2022

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Interview

need for ML to have taken place. An early oft-used method of AI implementation was the use of Decision Trees that break down complex problems into binary evaluations, then traverse those trees to find answers. This is not ML dependent and is widely used to this day. Other examples of AI that are not ML-dependent include, using machines to solve shortest path problems, constraint solving, chatbots, and aspects of NLP [Natural Language Processing] using stochastic grammar to parse sentence trees. We have to remember that AI is vast in scope and ML is just one of the many techniques that AI uses.

and accurate AI has been the aspirational Holy Grail of AI architects. Even though AI systems do not yet have emotional intelligence like humans, they are susceptible to influences. It is imperative to note that AI is based on inputs and inferences from human experts and sometimes fallible data. Since humans are intrinsically biased in one way or another, so is the AI that has been co-created by humans. These biases can and do get carried over to the systems. A particular issue in the news is the systems that self-train using data from social inputs. They can be extremely susceptible to unintentional or intentional malevolent influences and biases. Q: So, from your experience, what are For example, the early facial recognition some other common missystems had biases in conceptions about AI? identifying ethnicities, and other systems that A: Don’t get me started! I used social feeds such as think we’ve all heard that twitter were unduly influAI systems will probably enced by false propaganreplace our jobs, making da. While technology most people redundant. implementations for AI This is a myth that’s heard are advancing swiftly and to this day. Similar arguethics, particularly for ments have been made autonomous AI, is during the agrarian and improving, we still have a industrial revolutions. The long way to go in creating reality is that AI will mosttruly impartial and objecThe interly change existing jobs and dependencies of tive AI systems. create new ones. We have construction’s to remember, while on the Q: Why did you see one hand, a number of jobs inherently multi- building production as might be automated by AI, the next best place to disciplinary, the main reason that will what you’ve multi-dimensional implement occur is because those jobs learned? and multi-player are generally well suited to the way a computational ecosystem makes A: While technology has machine works. transformed the landit incredibly Roles that are best suitscape in several indusinteresting [for ed to human intellect and tries, there are aspects of AI], but also well building production that the supervision systems will continue to thrive suited to modern are yet to be touched by and grow. The migration technological advancecomputational of work from repetitive ments that have already solutions physical roles towards proved valuable elsecleaner, more rewarding where. Years ago, in careers, that humans are industries such as retail, brilliantly well-suited to, started a long healthcare, insurance and fintech, we’ve time ago, way before we were talking been able to bring about significant about AI. The overall quality of life and changes to improve overall efficiencies, our productivity will only become better implementing both simple and complex with a harmonious Human-Computer AI implementations. interplay, leveraging what machines do I joined Slate when I saw that building well in partnership with what humans production is a multi-trillion-dollar do well. industry that impacts the economy in a Another misconception is that AI sys- multitude of ways. Here I can leverage tems can be more impartial than human my knowledge of these technologies to beings and be objective. create a meaningful and significant alterFor some time now, creating unbiased ing of the value-map for building.

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If we think about this, improvements in construction can have a direct impact on the global economy. The interdependencies in building production are inherently global in scope, involving supplies, technologies, and participants across different countries, making this a truly global phenomenon. No other industry of today presents such a diverse array of unsolved challenges, and I believe many of those challenges can be solved more easily than imagined. Complexity and unforeseen challenges are the norms in building production. Every aspect of this environment that flexes human and machine intellect is exciting to me, allowing us to employ some of the latest technologies and ideas in a meaningful manner. Just a few examples include: supply chain, and schedule optimisation utilising some of the major advancements in AI, computer vision, and cognitive sciences; Metaverse Augmented Reality applications for digital simulation and digital rehearsals; the ability to predict cost overruns and anticipatory analytics to illustrate when stages of building can be completed. I’m also excited see new ‘smarter’ materials which complement building performance, utilising advancements in polymer science and computational nanotechnology, with multi-dimensional analytical tools that can leverage their potential to reduce carbon in operational performance. What other industry would offer the multitude of challenges this industry poses? All of these are exciting to me as they relate to building production. Q: AI and chess have become synonymous with explaining what AI can achieve. So, is construction more complicated than, for example, chess? A: Ah, yes… I might argue that elements of construction are a more complex challenge than a chess game. In a chess game, the player anticipates the moves of the opponent. Not just the next move but several moves ahead of what the opponent may do. This was generally viewed as the peak of challenges to solve with AI. That’s why when [chess computer] Deep Blue beat a human in a chess game there was elation all around. But, if we think about this, chess has a singular opponent, the game board is defined, the rules are defined. Even though the number of moves can be huge, there is still a finite number of moves an opponent can make with the game pieces. Construction, on the other hand, has www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 12:45

Slate is using AI to aid decision making in AEC

inherent complexities. Think of it as a game with an infinite number of opposing moves, multiple opponent players teaming up in unison against the player. Some of the moves may not even be fully well defined, such as unforeseen political events, supply constraints, surprise government regulations, workmanship constraints. All of these can throw a wrench into the well-designed construction schedule. This can make it significantly more complex than a game of chess. Q: So, how complicated are the problems in building production? How does the complexity compare with other industries, such as health, finance, and biotech? A: Well, building production is a daunting challenge. From conception to completion for the comfort and safety of human occupants and operational efficiencies, improving building production is among the most sophisticated and complex legacy industries to improve with technology. While tremendous advancements have been made in healthcare, manufacturing and finance, the difference between those industries and construction has been the pace of innovation and adoption. The interdependencies of construction’s inherently multi-disciplinary, multi-dimensional and multi-player ecosystem make it incredibly interesting, but also well suited to modern computational solutions. It’s incredible for me to see how many construction decisions are made without the situational context commonly available in other industries from well understood dimensional analysis techniques. To improve the Decision Value Chain in www.AECmag.com

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building production, multi-dimensional analysis can be a very effective strategy. This type of Analytical Reasoning involves data segmentation and contextualisation in varying dimensions. In the case of building production, a number of challenges can be analysed in cross-sectional contextual patterns of varying dimensions. Real world events across space and time can be correlated into contextual dimensions – causation analysis, co-occurrence patterns of features with events and values of importance. It could be as simple as computing the optimal time for performing certain construction tasks, or how should a specific work package be formulated and in what sequence should certain events be orchestrated? The ability to foresee and foretell events before they happen as it relates to construction can all benefit from multi-dimensional analysis to improve the decision value chain as it relates to building production. I was recently asked whether going to Mars is more challenging than construction. For me, I might contest that building production and sustainability on this planet and on Mars when we get there are the more interesting goals. Q: Where are we in the evolution of AI in construction? A: We are witnessing the creation of history in our times. Most leaders in construction have recognised that what the 4th industrial revolution did to the invention and patronisation of advanced technologies in traditional industries, the construction spectrum might finally be ready to adopt. Advancements are being made in a number of AI disciplines, including

Convolutional Neuroscience, Realtime Machine Vision, Human-Level Cognition with NLP, intent-based computations, and a favourite focus area of mine, “Speed of Thought” analytics, where, as you think, so shall the machine cater to your intent. While AI is going mainstream in other markets, adoption of it in the construction space has been lagging. This was not for want of technology or digital data but scepticism around AI, with a bias towards human experience being used as context for most decisions. Here at Slate, the biggest attitude change we are seeing in construction is happening when organisations are feeling completely overwhelmed with software and data, while not benefiting from the intelligence that the data can provide. Existing software has taken the automation of construction’s legacy workflows as far as they can go. Just knowing how many RFIs you have unprocessed, or how many change orders are stuck is not improving the bottom line. The current best-in-class software solutions are helping companies try and keep to the schedule and budget frameworks that have not changed significantly for decades. To gain from the digital motherlode of knowledge we are amassing in building production, we need new AI solutions that work with humans before, during and after the critical decisions that can and will improve outcomes, not just maintain current industry performance. We believe our work at Slate will be significant in bringing that value to the industry. ■ www.slate.ai

Slate.ai will be attending AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD event in London on 21 June 2022 ■ www.nxtbld.com

March / April 2022

24/03/2022 12:45

What graphics card should I specify for my Revit workstation? By Paul Grimston, Revit Specialist. About the Author Paul is a Principal Consultant for one of the UK’s largest Autodesk Platinum Partners. With two decades of proven CAD training and BIM consulting expertise, he has built a reputation for being a specialist in Autodesk Revit® and AutoCAD®, working with many of the UK’s most influential architectural and engineering practices. He continues to be an advocate for using the right tools for the right job, and using budgets wisely.

Typical Considerations:

1 How many monitors do I want to use? 2 What software will I use daily, and which will be occasionally used? 3 How big are my files? 4 What is important to my daily tasks, rendering, drawing, VR? 5 What budget do I have? 6 Do I need to be mostly mobile or sat at my desk? 7 Can I upgrade my systems components, or do I need a complete new one?

