For those of us who operate in the built environment industry, our ability to catalyse change and to drive innovation is vital to our roles as future makers. As problem solvers, tool developers, technology wizards and tinkerers, it can feel natural to jump straight into solutions.

But what if we don’t quite know for what reason we should be developing a solution? It can be difficult to pluck from thin air innovations and new ways of doing things. Divine inspiration is often not the optimum route to a great idea or product. Instead, new ideas are often best identified through more general exploration of the broader domain that they occupy. At Remap, we’ve run numerous hackathons and foresight workshops with our clients, with the aim of teasing out such ideas. Understanding challenges in our industry, working through what might be creating them and then investigating emerging technologies for a response can result in great solutions

Critique culture

In early 2024, Ben Porter and I (Jack Stewart) co-founded Remap off the back of 10-plus years leading digital design at Hawkins\ Brown. As architects at Hawkins\Brown, we would design through a process of inquisition, participating in design charettes and the deeply ingrained critique culture of the profession.

Here, we tested techniques for rapid design exploration and evaluation. Collaborative design charettes are where a team of designers, community members and other stakeholders work together to develop a vision or design for a project. Critiques, meanwhile, provide feedback on how well design meets both user needs and client objectives. Generally, this approach focuses on the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of design.

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But Ben and I were often curious about the processes that we undertake to design, as well as the technologies that we use to do it. Sometimes, it would feel as though there was a disconnect between designers and the tools that we use to do our work. In other words, it felt as if we, and our colleagues, were sometimes shackled by the design tools that we were using and at the mercy of those companies that build and sell them.

As we started to become more proficient in software development, we became aware of how good the tech industry is at testing, procuring and building new tools. At the most extreme end of the scale, open source culture in tech sees enthusiasts contributing to the improvement of software and platforms almost as a hobby. And for focused efforts, they typically run the equivalent of design charrettes and critiques, for ideas, process and functionality, in the form of hackathons.

As British architect Cedric Price said, ‘If technology is the answer, then what is the question?’ In a hackathon environment, we can discover what problems we need to solve and then rapidly prototype solutions.

Hackathons and heroes

This piqued our interest and, during the 2022 London Festival of Architecture, we hosted a hackathon alongside Here East, Hawkins\Brown, and Wikihouse, bringing together a range of creative minds to explore new ideas for the Wikihouse system. The challenge was simple: ‘Build X, using Wikihouse, for the purpose of Y.’

In this scenario, X is the tool. It might be a digital tool, a physical tool, a building component, strategy or system. Wikihouse, meanwhile, is the framework – the modular system that this tool will work alongside and facilitate. And Y is the purpose or goal.

One team, with the purpose of ‘reducing waste’, developed a tool to turn plywood offcuts into furniture. Another, targeting ‘structural improvement’, proposed a new beam solution for spans wider than were previously possible. Finally, a team addressing ‘cost certainty’ built a handy API for instant costing of an itemised Wikihouse.

It was a super-successful event, with several ideas finding their way into the future Wikihouse development pipeline.

In 2023, while the seeds of Remap were being sown, we listened to a podcast by the Y Combinator, called ‘How to start a start-up’.

In the podcast, Wufoo founder Kevin Hale introduced his ‘King for a Day’ initiative, born out of frustration that so many great hackathon ideas never make it to production.

Often during hackathons, users are working hard on ideas about which, in reality, they are only semi-passionate. In King for a Day, one staff member is randomly chosen, and, for one day only, an idea about which they are truly enthusiastic takes centre stage.

We brought this to Hawkins\Brown in 2023, launching our first ‘Hero for a Day’. This was a callout for practice-wide suggestions to improve practice, design or delivery. Over 50 ideas poured in. From these ideas, ‘heroes’ were chosen and a practice-wide Digital Design Network was assembled to tackle the winning challenges.

In this process, we start by understanding the hero’s idea and then break the problem down into simple, testable steps using pseudocode. We focus on practical solutions, prioritising functionality over appearance, and on what we can realistically accomplish in a single, energised day.

Later in 2023, as part of an automation-focused callout, we requested pain points that could benefit from technology to either improve quality of output or make processes more efficient.

One hero suspected that modelling ceiling setting-out tiles could be automated.

During the session, the team developed a Grasshopper script to automatically generate layouts responding to the ceiling perimeter and structural penetrations. This could then be developed as a Revit add-in leveraged by Rhino.Inside.Revit.

The second hero, frustrated with the conversion of design documents from A3 to 16:9, led a team to develop an automated conversion process. During the session, the team documented how this process worked auto-manually, using InDesign buttons, then daisy-chained the functions together using Javascript.

The third hero, in response to ARB and RIBA requirements to document CPD activities, developed an app to list, calendarise and track activities and attendance. This team’s app allowed users to easily download attendance records and access linked recordings and presentations.

We noticed that most pain points submitted were typically associated with automation, often broad in nature and had a practice-wide impact. To spark more project-specific innovation, we launched a design-focused Hero for a Day in 2024.

