topic Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg) in Modeling

Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:48:30 GMT

Most of the Cities have consultants: architects, engineers, etc...and all consultants must submit their work to the City following guidelines like the AIA Cad standards and the like:
Do you know any City that already incorporated BIM guidelines??

tons of thx in advance

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:34:13 GMT

cmon guys, please one at a time !!!

i just spoke to one of the IAI board member and i realized that this is really new...
but it will happen at city level shortly
thx u

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Chadwick — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:14:41 GMT

I am not sure about any cities in particular. I do know that the federal government is adopting BIM as a standard and there is commission right now that is regulating what those standards should be. Soon state governments will follow. How soon I am not sure but you are right, this is going to happen.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:23:37 GMT

correct..
www.gsa.gov/bim
im learning as i go..the site above is a good starting point x me.....thx

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:48:53 GMT

Our city uses Microstation. Anything that is not Microsation, in their view, is inferior, such as AC-generated shadow studies, etc. I can't imagine them adopting BIM protocols anytime soon. As long as your project can port into their mega DGN file, that is all that matters.

The problem is, we have had a hellacious time trying to import the city's DGN file into ArchiCad, whereby we get recognizable, complete, 3D elements. It just spits out a chaos of unclosed, indeterminate polygons. We have tried everything, capping stuff off in 3DS, etc. Nothing works. Microstation cannot export anything but DGN or DWG. How lame is that?

I say all of this, because even though MS is a full-blown BIM solution, it doesn't play nice with AC, so I can only wonder how any kind of BIM standards can come to be??

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:10:17 GMT

thanku Andy,

another big problem is that you cannot force the cities' consultants to use a BIM solution (for now), difficult to impose that kind of investment to 'minority' consultants...but you can enforce standards to follow instead and this is when the IAI . IFC come into play and somehow BIM begins to show.

im in the process of putting my neurons together first and try to see this thing from abv

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Djordje — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:03:06 GMT

andyro wrote:
I say all of this, because even though MS is a full-blown BIM solution, it doesn't play nice with AC, so I can only wonder how any kind of BIM standards can come to be??

IFC?

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:11:58 GMT

Are you saying that MS9 can export IFC? And import?

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Djordje — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:14:19 GMT

andyro wrote:
Are you saying that MS9 can export IFC? And import?

I am asking.

Archicad definitely can, Revit can, even ADT can. Not having that is quite incredible.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 19:36:06 GMT

My last experience dealing with Bentley (very frustrating by the way, ZERO tech support or assistance unless I owned a license, they debugged the file, gave it back to us, still garbage), we got multiple versions of the DGN and DWG exported from The City of Toronto (various versions, export options) and dealt with just about every tech person I could get in touch with, but basically we had no recourse to getting clean, sensible model output from Microstation, into ArchiCad. We even went as far back as AC7 to see if it could handle earlier DGN export any better. Nope. You had better believe we tried every form of import to AC as well. We had 4 people in our office working on this. The issue had to do with non-co-planar polygon edges, and tops of buildings not closing - which we tried to fix with a command in 3DS to no avail.

At that time (last year) I was in utter disbelief that (MS) would only export a DGN or a DWG - NOTHING else, I believe these were both versions 7 and 8. The quality of it's DWG was so bad we tried to open it in just about every program you could think of, Rhino, Revit, 3DS, Maya, Sketchup - not a single one of them could even open the file - only ADT, and the results saved out again, after extensive purging, simplification, audit, etc. gave total garbage in ArchiCad.

Every time I hear the word Microstation now I cringe.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

__archiben — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 21:33:42 GMT

Djordje wrote:
I am asking.

they are in testing:
http://www.bauwesen.fh-muenchen.de/iai/ImplementationOverview.htm

(although that site does look a little out of date . . .)

ben

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:18:22 GMT

Hey folks, some thoughts from Bentley for your consideration: I’m not trying to convert anyone here with this post, and trust that you all love Archicad (it’s good stuff) but just want to make sure you get a fuller story on this topic…

I'm not sure of the details you seem to be experiencing, but am surprised at them. Bentley's BIM solutions for Architecture, Structural and MEP Engineering all support a host of import and export types, including exceptional DWG support, and IFC 2.0 IFC2x2 and IFC2x3. We've done many tests (including with Archicad) in coordination with IFC consumers such as the US GSA, and with other 3rd party solutions such as Solibri Model Checker and have consistent high fidelity in our IFC import and export. Our CAD file format support for import/export (including DWG) is very strenuously tested both internally by our QA folks, and continuously in real world use by many thousands of users. We are very confident that there is no better support in any application for DWG R-14 though 2006 available anywhere (including from Autodesk). In fact MicroStation generated DWG files are even identified as a ‘Trusted DWG’ when opened in AutoCAD. This isn’t really surprising since (other than Autodesk) Bentley is the largest developer in the world of applications running on top of AutoCAD and using the DWG file format.