The graphics card might go by many names can send the resulting data to the graphics - GPU, video card or display adapter – but card to process and display. it’s basically the device that generates what And because the relationships in we see on the screen of a computer. With the model are interdependent, the CPU all the 3D models, renderings, games, and must carry out all of these calculations virtual reality (VR) applications that are now in one linear thread. So even if your CPU part of the modern world, you need the best has multiple cores, they can’t all be fully one you can possibly afford, right? utilised. Rather, the frequency (GHz) of the But before you rush out to buy a new processor is the most important factor to workstation to run Revit, let’s take a quick influence the performance of Revit. look at how 3D graphics actually works in But don’t dismiss having a CPU with Autodesk’s popular BIM software. Instead multiple cores. Multiple cores are used of blowing your budget on a top-of-thewhere possible - for example, opening, range graphics card, you could be better off saving and exporting files, rendering, spending a little extra elsewhere. applying colour fills, and displaying point Revit has been around for over 20 cloud data. years now and although it has changed a lot in that time, the core idea remains the The graphics card same – that of a 3D parametric building Now we have a better understanding of how model with bi-directional associativity Revit works, we can move on to the graphics between the model, views, and card itself. High-end graphics cards are annotation. Make a change somewhere aimed at displaying fast moving, real-time in the project and it’s instantly reflected renderings for games and animations. They throughout the entire model. are also key for video and photo editing with Bearing this in mind, and considering high resolution data. the size and complexity Revit doesn’t fall into of modern construction any of these categories. projects, it seems logical Its viewports are vector to presume you’ll need a data with the object high-end graphics card for representation preIt may be that Revit. calculated by the CPU, Revit is the least However, that’s not meaning that Revit will of your worries necessarily the case, as we rarely fully utilize the learn by looking at how Revit capabilities of a high-end when it comes uses the CPU and how that graphics card. to specifying a relates to 3D graphics. However, this doesn’t graphics card. First, think about the mean we can just parametric, bi-directional ignore the graphics card aspect of the Revit model. completely and use the With all the relationships cheapest one we can find. between the objects, views, As soon as you start to and annotations, driven by parameters, use realistic shading, enable shadows or the CPU has to do a lot of work before it turn on anti-aliasing, the graphics card

This article is sponsored by AMD. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. PID#: 211162851

will come into play. Orbit or pan around a large model with any of these settings and you’ll appreciate the need for a capable card.

The other thing to consider is the system you’re working on. I’m using an HP ZBook 15u G5 mobile workstation with an AMD Radeon™ PRO graphics card. I also have two high-definition monitors connected via a docking station so, together with the laptop panel, the graphics card is driving three displays. The machine is a few years old now, and probably due an upgrade soon, but this set-up still works well for me. I’m generally using Revit most of the time, sometimes several copies at once, along with PDFs, AutoCAD, and all the other typical workday apps. I work with some pretty big Revit models, around 1 GB in size, which grow significantly once the linked survey and consultant models are loaded too, and I don’t experience any significant slowdown when carrying out general tasks. Yes, if I enable realistic shading and try to walk through the model using the Navigation Wheel then it will take a while to get going, but realistic walkthroughs aren’t really the reason for using Revit. If I needed to do that regularly then I would be looking at realtime visualisation tools like Enscape™

or Twinmotion®, either of which will do a much better job than Revit for those types of output. If you are thinking of running Revit through a pair of 4K monitors, especially with realistic shading etc., then this will increase the load on the graphics card (typically doubling when compared to 2K). You also need to consider what other software you will be using at the same time, and what the graphics card requirements are for those applications. Will you be using any real-time rendering software such as Unity®, Twinmotion or Enscape? How about Adobe Photoshop®, Acrobat® or InDesign®? It may be that Revit is the least of your worries when it comes to specifying a graphics card.

Workstation recommendations For pure Revit use, my general advice is to go with a mid-range professional graphics card such as the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 (8GB) or the newly announced light workload Radeon PRO W6400 GPU (4GB) and balance this with a high frequency CPU and have plenty of RAM available. 32GB should suit most Revit users, although more never hurts! A Solid State Drive (SSD) is also important. They are not only faster than traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) but are more reliable and typically use less energy. PCIe® Gen 4 NVMe SSDs offer fast read/write

speeds. Storage capacity won’t affect performance, as long as there is enough to store all the local files, back-ups and Autodesk BIM 360 cache data. If you are working on Revit most of the time but maybe dabbling a bit with Enscape and Adobe Photoshop etc., then you should look at getting a mid-range professional card such as the AMD Radeon PRO W6600 for a desktop workstation or the AMD Radeon PRO W6500M for a mobile workstation. These cards will do all you need without blowing your budget and allow you to maximise your investment into a better CPU and more RAM to really make a noticeable difference. If you intend to bring your Revit models into Autodesk 3ds Max or produce VR/AR content, then you’ll need to specify a card that can handle these more demanding workflows, with more dedicated GPU RAM. The AMD Radeon PRO W6800 for desktop or the AMD Radeon PRO W6600M for mobile are good options for rendering and VR work. Conclusion In conclusion, getting the balance right between all the components to suit your specific requirements is the key. Graphics is important but only if it delivers a real benefit to your workflows.

amd.com/RadeonPROW6400

Review

Nvidia RTX A4500

Price €2,809

of the RTX A5000. Its launch appears to have been driven largely by the silicon and components that Nvidia had at its disposal. In fact, this week at Nvidia’s GTC event, the company launched another new GPU, the Nvidia RTX A5500, a cut down version of the RTX A6000. Nvidia told AEC Magazine that the A5500 not only gives customers a bit of a performance boost over the A5000, but improves the ‘overall availability of supply’. The company admits that it would have been limited if it was only producing the RTX A5000 all year long.

www.nvidia.com | www.pny.com

What is the Nvidia RTX A4500?

With a dual slot PCIe form factor, the Nvidia RTX A4500 looks identical to the Nvidia RTX A5000 and it is much closer in specs than it is to the single slot Nvidia RTX A4000. Compared to the RTX A5000, it has 4 GB less memory, but features the same GA102 graphics processor, albeit with some cores disabled, a slightly lower clock speed and a slightly lower power draw (200 Watts vs 230 Watts via a single 8-pin PCIe power connector). The feature set of the RTX A4500 and A5000 is virtually identical – four DisplayPort 1.4a connectors, 3D stereo, and NVLink — so two A4500 GPUs can be physically connected to scale performance and double the memory to 40 GB in supported applications. This

To help boost supply of its high-end professional workstation GPUs, Nvidia recently released a derivative of the RTX A5000 with slightly lower specs. Greg Corke looks at how the RTX A4500 stacks up in real-time viz, GPU rendering and VR workflows

hen Nvidia launched the 20 GB Nvidia RTX A4500 professional workstation GPU in November 2021, it took us a bit by surprise. We didn’t really see a need for a product to sit between the RTX A4000 (16 GB) and RTX A5000 (24 GB). The gap simply wasn’t that big. But these are no ordinary times. The ongoing global semiconductor shortage has meant supply of the RTX A4000 and RTX A5000 has been patchy to say the least. Since these ‘Ampere’ GPUs launched in Spring 2021 they have been very hard to get hold of. And some of the inflated prices we have seen online have been quite eye watering. The RTX A4500 is a cut down version

could be to boost 3D frame rates in pro viz applications like Autodesk VRED Professional, or to render large scenes, faster in GPU renderers like Chaos V-Ray. The one main difference between the GPUs is that the RTX A4500 does not support Nvidia virtual GPU (vGPU) software. So, if you want to virtualise the graphics card to serve multiple users in a virtual workstation, you’ll need the RTX A5000, A5500 or A6000.

On test We put the RTX A4500 through a series of real-world application benchmarks, for GPU rendering and real-time visualisation. All tests were carried out using the Intel Core i9-12900K-based Scan 3XS GWPME A124C workstation at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution using the latest 511.09 Nvidia driver. A summary of the specs can be seen below. You can read our full review of the workstation on page 46. • • • •

Intel Core i9 12900K CPU 128 GB memory 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

For comparison we tested an Nvidia RTX A4000 GPU in the same workstation. We did not have an Nvidia RTX A5000 in our possession, so took results from our June 2021 review (www.tinyurl.com/RTX4000).

What are Nvidia RTX GPUs? Nvidia RTX GPUs are professional graphics cards designed specifically for workstations. They are standard in most HP Z, Dell Precision, Fujitsu Celsius and Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and are also offered in workstations from smaller manufacturers such as BOXX, Scan and Workstation Specialists. Nvidia RTX GPUs tend to have more memory than their consumer ‘GeForce RTX’ counterparts, so they can handle larger datasets, both in terms of geometry and textures. In the higher-end models this is Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory to protect against crashes. There’s also a difference in software. With special drivers, Nvidia RTX GPUs are certified for a range of professional applications and are tested by independent software vendors (ISVs) and the major

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workstation manufacturers. Nvidia RTX GPUs feature three types of processing cores • • •

Nvidia ‘Ampere’ CUDA cores for general purpose processing. 3rd Gen Nvidia Tensor cores for AI and Machine Learning 2nd Gen Nvidia RT cores which are dedicated to ray tracing.