One highlight was the Arch-revival project, a computationally designed stone pavilion for Clerkenwell Design Week. Project leads teamed up with the Digital Design Network to create a design engine that automated brick arch layouts and enabled rapid exploration of variations in form and pattern.

Using Grasshopper, the team adjusted parameters such as brick size, mortar joints and arch shape, while attractor controls generated unique clustering effects. Integrating Rhino.Inside.Revit streamlined the workflow, enabling design changes to instantly update elevations and schedules, eliminating tedious redraws.

The result? A more complex, visually stunning pavilion that remained practical to build thanks to digital design tools. The final structure was a stand-out pavilion at CDW, and a testament to the power of computational design in real-world fabrication.

Hacking the future

These successes have given us great momentum. We have since run a forecasting workshop at BILT and hackathons at architecture firms Donald Insall Associates and Scott Brownrigg, with further events organised for later in 2025. These organisations are enthused about how techniques such as hackathons can help firms tap into the creativity and intelligence of their employees and use technology to build their own solutions to problems.

We are firm believers that to have ultimate design agency we need to be able to create & edit our own tools. That is really important to create great buildings.

Let’s embrace this challenge with the creativity, courage, and conviction it demands. After all, the future is not something that happens to us; it’s something we create. Let’s build it.

The post Hero for a day appeared first on AEC Magazine.

The AEC industry has a reputation for being slow to adopt technology. Some reports even place it behind farming. The reality is, while construction has lagged, design has been on an inexorable path to total digitisation since the 1980s.

3D modelling, the adoption of BIM and innovation in digital fabrication is ultimately going to lead to modern methods of manufacturing buildings.

This is not just a technology play; it’s borne out of necessity. The construction industry lacks skilled labour, many economies desperately need new housing, historic poor productivity needs to be addressed. Furthermore, everything from the design, material choice, and location to the fabrication of buildings needs to reflect the carbon climate challenges that will only become more prescient.

Today’s BIM tools add width to the chasm that separates design from fabrication, as they were created to deliver scaled drawing sets, not detailed 3D models for fabrication

To connect the digital thread, this industry needs new tools, new workflows, new fabrication methodologies. In short, and to coin an overused phrase, we need to rethink construction.

However, it’s not just construction that needs rethinking – it’s everything from what we design, through to how it’s fabricated, and how it’s assembled. We need to rethink AEC.

Buildings should be designed in the full context of how they will be fabricated, broken down into assemblies and a ‘Kit of Parts’. Today’s BIM tools add width to the chasm that separates design from fabrication, as they were created to deliver scaled drawing sets, not detailed 3D models for fabrication.

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When one tries to add that level of detail, the models swell in size and become unusable. Autodesk has arguably done the most to try and connect BIM and manufacturing CAD, but this has taken years and many attempts to get right.

The current solution boils down to proxy swapping of predefined components between BIM software Autodesk Revit and mechanical CAD (MCAD) software Autodesk Inventor, which lends itself to working with a ‘Kit of Parts’ mentality. This solution, while innovative, is a partial ‘band aid on a bullet wound’, trying to overcome the integration limitations of two products that were never intended to work together.

Those who follow the offsite construction market, will know that it has become a bloodbath in the US and UK. Many fabs have shut down. It’s all too easy to find examples of how not to do it, rather than ones that are making it work. But this time of failure will pass, and lessons will be learnt.

The convergence of design and manufacturing in AEC is going to be an ongoing experiment and it’s going to need some projects that require scale to prove out. This is happening, but it’s not necessarily joined up. The future is everywhere, it’s just not evenly distributed.

At AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD and NXT DEV last month we brought together some industry change makers, who presented the projects and processes that they are refining to connect architecture to construction and deliver digital design to fabrication. Dale Sinclair from WSP, Antoine Morizot from Bouygues Construction and John Cerone from SHoP Architects were three that stood out, taking us from London to Paris to New York.

WSP – London

Dale Sinclair first started experimenting with design at 1:1 construction detail level while at AECOM. At the time AECOM was working closely with offsite fabrication firms and Sinclair wanted to ‘talk the same language’ as the fabricators. He eschewed Revit for architectural design on modular projects, and instead adopted Inventor to take an assembly approach.

Now at WSP, Sinclair has continued his research into the convergence of construction and manufacturing, developing new processes and looking at the whole workflow from the construction end of the telescope, bringing ‘systems thinking’ to design.

At NXT BLD, he pointed out, “Construction in its current form, cannot continue, because we have all tried but we haven’t moved the dial. We haven’t reduced the cost. We haven’t reduced the time to deliver buildings. The quality is variable, and productivity is static.

“How do we change? We keep putting things together that have never been put together before. The number of new systems are increasing, adding complexity.

