A living list of the latest BIM standards available online. A list that will be updated regulary Català - Castellano - Deutsch
I've been trying to find as many BIM standards as possible for what is the seed of my next paper. I thought I'd share them here. In no way this means there are no other BIM Standards available, it simply means I haven't found them, so please share in the comments if you know another set of published BIM standards that are available online and that I haven't added to the list.
UPDATE: I have turned the list into a table that can be sorted clicking on the headers. THis way it is easy to sort the standards by country,or date or name, etc.
Audoesk seems to be suing Revitforum. Don't they have any sense of bad online campaings? Català - Castellano - Deutsch
Got the message I am quoting below from RevitForum. Apparently, Autodesk wants to take over their domain because it uses the word Revit. Look, I am no expert on copyright laws and domain names, but it seems kind of stupid to ban a community of users to talk about your product. Are the guys at Revit Forum making money because of the use of the Revit name? Not sure, but even if they do, isn't it logical that a Forum where people talk about revit should be called "something with revit + something with Forum"?
Our apologies for the mass email - we try to avoid these as much as
possible, but we feel it's very important that we share this news with
all of our members as soon as possible.
As some of you may be aware, Autodesk, Inc., makers of Revit, have
retained the law firm of Donahue Gallagher Woods to notify all domain
holders that have the word REVIT contained in their top-level domain
name, that they are infringing on the Autodesk REVIT trademark. They
have requested that we change the domain name of revitforum.org to one that doesn't contain the the word REVIT.
We refute these claims of infringement. The use of the trademark "REVIT" in the domain name "revitforum.org"
is protected by the "Nominative Fair Use" legal doctrine that provides
an affirmative defense to trademark infringement as enunciated by the
United States Ninth Circuit, by which a person may use the trademark of
another as reference to describe the product.
The administrators of revitforum.org will formally respond to Autodesk. However, if all else fails, we want to assure you that we are prepared to move revitforum.org to a new domain if that is required.
Whether or not there is a domain name change, rest assured that the
forums will continue to operate just as they do now. We retain all the
data on revitforum.org - that is not in any way at risk.
We will notify you via email and on the revitforum.org website of any required domain name change ahead of time.
p.s. if you know an attorney with the appropriate expertise who is
willing to donate their time for this good cause, please feel free to
contact a forum administrator privately.
Hate this type of Goliat attitudes big companies have sometimes. What do you think? UPDATE: Apparently, Autodesk has replied and seems to be willing to not force a change of domain name if the forum changes some stuff and adds a disclaimer about not being affiliated at all with Autodesk. Well, that seems fair. Not sure if it is a response to the fact that the news about this have spread quick or of really good-hearted company behavior but the result will be the same so I guess things are not as bad as they seemed at the beginning.
A lot of fuzz about Foster's plans to print buildings on the moon, but shouldn't we work harder to develop something like this on earth? Català - Castellano - Deutsch
Ok, so Foster and Partners have been working for the European Space Agency to develop a system to print buildings on the moon. I read the same news like 25 times in different blogs, and magazines since Jan 31st. Yes, it is the type of short news that travels the web at lightning speed, but I think that considering the last time the man was on the moon was in 1972 maybe it's just that, a short article intended to give a lot of publicity to Foster, the ESA and Monolite UK, (the company that have envisioned the large scale 3D printer system called D-Shape) because they added the "one the moon" ending.
Although there are rumors of plans from China to go to the moon, not much of it is known to be really true. So as I see it, the "moon" part of the news is not very relevant on the short term (although it is the reason why everyone is talking about it). What makes an interesting read is what's behind the technology to do that. The guys at Monolite UK have developed the D-Shape printer, a 3D printer that can actual print things as big as 6 by 6 meters, not bad at all.
What is even more interesting is the materials used as a building substance. According to the sources, the D.-Shape printer: "returns any type of sand, dust or gravel back to its original Compact Stone state. The Stone is very similar to Marble (...) and with a resistance and traction much superior to Portland Cement (sic), so much so that there is no need to use iron to reinforce the structure". Well, if that is true, I think the real innovation is that, much more than the fact that they have built a 3D model to show structures on the moon.
