BIM Discussion

The required reading from the BIM Handbook first discussed in general the capabilities of BIM software. It listed a number of capabilities in order of what the author thought was most important. Some of the areas discussed included user interface, drawing generations, ease of developing custom parametric objects, scalability, interoperability, extensibility, complex curve modeling, and multi-user environment. Then the handbook went on to discuss the different BIM software packages that are in use today. The first software was Autodesk’s Revit. Revit is able to import and export a number of different files and it is easy to get a general overview of how it works if you’ve never used it before. The one weakness that Revit has is that it has a small memory system that slows down for larger projects. It also doesn’t support complex curve modeling which was discussed previously as an important feature of most BIM software. Bentley systems and their architectural BIM tool were discussed next. When compared to Revit there is noticeable difference in the memory because of the way files are saved. Bentley’s interface is also a lot more difficult to easily understand. The handbook goes on to discuss other BIM software that I think aren’t used a lot in the industry. Revit and Bentley seem to be the most popular of the BIM software.

The first additional article I read is called BIM and Substantial Design, Building Analysis. This article discusses the benefits of using BIM to aid in the analysis of a sustainable building design. When analyzing a building done in AutoCAD or any other 2D program, a lot of human interference occurs which makes the analysis process costly and time consuming.  BIM is able to model a building in its early stages. This allows the building to be analyzed to see how the structure will perform. If it performs poorly, the design can be easily changed without affecting construction time. The use of BIM can insure many sustainable features in the end result of a building. Sustainable design and building greener is something that is beginning to be incorporated in every new building whether it’s LEED platinum or just has a LEED certification. The required reading discusses the capabilities of BIM but doesn’t touch on these capabilities too much.

The second thing I looked at this week was a video on cloud computing. I wanted to know a little more about it after our guest speaker last week touched on it in his presentation. It seemed like there are still some difficulties with cloud computing which were noticeable in the presentation last week, the lecturer’s discussion with a student, and from this video I found. The video discusses Intel’s vision for cloud computing by the year 2015. The way I understand cloud computing is that when you do something on one device like your computer, it automatically shows up on all of the other devices within the cloud such as, other computers, mobile devices and tablets. This could benefit the building industry greatly because clients and contractors would be able to see updated changes the minute they happened. This could greatly reduce the time for the design phase of a project.