Different applications support these cores in different ways. Most CAD and BIM applications, for example, simply use the CUDA cores for rasterisation, to turn vector data into pixels (a raster image). On the other hand, an increasing number of visualisation tools can use all three types of cores. Real time arch viz software Enscape, for example, can use CUDA for rasterisation, RT cores to accelerate ray tracing calculations

and Tensor cores for Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). DLSS allows scenes to be rendered in real time at lower resolutions and then deep learning-based upscaling techniques are used to output ‘a clean and sharp high-resolution image’. The aim is to boost 3D performance

or cut render times. Other applications that can be accelerated by Nvidia’s RT and Tensor cores include Chaos V-Ray, Chaos Vantage, Solidworks Visualize, Luxion KeyShot, Unity, Nvidia Omniverse, Unreal Engine, Autodesk VRED and others.

www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 10:02

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If you’re looking for a powerful pro viz focused GPU with lots of memory, then the RTX A4500 and RTX A5000 both pack a real punch

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The Nvidia RTX A4500 supports NVLink, so two GPUs can be physically connected to scale performance and double the memory to 40 GB in supported applications

Lumion 11.5 (DirectX 12 - rendering)

Enscape 3.0 (OpenGL)

Architectural house

Large building complex

8K (7,680 x 3,840 resolution)

1.23

Render time (secs) (smaller is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1 219

Nvidia RTX A5000 2 50

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

100 2

150

200

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Nvidia RTX A4000 1

250

35 36 0

300 1

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

15 2

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

1.23

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

www.AECmag.com

1.23

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

212 0

Roundabout model

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

272

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

LumenRT (DirectX)

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

35.5

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

29.25

38.25 0

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

15 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

March / April 2022

24/03/2022 10:02

Review

Real-time performance Unreal Engine Audi car configurator

Back then our test machine was different, a Scan 3XS GWP-ME A132R with an AMD Ryzen 5950X CPU, running Windows 10 Professional. With the AMD Ryzen 5950X having a different architecture and lower Instructions Per Clock (IPC), and the workstation running a different OS, there’s a hint of comparing apples and pears here. However, the results should still give a pretty good indication of relative performance. One might expect the AMD CPU to bring down scores slightly in some of our real-time 3D tests. However, as most of these benchmarks are very GPU limited, rather than CPU limited, we wouldn’t expect the CPU to influence the results that much. In our GPU rendering tests, as the role of the CPU is minimal, the comparison should be more precise.

There wasn’t a huge performance difference between the RTX A4500 and A5000 in our real time 3D tests. With our automotive test model in Autodesk VRED Professional, for example, the A5000 was between 1.75% and 3.10% faster than the A4500, depending on the level of anti-aliasing applied. We experienced similar in arch viz tool Enscape with a difference of 2.85% when testing our large office scene. The RTX A5000 pulled ahead more in Unreal Engine, especially when real time ray tracing was enabled on the Audi automotive model. The gap between the RTX A4000 and A4500 was much bigger. This isn’t entirely surprising, as the RTX A4000 is a single slot card, draws up to 140 W of power and features the lower spec GA104 processor. The RTX A4500 was around 20-25% faster than the A4000 across the board.

GPU rendering In our GPU rendering benchmarks, the lead of the RTX A5000 over the RTX A4500 was much bigger. In the Chaos V-Ray RTX benchmark, for example, it was 9.5% faster, rising to 26% in KeyShot 10. This may be because these benchmarks use all three types of

Solidworks Visualize 2021 SP3 (Iray)

Chaos Group V-Ray 5.0 benchmark

1969 Camaro car model (denoising enabled)

V-Ray GPU RTX

100 passes, accurate quality 4K (3,840 x 1,080 resolution)

1.23

Render time (secs) (smaller is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

10 2

1.23 Relative performance to reference system (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1 1,944

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

It’s a very interesting time for professional workstation GPUs, and GPUs in general. While you might have your eye on a specific model in terms of features and price/performance, what you end up buying might be dictated more by what’s available in the channel. UK workstation manufacturer Scan, for example, currently has a ‘significant quantity’ of RTX A4500s available for workstation builds, while the RTX A5000 remains in short supply. The introduction of the RTX A4500 (and, this week, the RTX A5500) certainly gives customers options. If you’re looking for a powerful viz focused GPU with lots of memory, then the RTX A4500 and RTX A5000 both pack a real punch. The price differential isn’t huge. And, with a little bit of luck, you may find one that fits your budget and workflows precisely.

Luxion KeyShot 10 benchmark (GPU)

1,588

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

14 0

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

Conclusion

1.23 vrays (calculations per minute) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

processing cores - CUDA, Tensor and RT (see box out below). The RTX A4500 was consistently faster than the RTX A4000, between 20% and 26% in most of our tests. You can read more about our testing process in our June 2021 review of the Nvidia RTX A4000 and RTX A5000 (www.tinyurl.com/RTX4000).

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

2,128 0

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

500

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

1000 2

1500

2000

51.72

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

2500

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

65.52 82.60 0

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

40 2

100

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

Solidworks Visualize 2021 SP3 (Iray) 1969 Camaro car model (denoising disabled) 1,000 passes, accurate quality 4K (3,840 x 1,080 resolution)

1.23

Render time (secs) (smaller is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

208

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

158

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

140 0

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

100 2

150

200

250

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

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24/03/2022 10:02

NEW

Nvidia RTX A4000

Nvidia RTX A4500

Nvidia RTX A5000

Nvidia RTX A5500

Nvidia RTX A6000

Architecture

Ampere

GPU memory

16 GB GDDR6

20 GB GDDR6

24 GB GDDR6

48 GB GDDR6

ECC memory

Yes

CUDA cores

6,144

7,168

8,192

10,240

10,752

Tensor Cores

192

224

256

320

336

RT Cores

SP perf

19.2 TFLOPS

23.7 TFLOPS

27.8 TFLOPS

34.1 TFLOPS

38.7 TFLOPS

RT Core perf

37.4 TFLOPS

46.2 TFLOPS

54.2 TFLOPS

66.6 TFLOPS

75.6 TFLOPS

Tensor perf

153.4 TFLOPS

189.2 TFLOPS

222.2 TFLOPS

272.8 TFLOPS

309.7 TFLOPS

Max Power

140W

200W

230W

300W

Graphic bus

PCI-E 4.0 x16

Connectors

DP 1.4 (4)

Form Factor

Single slot

Dual Slot

vGPU Software

NVIDIA RTX vWS

Nvlink

N/A

2x RTX A4500

2x RTX A5000

2x RTX A5500

2x RTX A6000

Power Connector

1 x 6-pin PCIe

1 x 8-pin PCIe

1 x 8-pin CPU

Estimated street price (Ex VAT)

€1,519

€2,809

€3,379

(price in Euros not available)

($3,600)

€6,349

Autodesk VRED Professional 2022 (OpenGL)

Unreal Engine 4.26 (DirectX 12 - rasterisation)

VRMark - Blue Room

Automotive model (No Anti Aliasing)

Audi car configurator model (ray tracing disabled)

DirectX 11

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

1.23

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

51.5 61.4

Nvidia RTX A5000 2 0

30 2

25.1 31.2

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

33.0 0

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

15 2

1.23

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

63.3

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

1.23

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

75.33

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

91.89

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

98.25 0

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

Autodesk VRED Professional 2022 (OpenGL)

Unreal Engine 4.26 (DirectX 12 - DXR)

VRMark - Cyan Room

Automotive model (Anti Aliasing - Ultra-high)

Audi car configurator model (ray tracing enabled)

DirectX 12

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

1.23

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

12.9 15.7

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

16.0 0

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

10 2

p42_43_44_45_AEC_MARCHAPRIL22_Nvidia.indd 45

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

13.35

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

10 2

237.48 289.91

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

100

Frames Per Second (FPS) (bigger is better)

Nvidia RTX A4500 1 19.02

0 1

1.23

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

Nvidia RTX A4000 1 16.75

Nvidia RTX A5000 2

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

www.AECmag.com

1.23

Nvidia RTX A4000 1

Nvidia RTX A4500 1

4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution)

323.43 0

100

Intel Core i9-12900K (Win 11 Pro, 511.09 driver)

150 2

200

250

300

350

AMD Ryzen 5950X (Win 10 Pro, 462.59 driver)