Why this is not being used already in real buildings if it is cheaper, faster, stronger and allows all kind of shapes like the inventors claim? No idea, something might still not be 100% proof ready, but anyways its an interesting experiment.
Related to this, I remembered a video I saw some months ago about a research going on at a research group at the University of Southern California. The research is called Contour Crafting, and it aims to something very similar, to be able to sort of print parts of the building and to actually use a sort of huge crane to automate construction. Here is a video about it.
This research from USC, although it has some points I think they need rethinking, seems more developed than the "print on the moon" experiment. It is based on using some standard construction procedures combined with the automation of a big part of the construction of the structure. Is this the (near?) future?
So let's think about it, printing on the moon when we don't know exactly how to do it on earth seems a bit of a far shot, but these too experiments show a trend that I think will slowly evolve and that has huge repercussion, the slow replacement of construction man-labor by machine automated work. Let's review in a couple of years how much of this is actually on the real world!
A new add-in to manage your families in revit. And it is free. Català - Castellano - Deutsch
Got the heads up from Luke Johnson about this new, and free, add-in for Revit available at the Autodesk Exchange app page. I haven't tried it but it looks promising.Quoting the app developers HTSSIndia:
The purpose of this tool is to directly load families from one Revit project to another i.e., this tool enables the users to easily look in to the views, types, parameters of the families in a Revit project file and directly load the selected families in to the current Revit project or save them as ‘rfa’ files in the given PC path.
So now it is easy to transfer families from project to project knowing exactly what you are transferring. Excellent.
Without this add in, you can transfer families from one project to another using the Transfer Project Standards tool in revit. But then you would be transfering without so much control of which families you actually copy, so this add-in is worth it.
To install it, download the add-in from here, then run the installer.
Did you delete an object by mistake and kept workin? OOPS! No worries, you can have it back! Català - Castellano - Deutsch
If you delete an object in AutoCAD, keep working, and then you realize you shouldn't have deleted it and want it back, there is a command in AutoCAD that allows you to get that object back.
The OOPS command in AutoCAD will bring back the last deleted object, even after you kept working and doing more stuff. It has its limitations as you can imagine (for instance if during that "kept workin" you deleted something else) but still can save you from having to redo stuff.
Creating a Slum from scratch in 5 minutes thanks to this plugin and a bit of smart thinking Català - Castellano - Deutsch
The people of ARTmine just got in touch with me to share their SketchUp plugin ARTmineSKP. I think it is pretty cool so thought I'd share it here despite not posting much about SketchUp lately. What this plugin does is that it makes available a database of artworks and allows you to add them directly to your model. This way you can decorate your interior design projects with some original artwork. See the video below that explains how it works.
You can visualize your DWG files also on your mobile device now Català - Castellano - Deutsch
I wrote back in 2011 about the official launch of AutoCAD WS (what had been called on Autodesk Labs Project Butterfly). At that time I actually had no smartphone and the Ipad and similar tablets where not as common as they are right now. So when I talked about the use I was giving to it and the potential I saw, I have to admit I didn't foresee that the main use could be to view files on site with your mobile devices. ANd I think this is actually one of it main uses today.
I was asked today at a lunch party by a friend who also works in the AEC Industry: How can I see AutoCAD files on my IPad when I go on site? The answer was simple, download the AutoCAD WS app for iPad, create an account, go to the AutoCAD WS web page from a computer where you have those files and upload them to your account on the cloud, then simply access the app on your iPad and you will be able to see those files. Simple it doesn't get in life.Here the links to the apps, choose the one that fits your device:
This is actually the best use I see for this app, but don't forget another one that I also talked about back in 2011. It can actually work as a free AutoCAD version converter. See the image below
If you get a file and you are not updating your AutoCAD software regularly you can use AutoCAD WS to upload the file to the cloud and then download it saved in any version from R.14 to the latest one. So this is another great use of this tool I guess.
As far as I know, so far only iOS and Android have apps, something to consider if you have to buy phones for your field staff.
Any other great uses you guys know about and that you wish to share? Please Comment!!
A living list of the latest BIM standards available online. A list that will be updated regulary