If it helps in your workflow, you may be interested to know that aside from IFC, DGN and DWG we also support DXF, STEP, IGES, STL, SketchUP, Google Earth, and PDF (with 3d and animations).

I would suggest you contact the support folks at Graphisoft, who I gather are quite helpful, and see if they can resolve this for you. Clearly MicroStation makes proper DGN files, and DWG files so I suspect the problem is in the Archicad import functions or the procedures you’re using. (I know that sounds like passing the buck…)

Lastly, and I’m not trying to sneak a sales pitch into this site, but if you find you are interfacing with DGN regularly, you may want a copy of our BIM solutions to help you with that and to gain you access to our technical support team. We are offering special pricing to Archicad users through December, see www.bentley.com/bim and click on ‘special offer’. Also, whoever is making the DGN files is a Bentley user and could contact our support team.

I hope this all helps, we certainly want BIM users to easily and effectively communicate regardless of your chosen authoring tool. With Bentley BIM formats being mandated by so many building owner and government organizations it is in our interest to facilitate these information exchanges. (I don’t expect to monitor this thread, so if you have further thoughts or questions please contact us at bim@bentley.com). Thanks for reading.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:26:34 GMT

Last month there was a BIM conference here in Portugal, and we had Jeffrey Wix here who presented his work on this subject.
He has been involved in the Corenet from Singapure, in the Scotland implementation, and is now working on the USA implementation of e-submission.
Everything is based on IFC, afaI understood.
Just to mention one aspect, USA has 44.000 jurisdictions, so coding all that legislation is a very unusual work
This is his presentation, which I recomend to anyone interested in BIM:
http://www.opet-online.org/AEC3-BIMBC.pdf

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 16:49:01 GMT

Huw, I happily stand corrected - however - could you please tell me at what version of MS IFC export was introduced?

Now - to brass tacks - I have been through hell with these files. Neither David Tauer (GS) or the folks at Bentley could remedy the situation, re. importing sensible model data generated by the City of Toronto (3D City file) - we all experienced the same bad behaviour, and degenerated polygons. I have never had similar issues with any other 3D DWG import, which usually imports without any issues whatsoever, although they are much smaller files.

I would kindly ask that you please take a look at the file in question - please send me a PM and I will post the file on our fileserver for you to pick up (80MB). Please try opening the file in anything other than ADT or Microstation.

If you concur, that nothing can be done with this DGN, or its related DWG (also exported from MS) - I would like to get to the bottom of the issue, and learn why this data is so difficult to work with. If the City staff needs a primer in export methods, I would urge you to contact them. We do many projects at an urban/master planning scale, and it was unacceptable for us to be crippled in this way by lack of access to an adequate 3D base file.

We regularly need this data, and for the past 2 years, it has been unavailable to us for the reasons cited.

I am very glad you have joined the fray here.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:00:13 GMT

I'm not sure off hand, but we've had IFC for a few years.
We introduced 2x3 recently, in our V8 XM edition.

http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Markets/Building/Open+Standards+and+Interoperability.htm may have more info for you.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

TomWaltz — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:13:05 GMT

I'm just happy that we finally have some Microstation representation

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:39:43 GMT

Well, the kind folks at Bentley now have our City's DGN file. Version 7 of MS saved out a 30MB file, when opened and saved in MS 8, this file went down to 6MB. When exported as DWG, this file balloons to over 130MB - the DWG is what we were having all of the problems with, as there was no other way to import to AC10 - or 9 for that matter - UNTIL IFC came along!!

Apparently MS8 exports IFC somehow, we didn't know how to do this last year - does it need some kind of add-on that we didn't have at the time?

I am hoping Bentley might convert the file to IFC and we can try again.....waiting to hear back...

One amusing observation, I tried to get a new copy from the planners at the City - who now inform me they charge cash money for this data. Crazy beurocrats. I tried to explain we were using this as research to get a workflow established, but of course they had no idea what I was talking about. Whatevah.

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:56:15 GMT

I am hoping Bentley might convert the file to IFC and we can try again.....waiting to hear back...

Andy,
i will ask the bentley people here in our building if they can do this,
just give me sometime

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Andy Thomson — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:02:44 GMT

Just PM'd you with the fileserver pickup link....Thanks!

Re: Cities and BIM (Virtual Bldg)

Rakela Raul — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:19:09 GMT

got it