March / April 2022

24/03/2022 10:02

Review

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C

(Intel Core i9-12900K) With unrivalled single threaded performance from the Intel Core i9-12900K and impressive GPU acceleration from the Nvidia RTX A4500, this desktop workstation delivers on all fronts

he Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C is the first review system to arrive at AEC Magazine with the new ‘Alder Lake’ 12th Gen Intel Core processor. And, from what we’ve seen, it certainly won’t be the last. Having spent the last 18 months playing catch up with AMD and its impressive Ryzen 5000 Series, Intel now has plenty to shout about when it comes to mainstream PC / workstation CPUs. 12th Gen Intel Core is different to all Intel processors that have come before. It is the first to have a hybrid architecture with two different types of cores: Performance (P) cores for primary tasks and slower Efficient (E) cores, which are heavily focused on maximising performance per watt. Intel calls this its biggest architectural shift in a decade. The approach is similar to that taken by computer chipmaker ARM, whose technology forms the backbone to Apple’s M1 processor. The idea behind Intel’s hybrid architecture is that critical software, including your current active application, runs on the P-cores, while tasks that are not so urgent run on the E-cores. This could be background operations such as Windows updates, antivirus scans, or hidden tabs on a web browser. P-cores also support hyperthreading, Intel’s virtual core technology. This means every P-core can run two threads, which can help boost performance in certain multithreaded workflows, such as ray trace rendering. Our review machine’s Intel Core i9-12900K, for example, features 8 P-cores and 8 E-cores, for a total of 16 physical cores and 24 threads. To help assign tasks to the appropriate cores, ‘Alder Lake’ includes a hardware-based 46

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“Thread Director”. This is said the same time and not on Product spec to work best with Windows 11, the same motherboard. For which was released at the tail the 3XS GWP-ME A124C, ■ Intel Core i9 12900K CPU end of 2021. However, it is also Scan has chosen DDR4, (8 P-cores, 8 E-cores, compatible with Windows 10. matched with the Asus TUF 24 threads (3.20 GHz / 2.40 GHz, 5.20 GHz Splitting out the CPU into Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi D4 / 3.90 GHz Turbo) P-cores and E-cores doesn’t motherboard. ■ Nvidia RTX A4500 mean that highly multiThere are two reasons why. GPU (20 GB GDDR6 memory) threaded processes simply First, DDR5 modules are ■ 128 GB (4x 32GB) run on the P-cores, leaving currently very expensive. Corsair Vengeance the E-cores idle. In ray trace According to Scan, 128 GB DDR4 3200MHz memory rendering software Luxion of DDR5 currently costs ■ 2 TB Samsung 980 KeyShot 11 for example, we double that of DDR4 (£1,024 Pro NVMe SSD observed the Intel Core i9versus £578). Second, DDR5 ■ Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 64-bit 12900K maxing out 24 threads. won’t necessarily give you a ■ 3 year warranty There are some caveats performance benefit. (1st Year on-site, 2nd to this. As with all the In developing the system, and 3rd Year RTB (Parts and Labour)) workstation testing we do at Scan tested 128 GB of AEC Magazine, we turn the 3,200MHz DDR4 versus 128 ■ £3,333 (Ex VAT) Windows Power Plan to ‘highGB of 4,400MHz DDR5, the (64 GB memory) performance’. fastest speed supported in a ■ £3,583 (Ex VAT) However, technology website four DIMM configuration. (128 GB memory) AnandTech has reported that While the DDR5 system www.scan.co.uk/3xs when the Power Plan is set to was a massive 47% faster ‘balanced’, any app that’s not in synthetic test application in the active window automatically goes AIDA, Scan found the performance over to the E-cores. This is an important benefit in real world applications to consideration if you often run compute be significantly lower. In the ray trace intensive processes in the background, renderer V-Ray, for example, it was less such as rendering, point cloud processing, than 1% faster. We would expect similar in photogrammetry and others. By pushing CAD and BIM applications. those processes over to the E-cores, they There are some viz-focused workflows will likely take much longer. We plan to test that might benefit from faster memory. this out in a future article. AMD, for example, has previously highlighted shader compilation in Unreal Memory: DDR4 vs DDR5 Engine as one that would. However, while 12th Gen Intel Core supports both DDR4 Scan can offer DDR5-based workstations, and DDR5 memory, although not at we imagine most users will stick with DDR4 until prices come down. The machine was fitted with 128 GB (4x 32GB) of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200MHz memory, mostly at our request, so as to allow us to properly test the machine in our demanding Leica Cyclone point cloud processing benchmark (see later). For less demanding workflows, going down to 64 GB will shave £250 (Ex VAT) off the system price of £3,583 (Ex VAT).

Nvidia Quadro RTX A4500 The CPU isn’t the only new processor in the Scan workstation. The Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU is also a first for AEC Magazine and forms an important part of this ‘graphics workstation’. When Nvidia launched this dual slot 20 GB professional GPU late last year we were a little surprised. We didn’t really see a need for a product to sit between the Nvidia www.AECmag.com

23/03/2022 15:14

RTX A4000 (16 GB) and Nvidia RTX A5000 (24 GB). Could the launch of the RTX A4500 be governed largely by chip availability? Nvidia, like most computing firms, has been hit by the ongoing global semiconductor shortage. According to Scan, the Nvidia RTX A4000 and A5000 have been hard to come by over the last year, something we’ve also observed ourselves. However, Scan says it now has a plentiful supply of Nvidia RTX A4500s. The RTX A4500 is essentially a cut down version of the RTX A5000. It uses the same GA102 graphics processor, but with slightly fewer cores, a slightly lower clock speed and a slightly lower power draw. Two RTX A4500s can also be connected with Nvidia NVLink to scale memory and performance, but this is not possible due to Scan’s choice of motherboard. www.AECmag.com

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The system The 3XS GWP-ME A124C is built around Scan’s custom 3XS workstation case, which is available with both solid and tempered glass side panels. It’s a nice sturdy chassis with a 3XS branded vented front that helps ensure cool air runs freely from front to back. A dual fan Corsair H100i Pro XT liquid cooler helps keep the system processor running fast and stable. In fact, it can maintain high clock speeds over long periods. In KeyShot 11, for example, we observed an all-core frequency of 4.49GHz when rendering for over two hours, although fan noise rose over time. To feed all the components, the system drive is a 2 TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, which is rated at up to 7 GB/ sec sequential read and up to 5 GB/sec sequential write. There’s plenty of scope for storage expansion. The Asus TUF Gaming Z690-

Plus WiFi D4 motherboard has a total of four M.2 sockets and four SATA ports for additional NVMe / SATA SSDs or SATA Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). At the rear, it’s got eight USB ports, including two Type C. The front panel has three USB ports including one Type C. A 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port, integrated Wi-Fi 6 round out the specifications.

CPU performance With the flagship Intel Core i9-12900K, the Scan workstation delivered impressive CPU performance across the board, but particularly stood out in single threaded workflows. In BIM authoring tool Revit 2021, for example, we saw a 9 to 11% performance gain over 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900 (8 cores), and a 21 to 24% performance gain over AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16 cores). In mechanical CAD software Solidworks 2021, this lead extended to 19 to 20% and March / April 2022

23/03/2022 15:14

Review

22 to 27% respectively. There were also big leaps in multithreaded performance. With higher instructions per clock (IPC) and an additional 8-cores, albeit E-cores, the Intel Core i9-12900K has significantly more clout than the 8-core Intel Core i9-11900. In rendering benchmarks V-Ray 5.0 and KeyShot 10 we saw a massive boost of 56% and 71% respectively. Despite the big advances within Intel, AMD still has a rendering lead with the Ryzen 9 5950X and its 16 highperformance cores. It was 10% faster in KeyShot and 11% faster in V-Ray. In more lightly threaded applications, however, where processes are distributed across fewer than eight threads and therefore handled entirely by the P-cores, Intel has the lead. In point cloud processing software Leica Cyclone, for example, the Scan machine was 22% faster than the Intel Core i9-11900 and 17% faster than the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. Intel’s generational leap doesn’t extend to all multi-threaded workflows, however. In two simulation tests (Solidworks 2021 SPECapc (Simulate) and Invmark for Inventor 2022 (FEA) the lead over 11th Gen Intel went down to 2% performance of the RTX A4500 sits and 5% respectively. somewhere in between the RTX A4000 and RTX A5000, but is much closer to Graphics performance the RTX A5000. Roughly speaking we Billed as a ‘graphics’ workstation, it’s found it to be around 20 to 25% faster than the RTX A4000 hardly surprising that and 2 to 12% slower than the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A124C also delivers in The combination the RTX A5000. We’ll explore this in more GPU centric workflows. of Intel Core detail in a future article. The Nvidia RTX A4500 i9-12900K CPU is an excellent choice Final thoughts for those that take and Nvidia RTX visualisation seriously, A4500 GPU offers Workstations are well matched to GPU currently in a big state of users the best of rendering, VR, and real transition. New CPUs, both worlds: time viz and real time ray new GPUs, new memory tracing. and the new Windows 11 exceptional In Enscape 3.0, for operating system deliver performance in example, we got a a bewildering array of single and lightly options. smooth 35 frames per threaded second (FPS) at 4K Scan brings together resolution with our 9.5 workloads with an these advances in a GB office complex test considered way, in enviable level of model. The results in a well-built desktop GPU acceleration workstation Unreal Engine 4.26 were for similarly impressive. The users. with capacity for professional Automotive Configurator Newer isn’t always better, large datasets Audi A5 rendered at certainly when it comes 16.75 FPS at 4K with ray to price / performance, tracing enabled (DirectX Ray tracing and Scan’s choice of DDR4 memory helps – DXR) and 31.20 FPS at 4K without bring down costs without negatively (DirectX 12 rasterisation). impacting performance for most users. As you’d expect from its model number, The combination of Intel Core i9-

