October Recap
The second user’s group meeting has come and gone and it was an evening filled with wonderful information.
It started off with a member of the Blue Beam team leading a demonstration (via WebEx) on what changes they have been making, and to see how they have streamlined the pdf to meet the needs of many different clients from Architects and Engineers to General Contractors. (This is not your dad’s pdf creator).
She first dove into how to navigate within the Revit Plug-in that installs right inside of Revit. She then began going through the settings exploring batch plotting, page setup, and all around pdf customization that could then be dispersed to a network for any machine connected, to be able to import those setting.
Blue Beam then went into the user interface and gave a pretty thorough breakdown of how you can customize the UI to look however you please. After showing some tools and quick tricks we were then taken and showed how mark-ups can quickly and easily be tracked and later appended to for archiving and possible RFI tracking.
Our last stop was with the Blue Beam Studio where multiple remote locations are able to open the same PDF and everyone is able to make comments and mark-ups on the same view and see them in real-time as a way to show and track changes as they arise. If you missed this month and would like to learn more please comment to this post or visit http://www.bluebeam.com for more info.
As if that wasn’t enough for our second User Group back, we also had a wonderful guess speaker that is out of Avatech’s Omaha office. Mr. Dan Chapek a member of Avatech’s Civil Design team was there to demonstrate just how easily an Architect or a design professional can collaborate with a civil design team.
First, Dan started off introducing himself and showed us just what kind of info. he will typically have from a gps survey. From there he created contours so that an architectural design professional might be able to understand the existing grade. This 3D model from Civil 3d will then be imported into Revit where we will place it at the height and location of where the design building is proposed to be. After aligning our survey point to a given point by the Engineer we can then publish coordinates. Now that our building is properly coordinated to real world coordinates he exported the building model out to and .ADSK file that Civil 3d can read. Once he imported this file into his Civil 3D file he was then able to see exactly where the building was located and could then do finished grading to complete the site. It was a very good demonstration of how Civil Engineers are getting their hands on Bim.
………….and if that wasn’t enough……
A few user group members in attendance asked a few questions about laser scanning, and wouldn’t you know it Dan just happens to be Avatech’s best expert at that. Typically, the meeting is over at 8:00 p.m. sharp but a whole new topic got brought up and Dan decided to dive in for anybody that was interested in staying.
He first showed us about 3 different projects that had gotten shot with the HD laser scanner and it was impressive. He then went through and showed how another program called Cyclone can take an object with a min. 300 points located on it and translate it to a structural shape (ie w, channel, angle, etc.) or a pipe. There was a lot of interest shown in this as many practical uses were brought up as well as prices and availability.
We hope to get Dan to come back and maybe even bring a scanner with him as we explore and get more info. on this emerging technology.