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12900K CPU and Nvidia RTX A4500 GPU offers users the best of both worlds: exceptional performance in single and lightly threaded workloads with an enviable level of GPU acceleration with capacity for large datasets. At £3,583 (Ex VAT), however, Scan’s workstation is a serious investment. Configuring with a lower spec GPU would save significant money and still leave you with an excellent all-round machine for CAD, BIM, and reality modelling workflows. For those focused less on visualisation, the Nvidia RTX A2000 (6 GB) would be an obvious downgrade. However, as with so many technology purchases these days, that config might not be available due to limited availability of the entrylevel RTX GPU. As a closing comment, it’s genuinely exciting to see such intense competition in CPUs that was lacking for so many years. At the tail end of 2020 AMD took the lead with its excellent Ryzen 5000 Series. Now 12th Gen Intel Core appears to be the processor of choice for single and lightly threaded workloads, including CAD. But Intel certainly won’t rest on its laurels. With AMD set to launch its next gen Ryzen processor (Zen 4) in the second half of 2022, we’re excited to see what happens next. www.AECmag.com

23/03/2022 15:14

PARTNERED WITH

21 June 2022 The Queen Elizabeth II Centre Westminster, London

Cobus Bothma, presenting at NXT BLD 2021. Image courtesy of KPF nxtbld.com/videos/cobus-bothma-2

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23/03/2022 19:57

In association with

Early bi rd tickets only £4 9

THE FUTURE OF Architecture, Engineering and Construction technology

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23/03/2022 19:57

Opinion

Navigating the metaverse Design and technology leaders at HOK share their thoughts on the metaverse, and the role that architects and designers can play in shaping this exciting new immersive world

s it an overhyped buzzword coopted from a 1990s sci-fi novel or a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity that will affect nearly every part of our lives? And what exactly is it? There are nearly as many working definitions of the metaverse as there are opinions about what it will mean to architects and designers. But it’s often used to describe a future iteration of the internet that immerses people in a 3D virtual reality world where people can interact and conduct real-world activities. Whatever the definition, the metaverse is coming. Consider ubiquitous smartphones and watches, AR/VR headsets, immersive video games, Peloton screens and futuristic Tesla dashboards. In many ways it’s already here. As Moore’s Law kicks in and technology continues to accelerate this convergence of physical and digital environments, the design profession will need to stay one step ahead. The 3D, immersive metaverse will facilitate changes in how design firms work, the services they provide and the products they deliver. The opportunities range from creating a parallel digital uni52

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verse that mimics the physical world to developing entirely new universes—and revenue streams. Designers of the built environment are poised for immediate engagement with the metaverse. “All the physical spaces we design—interiors, buildings, campuses and cities—are born as meta spaces,” says Brian Jencek, HOK’s San Francisco-based director of planning. “We just call them 3D models. We’re already using many of the tools that game designers use— including Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity and Twinmotion—to create realisticlooking virtual environments.”

Digital sandboxes and connected sensors HOK has long used virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tools to immerse clients in a proposed space, be it a stadium, hospital, office or lab. These tools can simulate building performance and play out various scenarios. They can model New York City, for example, to show what it will look like if the population grows by 10 million and the sea level rises by six feet. Emerging technology will make it pos-

sible to meet with a client inside a proposed or existing building and alter the design in real time. Or for firms to host virtual spaces where, via realistic avatars, designers scattered all over the world can come together to collaborate. It also will be possible to create a true digital twin—a virtual model that accurately reflects a real building and is updated with real-time data. “A digital twin will receive data from connected Internet of Things sensors to tell the story of a building’s performance throughout its life cycle, from design through operations,” says Chloe Sun, design technology specialist in HOK’s Toronto office. For now, however, virtual buildings predominantly remain read-only environments that only change as their owners publish updates. “The technology doesn’t exist yet to replicate 3D space in a fidelity that captures anything more than static elements with data links,” says Greg Schleusner, HOK’s New York-based director of design technology. “We don’t even have ways to model something as simple as a person walking through a door.” At what point will the metaverse be realistic enough to simulate reality? www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 13:09

IMAGE CREDIT: POWERCHINA ZHONGNAN ENGINEERING CORPORATION LIMITED

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I worry about the overall effect on humanity of disengaging from nature. We are biological beings, not digital objects David Weatherhead , Design Principal, HOK

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March / April 2022

24/03/2022 13:09

Esport arena designed by HOK

“People are really good at spotting fakes,” says Jencek. “I could show you a rendering where I have used Photoshop to change one digital asset and you would see it in seconds. Though the technology has never been better, we have a lot of work to do if the metaverse is intended to twin reality.”

potentially millions—to attend virtually and interact with each other.” Epic Games has already hosted a series of interactive musical performances, including Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, in its “Fortnite” video game. “We could design 20 different skins for that concert venue where the users choose their preferred thematic experience,” says Rashed Singaby, senior project designer for HOK in Kansas City. “Or we could design our own digital art assets that have value for sale as NFTs. Not to mention how our portfolio of projects can be experienced differently in the metaverse, with view-

“Every designer has amazing designs sleeping in their hard drives,” adds Sun, who already knows how to code. “We can revitalise them in the metaverse, where we have more opportunities to share our creativity with the world.” As building designers monitor the patterns and needs of this growing virtual world, they can begin cultivating Designing a better Metaverse design standards. When HOK started to Another vision for the metaverse looks build its knowledge about designing for past digital tools, sensors and data to Esports, designers studied several popufocus on the creation of immersive envilar video games, like “League of ronments that bear no semblance to Legends,” to understand how their comreality. “It’s strange to escape gravity petitive events worked. “We then examonly to re-create it in virtual buildings,” ined the traditional sports market—from says Jencek. venue layout and ame“What if we designed nities to how these a digital-only stadium sports were being proWe all have relatively equal opportunities in the where you were floatduced for broadcast— metaverse market regardless of gender, race, ing above the field and for cues,” says Singaby. there were people nationality or sexual orientation We also can design “From this we develaround you in every oped design standards culturally inclusive, accessible environments direction: up, down, for venues to accomChloe Sun, design technology specialist, HOK left, right and everymodate Esports. And where? Do you want to as traditional sports fly to the International leagues noticed the Space Station? Or own an NFT of a virtu- ers able to virtually tour the buildings blend of physical and digital in Esports al chateau on a virtual piece of land in the we designed. Between designing for the events, they were able to learn from and Swiss Alps? We’ll even include the goats! metaverse and leveraging its capabili- capture some of that magic.” As someone anchored in reality, I’m torn. ties, the potential is almost limitless.” Will the same type of evolution But one of our roles in the metaverse can The challenge for architects accus- toward immersive computing experiencbe to design these fantastical environ- tomed to overcoming constraints will be es also transform the design of other ments.” to free their imaginations to think on the building types? “It’s already starting to A digital building twin also could be level of fantasy possible in the virtual happen across workplace, healthcare, used to enhance people’s experiences in world. “There are no rules for buildings education, entertainment and retail its real-life counterpart. “Imagine an in video games,” says Singaby. projects,” says Singaby. “Designers for arena that holds thousands of people for “Architects can tap into what video game every market should be thinking about a live concert,” says Sun. “By using a digi- designers have been doing to create capti- how the metaverse could dramatically tal twin, the performer will be able to vating, fantasy experiences. More of us change what their clients need over the accommodate a much larger audience— may need to learn to code.” next ten years.”

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‘‘

As someone anchored in reality, I’m torn. But one of our roles in the metaverse can be to design these fantastical environments Brian Jencek, director of planning, HOK

’’

ESG in the Metaverse There will be a host of environment, social and governance issues to grapple with in the metaverse. On the environmental side, the increased data processing and network traffic required to power the virtual world could vastly increase consumption of electricity. At the same time, conducting more of our activities in the digital world would reduce carbon emissions from transportation while curbing resource use and waste. “I worry about the overall effect on humanity of disengaging from nature,” says David Weatherhead, a design principal for HOK in London. “We are biological beings, not digital objects.” The metaverse will be more accessible for designers. “We all have relatively equal opportunities in the metaverse market regardless of gender, race, nationality or sexual orientation,” says Sun. “We also can design culturally inclusive, accessible environments.” Maintaining actual digital twins of physical buildings could advance equity. “This hybridisation of a building will offer people on- and off-site access to many of its resources,” says Mark Cichy, director of design technology in HOK’s Toronto studio. As more real people engage in the virtual worlds of the metaverse, designers will have to consider issues related to governance, security, safety and privacy. A crime that can be committed in the real world—like harassment or theft—most likely has a parallel in the metaverse. “What are the rules and laws people in respectful virtual communities need to www.AECmag.com

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abide by?” asks Singaby. “It’s not our issue as architects to solve, but the stewardship and safety of that space is part of our responsibility as advocates for humanity.”

Balancing act Designers of one-dimensional, digitalonly buildings aren’t constrained by codes, materiality, constructability or even gravity. The rules architects are accustomed to following vanish in the ether of the metaverse, where a building doesn’t even need to look like a building. “Yet as architects in the real world, we spend a lot of time optimising the restrictions we’re given,” says Weatherhead. “When I was part of a team designing the world’s tallest building, our goal was to make it as tall as we could while ensuring it was technically feasible and affordable to build. Without those practical limitations, our skills and ability to innovate could be somewhat devalued and engineering goes away.” Cichy agrees that there’s a risk in the metaverse of commoditising the role of architects. “We’re there with our clients from the beginning of a building’s design all the way through occupancy and ongoing operations,” he says. “What architects do is so much more powerful and rich than just aesthetics.” The idea of using the metaverse solely as an escape from reality—a fictional world where people don’t have to physically interact—also sounds dystopian to some designers, who tend to be optimistic by nature and would much prefer to build a better reality. “We don’t just want to reject the real world because it’s diffi-

cult or has problems,” says Schleusner. “That’s the ‘Ready Player One’ version that’s so popular in movies. We want to keep advocating for the version of the metaverse that maps to and helps the real world.” Imagine AR providing a 3D modelled overlay on what we see in the physical world. Perhaps we could be walking through a park and see how healthy a tree is. Or view information about an historic building. “The bi-directional flow of information between digital worlds and the built environment offers tremendous value,” says Cichy. Though he admits to being intrigued by the infinite dimension of user experiences that architects could create in the metaverse, Weatherhead has yet to be moved by a digital-only design. “But I can easily feel moved by experiencing a great piece of architecture,” he says. “We have a long way to go before we can imbue digital buildings with that kind of emotional power and meaning. For now, we can use these tools to keep making the real world a better place.” The discussion about the role of architects and designers in connecting the physical and virtual worlds has only just begun and will keep evolving as new layers emerge. Though acknowledging it can be frightening for some because it’s new, Singaby believes designers must embrace this opportunity. “It will be better for us to help define this new digital world than to ignore it,” he says. “It’s happening. And it’s up to us to decide how we want to participate.” ■ www.hok.com

March / April 2022

24/03/2022 13:09

Opinion

aha Hadid Architects – which was founded by Zaha Hadid, the 2004 Pritzker Prize Winner and one of the most influential female architects of our time – is internationally known for its dynamic and innovative designs. Each of the practice’s projects builds on over thirty years of revolutionary experimentation and research in the interrelated fields of urbanism, architecture and design. Today the practice is headed by Patrik Schumacher, who since 1988 has been 56

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instrumental in developing Zaha Hadid Architects to become a 500 strong global architecture and design brand. Schumacher studied philosophy, mathematics and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart and London and received his PhD at the Institute for Cultural Science in Klagenfurt. In 1996, he founded the Design Research Laboratory at the AA in London where he continues to teach. Since 2007 he has been promoting parametricism as an epochal style for the 21st century. His current research interest is focused on the metaverse and the

integration of real and virtual communication spaces. Sara Kolata, an architect and business strategist on a mission to improve the financial wellbeing of architects, sat down with Patrik to speak about the metaverse as an opportunity for architects. Sara Kolata: Patrik, can you tell us more about the ZHA approach to the metaverse? Patrik Schumacher: The metaverse is being built as we speak, rapidly. But who is designing it? Who should design it? www.AECmag.com

23/03/2022 17:37

The Liberland Metaverse MasterPlan: a collaboration between Liberland, Zaha Hadid Architects, Mytaverse and ArchAgenda a.o

The metaverse as an opportunity for architects My thesis is that the design of the metaverse falls within the remit of the discipline of architecture and the wider design disciplines, not video game artists. According to my theory of architecture and design, video game developers / artists are not designers. They do not belong to the discipline of design, but to the entertainment industry. The metaverse is where much of the architectural action and innovation will be happening in the coming period. I also believe that the metaverse offers a potent opportunity for parametricism – the only natively digital, www.AECmag.com

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computational and truly contemporary architectural style – to make strides toward the hegemony it long aspires to within the discipline. Kolata: How do you see the metaverse opportunities for architects manifest in positive impacts on society and the future of the built environment? Schumacher: The metaverse I want to contribute to supports and becomes part of productive societal life and an integral part of social production and societal reproduc-

tion. This serious type of metaverse does not offer an alternate reality or second life or any escape from social reality or societal life, but instead enhances society and enables fulfilling, productive lives. Entertainment is not altogether excluded, but it is only a small part of this. Fiction plays a productive role in societal self-reflection and education, but the world of video games, and many of the virtual worlds and metaverses tied up with the world of video games, are all too often ideologically regressive fantasy worlds. March / April 2022

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Cover story

Liberland Metaverse is a “cyberurban” virtual city designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Render by Mytaverse

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The metaverse I want to contribute to supports and becomes part of productive societal life and an integral part of social production and societal reproduction Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid Architects

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NFTism’ is a virtual gallery exploring architecture and social interaction in the metaverse

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Medical Center ‘virtual architecture’ for PUBG Mobile, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, developed by LightSpeed & Quantum, Tencent Games, Krafton

To be sure, the video game industry has developed all the amazing digital technologies that are now ready to be emancipated and transferred to greater tasks. The computer game market is big, but it is only a small niche compared to the generalised concept of virtual interaction spaces that will now invite and frame all domains of human interaction: knowledge exchange, professional collaboration, cultural communication, art, education, political engagement, etc. We will never get away from real physical architecture altogether, as long as we have bodies. Also, there will probably never be a total virtual substitution even of all physically embodied social communications. However, no domain will remain untouched by these new opportunities, and no physical space will remain without virtual competition and potential substitution. Kolata: What, in your opinion, is the role of the architect in the metaverse? Schumacher: The life process of society is a communication process that is ordered via a rich typology of communicative situations. It is the designed environment, both physical and digital, that distributes, frames, stabilises and coordinates these distinct situations and unfolds them within a designed order that allows us to self-sort as participants of various specific social interactions. The designed spaces – real or virtual – are themselves communications: they are communications that define, premise and prime the communicative interactions that are expected to take place within the www.AECmag.com

respectively framed territory. All design is about framing social interactions. This is also true for virtual interactions. Any design project in this space involves the three parts of the architect’s project I have distinguished in my theory of architecture: the organisational project, the phenomenological project and the semiological project. In the context of the metaverse, I must add the dramaturgical project, representing interaction design. The semiological project is crucial: While all urban spaces are also information-rich navigation and interaction spaces, this information-rich communicative charge and capacity is the very essence of all virtual spaces and the metaverse. To design architectural projects, real or virtual, implies the development of a spatio-visual language, with a muchenhanced communicative capacity, to create navigable and legible information-rich environments for multiple layered societal interactions, purposes and audiences. The metaverse promises co-location synergies, just like cities, and an immersive 3D layered visual field makes many more interaction offerings simultaneously navigable, recognisable and accessible than 2D pages with scroll down menus. How to maintain perceptual tractability and legibility in the face of richness and complexity is the designer’s task and core competency with respect to both city and metaverse. Kolata: Do you see any alternative opportunities for architects, which are worth exploring?

Schumacher: There is another reason why architecture will take the lead in metaverse design: All organisations – firms, cultural institutions, charities, etc. – will host virtual spaces in the metaverse. Most of them will retain their urban premises too. It makes sense that both physical and virtual premises are congenial extensions of each other, and are designed together. I further predict that our physical urban and architectural environments will transform and become interfaces to these virtual worlds. This means users can enter the virtual worlds not only individually from their homes via headsets or laptops but together with others via large panoramic screens and other spatial interfaces. We’ll experience the metaverse from shared physical social spaces, from within our work spaces and public urban spaces. So, I predict a mixed reality and a cyber-urban fusion. If this is true, it is again important to design real and virtual spaces together, as a continuum. Architecture and the design disciplines must gear up to take on this task and a massive, soon snowballing market. Patrik Schumacher will speak at the DisruptBusiness of Architecture conference planned to take place on 1-5 May 2022. He will give a presentation about architects’ opportunities in the metaverse and disclose advice and step-by-step strategies architect entrepreneurs can implement today to better strategise for success as designers for the metaverse. ■ www.disruptsymposium.com

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Opinion

Reducing CO2 by AI design and robotics The construction industry is yearning for a sustainability and CO2 reduction revolution. However, the relationship between digital design and its physical output has never been more loose. New AI design strategies and automated smart manufacturing will change our industry for good, writes Foldstruct’s Tal Friedman

espite the current “green The architect does not stand alone. Gone hype” from regulators and are the days where architectural design industry, 99% of buildings are can be dispatched from its means of manstill being built to the lowest ufacturing and footprint analysis. New common sustainability denominators. technologies now allow us, like never Einstein allegedly said that the defini- before, to create unified methodologies tion of insanity is to that blur the boundado the same thing over ries between disciand over again and plines. But to grasp expect different the potential, we first Tal Friedman is an results, and the same have to understand architect and conis true in construction. the problem. struction-tech entrepreneur active If we keep planning in automated algoSo how big the same buildings, rithm-based designis this problem? we will end up with to-fabrication. His the same results. You’ve all heard this work explores new Sustainability canone before: the conpossibilities for not happen on a local struction industry is transforming the built environment through innovative use of materials and basis. A “green” responsible for 40% creating new typologies for architecture house, school or even of global CO2 emisand structural purposes (www.foldstruct.com) neighbourhood which sions, making it the Tal has also presented at NXT BLD do not prove a cost most polluting (www.nxtbld.com/videos/tal-friedman) effective and scalable industry on earth. model are many times In fact, reducing a part of the problem, also known as emissions for this sector alone can achieve “greenwash”. the global benchmarks for preventing globIn order to effect true change, we must al climate change. see the industry as a whole and provide Add to that a geo-political turmoil models that can work for the mainstream caused by external energy source instead of one-offs. dependency, and you have the most burn-

About the author

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ing issue of this century. The coin of the future is, therefore, not the Dollar or the Bitcoin, but the Kilowatt.

Bridging the gap As demonstrated in my previous articles, the planning world has not changed fundamentally for thousands of years, relying mainly on pure geometric representations, very far from their actual manufacturing details and eco footprint. Yet, it is clear that industrial manufacturing holds the key to improving performance, reducing waste and using smart materials - the main factors affecting a building’s sustainability. The biggest challenge is in matching the restraints of these in early design stages. Today, “real world” data leading to CO2 calculations can only be extracted at the last 20% of the planning stage, after planning is pretty much complete, making it practically too late to change and optimise. So how come in a world of BIM, digitation, and open knowledge, we are so far behind? Compare today‘s AEC planning firms with those of 50 years ago, and you see something remarkable. Planning costs, times and complexity have gone up due www.AECmag.com

24/03/2022 14:16

Tal Friedman Architecture with Foldstruct

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Today, “real world” data leading to CO2 calculations can only be extracted at the last 20% of the planning stage, after planning is pretty much complete, making it practically too late to change and optimise

Kuka KR Iontec robot Image courtesy of Kuka Group

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to extra BIM experts, consultants - and rising software license fees (more on that in Martyn Day’s article “Prisoner of Vendor” – www.tinyurl.com/AEC-prisoner), yet the overall detail level has not seen significant changes for the mainstream. In other words, we have digitized the same problem.

The solution: optimise early on Design for manufacturing (DfMA), the holy grail for the construction world, is often overlooked by AEC firms due to complexities. However, it is now becoming more feasible than ever. According to the latest reports by bodies like McKinsey, Deloitte etc. adopting industrialisation and automation for the construction world can not only reduce CO2, but also cut costs by 15-25% when applied at scale. Yet, this requires all stakeholders to “play by the rules” in all stages. Looking at other industries like furniture, automotive and aerospace that have managed to revolutionise their manufacturing, we can see the large role that designing to the screw level holds. The equation is simple: the more data you have, the better you can optimise. It is, however, unrealistic to expect an www.AECmag.com

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architect or engineer to know how to write machine code, analyse CO2 footprints and be acquainted with all the latest building technologies. So how do we bring all this together?

A new state of mind Using AI, a radical mindset shift is now available. No longer should architecture remain isolated as a ‘soft’ discipline, ending its role upon design completion. New architecture is deeply rooted in its environmental and social impact. Planners must take full responsibility of what they design above its local usage. On the other hand, manufacturers, contractor and regulators must provide the infrastructure and data for its adaptations. The amazing possibilities of data analysis for AEC that can be achieved through digitation are immense and growing by the day. Just to name a few: daylight analysis, CO2 calculation for materials, thermal insulation with Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)-based wind calculations, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), manufacturing supply chain optimisation - all these, when combined together, can help us create greener, smarter and

more cost effective buildings. From my personal experience with Foldstruct, working with corporates in the manufacturing field, it is all about data collaboration. A true open book approach from all sides can digitally dissect the project in ways that are not seen to the naked eye. In a recent project, we were able to not only reduce CO2, but also cost, by optimising the design according to a specific system. The main challenge was to reverse engineer something that has already been designed. However, using AI and parametric logic, it was possible to make slight adjustments that were non-intrusive to the original design, yet proved to be of great benefit in terms of performance. It is indeed an ongoing journey to digitize the construction industry, but the path has been set with more and more corporates joining the game. As more analysis tools spring up and regulations demand more sustainable buildings, we will see a unification of all disciplines in a “building as product” approach. It is a time where AI, robotics and smart materials are no longer buzz words, but the future of the AEC industry. ■ www.foldstruct.com

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24/03/2022 14:16

Interview

Towards drawing automation Berlin-based CAD software developer Gräbert has been developing DWG CAD tools since 1994, now spanning Windows, Mac, Linux and cloud. Martyn Day talked with company CTO Robert Gräbert on the company’s efforts to better link 2D to BIM

uilding Information Modelling (BIM) was sold as a way of getting automated drawings by modelling a building in 3D. What we actually got is more drawings. We now model a building to get drawings that need 2D editing, and if the model changes, we need to do the edits again. In our conversations with AEC firms there are growing calls to get rid of drawings completely and work only from 3D models. The bad news is that in manufacturing, which is a decade further ahead in adoption of modelling virtual prototypes, they still produce and rely on 2D drawings. 62

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There is also the issue that the contractual framework for AEC is still the drawing. What needs to happen first is smarter 2D drawing tools. Gräbert develops its own drawing tool under the ‘Ares’ brand. It also licenses its core engine to the likes of industry heavyweights Dassault Systèmes (Draftsight) and PTC (Onshape) to name but two. Gräbert is innovating in its drawing tools, not just in functionality but also in platform, with Ares Kudo – its DWG engine in the cloud - and also looking at how to connect to BIM modellers and get better automation, even when there are changes to the model.

Martyn Day: Many of the large firms I talk with either want to automate their drawings or get rid of drawings completely. They see it as a great bottleneck, a drain on resources and a bottom-line cost. Robert Gräbert: We want to give the users productivity tools so that they can create drawings efficiently. But if you have a motivated client that has enough volume, and wants to automate (drawing production) all the way, if that company decided exactly what their drawings look like, this type of document, to that level, you could go all the way. We could automate a system that www.AECmag.com

23/03/2022 16:16

gives you a full drawing set every single night just for them; you can just do it on the cloud. It could be done but it would not be very configurable. I think that is an interesting vision, especially for the top of the market. I see so many hours wasted, customers that have similar positions, that might have over 1,000 designers working on drawings every month. If you just solve that and give very good productivity data, they know how much time they are spending on that problem. But if you solve this for one company, it might not be valuable for the industry. I think there’s still tonnes of easy gains that have not been explored yet. I don’t want to take out the engineer or the architect from that equation. I still hear really dumb stuff that needs fixing, like the visibility of annotations. Those are really nice computer problems; what you put on the drawings and for what reasons, and that’s sort of the skill.

been impressed with working at 1:1 and seeing the automated 2D output for manufacturing. But AEC drawings and mechanical drawings are not the same.

tures. So, for example, in Onshape, you can say ‘I’m going to document holes differently than other curves because I know there’s a hole feature and we know what a hole is.’ Robert Gräbert: First of all, obviously So, I think that’s the main point, we there’s more stakeholders in an AEC want to take the non-geometric (BIM) process. You might want a drawing for data, and inform the drawings, to enable prefab, for construction or [applying automation. So one thing today, if you for] permits. There’s all these different use our BIM drawings, we still make you use cases where MCAD [mechanical put in your own sections. Users select CAD] drawings typically are designed the floors. for manufacturing, inspections, conWe actually know the original hierartracting - it’s much more focused. But if chy of the BIM model from Revit, we anyone thinks that all manufacturing know what floors, what wings of builddrawings are automated, there will be ings you have. So, one of the things no need for us to partner with PTC on you’ll see very soon, as it’s not finished the Onshape drawings, no need for inte- yet, is a button that says ‘create my ceilgration, right? It is still a very important ing grids and floor plans for every floor part of an MCAD product that you can in the model’ because we know the create your own drawings. extents of your model.’ You don’t start with a blank sheet. You Obviously, there will be some weird start with a view into the model. And then cases, like when we have a curtain wall, you create derivative views like detail other things that span multiple floors, views, section views or whatnot. And then but I think we can guesstimate it. you annotate those and add additional Now that you have the BIM data availMartyn Day: In the January / February documentation, inspection symbols, toler- able, I think we can drive that automation 2022 edition of AEC Magazine (www. ances, etc. I guess, just going through that as far as you want, right. Today, we spend a ec m a g.c o m/m a ga z in e s), a lot of time, building Keith Bentley, CTO of from the principles. For Bentley Systems predicted instance, we just added Every IFC object has a GUID; every Revit object the ability for every multi 2D drawings will be gone in twenty years (or at least has its own handle; so if the model does change, component wall to autothe time spent creating create all the things for all the work you have invested in annotating a them). Where are we now? the rooms, for all the windrawing or model is not wasted dows etc. We basically Robert Gräbert: I think have tools that you just we’re in the middle of this press a button and bam! transition, where there’s still some experience was the inspiration for what The final thing is, because we are capdrawings that are being produced in we’re doing with BIM. turing that original data about that object, their own right. Architects still sit down The difference between what we’re we can also capture the unique identifier and start to sketch something out, doing today, versus what we did, maybe of those objects. whether it’s a floor plan or something a couple of years ago, was that previousEvery IFC object has a GUID; every else. But I do think we are transitioning ly we could always bring in 2D geometry Revit object has its own handle; so if the the point where the drawing documents (or 3D geometry even) right. And you model does change, the work you have the model. This is what Revit and the could always cut it, and you’d be fine. invested in annotating a drawing or other tools have always done, with This is what we do with BIM drawings model is not wasted. AutoCAD finessing 2D content and you today. We get IFC content, we cut it, and Firms try and delay the drawing phase create annotations. then we get 2D and that’s fine. But now as long as possible, because once you I think what we are doing, especially we are saying the source data is not just start doing the drawing, you know it’s with BIM stuff, we are saying you are still geometry, but now has added data. Then really difficult to go back to the model going to have drawings, you are still you can start doing interesting things. and you can’t model everything. So by going to produce drawings, but you’re You can auto-swap-out the representa- having access to the data, to drive the not going to start with a blank sheet. tions for doors, you auto-label all the drawings, by having access to them, You’re going to start with a source model, rooms, add fireproofing information, GUIDs, we can now keep BIM models and I think we have a chance of saying, add different materials, different shad- and drawings in sync - or at least attempt not today, in two or three years, we’ll ing or different symbols. to do so. It gives us a chance that the hopefully be able to produce something Brics [BricsCAD] has gone down this drawing, that investment, isn’t wasted. more productive than you have today. way [route] as well because this is ■ www.graebert.com where the productivity comes in, in Martyn Day: Firms that have been experi- mechanical CAD systems, as they know This is an edited version of a more in-depth menting with mechanical CAD tools like that the underlying model is not just a interview, which can be read in full at Inventor, Fusion and Onshape have all shape but shapes that are driven by fea- www.tinyurl.com/grabert-AEC

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23/03/2022 16:16

Opinion

The Golden Thread of information The Golden Thread provides an accurate record of a construction project, including maintenance and operations data for the final asset, but how effective can it be and when? Martin Couling, BIM solutions specialist, Microdesk, shares his thoughts

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n May 2018, the Hackitt Report was released in response to the UK’s Grenfell Tower disaster. In it, and in the interim report released in December 2017, Dame Judith Hackitt called for a critical need for change from the ground up in the construction industry to document accountable, reliable, consistent, secure, and accessible information. The reports stated these criteria should be applied to the entire asset lifecycle and characterised them as the Golden Thread of information. This determination was a welcome one as it has many of the same goals that Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been trying to achieve for years. These include establishing information management as the foundation of industry standards and processes that define the UK BIM framework. The results of the 2020 Golden Thread Review investigations found that just over half of the respondents believed less than 25 percent of UK projects were being delivered in alignment with the UK BIM Framework. This raises the following questions. Are BIM and the Golden Thread inherently tied together, or can one be achieved without the other? What is preventing the adoption of

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these vital elements of the construction industry’s digital revolution? The industry is no stranger to the principle of the Golden Thread. Various definitions existed before the Hackitt Report’s release and the concept has appeared in numerous government released correspondence. Government Soft Landings stated, “Government Soft Landings will be used to maintain this golden thread and ensure its continuation into the building’s operative stage.” The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) approached it from the planning perspective stating, “At the heart of the NPPF is a presumption in favour of sustainable development, which should be viewed as a golden thread running through both plan-making and decision-taking.” These references are key to understanding the principle of the Golden Thread. Although these different definitions refer to the principle specific to their respective fields, the practices and requirements are all established by competent information management which consists of centralised, standardised, and organised information with its asso-

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ciated history readily available. For the construction industry, the Hackitt reports have been indispensable in giving the Golden Thread purpose and bringing recognition. Previously, it was more a buzzword than a principle and for all intents and purposes, fell on deaf ears. Now, it is tied to the very fabric that forms the structures around us and, most importantly, how they keep us safe. However, nearly four years on from the findings, the question remains the same. Is the industry more intellectually and technologically equipped now to deliver the Golden Thread? 45 percent of respondents to the Golden Thread Review believed the appropriate people within their organisations understood what is meant by a digital Golden Thread of information. But as an indicator of industry readiness, this is a concerning figure. True progression comes from within, where internal practices and processes can be analysed, distinctive needs for change become obvious and solutions implemented. This will not happen until insight and judgement are applied and action taken. Only then will the industry advance.

Golden Thread explainer What is the Golden Thread? The Golden Thread provides an accurate record of a project and includes maintenance and operations data for the final asset. It also stores all decisions made since the asset’s inception and ensures accountability to mitigate risk to occupiers. Where did it come from? Although the Golden Thread is not specific to construction, the term is most frequently used in conjunction with it. In that context, its earliest reference appears in the 2013 Government Soft Landings Executive Summary. What are its implications? The implications of the Golden Thread are traceable, complete sets of information that provide the history of decisions made about all aspects of design and construction. By having this wealth of information operational decisions can be informed by past actions, detailed data sets, and alignment to current standards. It also facilitates the reviews of best practices.

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Opinion

The three gateways As a result of the Hackitt Report the industry coined ‘Gateway Regime’ defines three gateways. These are vital for accountability. At each gateway, the duty holder (respective to the gateway) is required to submit the Golden Thread of information to the Building Safety Regulator for approval. The gateways and associated duty holder are as follows: Gateway 1 Planning Application phase, Principal Designer

the Building Safety Bill predicted for the summer of 2022, Gateways 2 and 3 will not be enforced until 12 to 18 months later. Additionally, it is unclear when guidance will be released for the other gateways. With the above timeline we may not see the implications of Hackitt’s findings implemented industry wide until potentially 2024. While it is appropriate that such broad-based vital decisions be scrutinised and discussed at length, the topic of occupier safety the final gateways implementation cannot come soon enough.

Challenges ahead

Gateway 2 Construction Commencement phase, Principal Contractor

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” George Gateway 3 Bernard Shaw Practical Completion phase, As with all progress, it is often the few Occupier against the many. Industrial advancement only happens when change takes It is clear the duty holders are expected to place on a cultural level, from leadership communicate the information they have down to the individual. The construcbeen responsible for in a tion industry is infamous structured manner at each for lagging behind the key transition of a project’s You can have curve, with ‘old school’ senlife cycle. This will ensure timents and mentalities the Golden key handovers are effective. being the main detriments Thread The intention is for the gateto advancement. Placing the without BIM Golden Thread principle ways to enforce these requirements. Currently, the and vice versa within the more tangible industry is creating and of Fire Safety given the right framework sharing guidance on each practices means it could be circumstances easier to achieve and engage gateway and its requirements. the usual ‘back runners’ and poor On 10 May 2021, in an management of onboard at a much earlier effort to address the potenstage, with the duty holders projects, but tial issues arising from the leading the charge. lack of industry adoption why would you Historically Small and and understanding, the govMedium-sized Enterprises want to? ernment published a draft (SMEs) are linked to the statement form and associslower than desired uptake ated guidance for the first of the three of BIM, with client demand, lack of gateways effective in August 2021. But expertise and training and cost being the with an estimated ‘Royal Assent’ date of commonly cited barriers noted in the

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National Building Specification (NBS) 2020 Annual BIM report. As the duty holder for Gateway 2, the Principal Contractor will be responsible and now more inclined to ensure the information they receive from their sub-contractors (commonly SMEs) is validated and complete. After all, it is no longer a matter of completing delivery and hoping it is approved with the knowledge that there are gaps. Liability is now being tied to the history of the project, the asset, and the stakeholders. With this there is optimism that SMEs will be more responsive and better supported to deploy the required technologies and processes to achieve the requirements of the Golden Thread. These issues fall under the general wider topics of understanding, technology, and culture. Circling back to the initial query of whether BIM and the Golden Thread are inherently related, it is clear to see that if one process has a problem, you can nearly guarantee that the other process will also fall prey to the same obstacle. Of course, you can have the Golden Thread without BIM and vice versa given the right circumstances and poor management of projects, but why would you want to? With an established BIM framework and wealth of knowledge and digital technologies suited to deliver the requirements of the Golden Thread, hopefully, the time for BIM and the Golden Thread is now.

About the author Martin Couling is a BIM Solutions Specialist with Microdesk providing technical support, training, BIM assurance and consulting services. He focuses on practicality as part of the training for implementing ISO19650 and develops bespoke deliverable review processes for BIM projects and clients. ■ www.microdesk.com

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