“We should be using offsite manufacturing. There is no downside to using factories. We have better safety, bring in more diverse people and get the benefits of scale. We should be leveraging the benefits the manufacturing sector has had for years. But the one thing we have not cracked with offsite is cost and this prevents us from scaling up offsite.”

Sinclair explained that adopting a ‘Kit of Parts’ approach in design is phase one. The next step is to mobilise offsite, by taking a small number of large components to site (panelisation not modular).

This can then be followed by adopting a broader ‘program mentality’, using fabrication-level details at the start of a project, pushing manufacturing information upstream and adopting configurators. “We have flipped the entire process on its head, so we are coming from a manufacturing first [approach] and it’s a game changer,” he said.

Sinclair believes off-site has to be explored at a country level. He thinks that offsite fabrication spaces should be distributed throughout the UK, in all the places there is unemployment, and hopes the UK Government wakes up to the benefits of doing something like this. I suspect we will have to wait to see it work somewhere else first.

Watch Sinclair’s NXT BLD talk here

Bouygues Construction – Paris

From the other side of the channel, construction giant Bouygues Construction has been on its own digital journey. It has similar challenges, but instead of focusing on the original architectural design, it concentrates on how to connect its clients’ design information to the Bouygues fabrication and cost estimating system.

The decision to digitise and automate has led to a multi-year consultancy engagement with Dassault Systèmes – creator of the leading MCAD brands Catia and Solidworks – to create an expert system for Bouygues called ‘Bryck’.

Bouygues’ strategic vision is to head towards metamorphosing building sites to a place where products are assembled – unlike the current process, which requires the onsite transformation of materials. Antoine Morizot of Bouygues explained, “The products could have been prefabricated or assembled in micro factories near the site, but the idea is not to standardise the products, it’s to standardise the processes.”

The concept that Bouygues is adopting is not dissimilar to the ones which Dassault Systèmes has proven many times in the manufacturing space for aerospace and automotive. Here customers build a virtual digital mock-up or in common CAD parlance, a digital twin, which contains all the details of what is to be manufactured, to simulate the method of construction, the construction site and the as-built.

Morizot stated that BIM has failed to give the result the industry was expecting. By modelling in 3D, there was an expectation that, like in MCAD, this data could be connected to fabrication systems. BIM data conveys the idea, but not from an engineering or construction point of view. To achieve this, Bouygues has built a ‘productised’ system which covers all these bases, using Catia and customisation to produce a predictable, systemic view of project data.

RVT or IFC models are brought in and converted to productised Catia components such as groundwork, structure, covering, partitioning, finishes, MEP, equipment and prefab modules.

This template-based system also offers a library of parametric templates, which pre-define multi-disciplinary parametric modules for central cores, CLT floors, façade design, electrical components, MEP etc, which can adapt to any complex geometry, or imported IFC or Revit files. These ‘products’ adapt to the architectural model, through the use of generative design, adding tags, attributes, dimensions, 3D annotations, surface treatments, manufacturers’ catalogue part numbers, integrating a lot of data making calculations, and even defining the installation order.

Morizot demonstrated that by simply clicking on the raw geometry of a floor in a model, Bouygues can apply a product, in this case a CLT floor, and a complete, highly detailed CLT floor is created, adapting to the new model, ready panelised to fit the capabilities of Bouygues’ in-house fabrication machines. These can then be edited in multiple ways, such as orientation and installation order.

This was a rare outing for Bouygues to explain the level of detail it has achieved with its construction expert system. It means the firm can be given an IFC or a Revit model and in minutes get a fabrication level digital twin, with the exact cost and all the fabrication drawings. Bryck has impressed the company’s board so much that another long-term deal has been signed with Dassault Systèmes, with more capabilities to come.

Watch Morizot’s NXT BLD talk here

SHoP Architects – New York

New York-based SHoP Architects is a relative latecomer to the NXT BLD roster, but principal John Cerone has been a long-time advocate of embracing digital fabrication and going beyond the limitation of delivering drawings.

Cerone is certainly in the architectural camp of wanting to get rid of drawings and move to a pure modelling paradigm and the practice is doing its utmost to define its own process to connect architecture with modern methods of construction. He defines his firm as ‘Production Architects’ as they focus on materials, process and how the buildings they design are made.

Cerone is on board with offsite manufacturing and the concept of a ‘Kit of Parts’, sub-assemblies and how these Cover story work in the design as a whole. SHoP is not a fan of the plan, section and elevation approach to define its schemes but places itself in the Ikea approach to communication.

Cerone stated, “Architecture, with a capital A, can be designed and manufactured. To do that, you need to understand the processes, who/what is reading the instructions and how the materials are being processed. When you do that, the deliverables are not the flat orthogonal drawings, we can be much more diagrammatic.

“We operate in this industry with the mentality that there’s an opportunity to leapfrog and take advantage of advanced manufacturing techniques in our projects. If you come to our office in downtown Manhattan, in the Woolworth Building, the first thing you’ll notice will be model planes, boats, cars – they are everywhere.

“And for us, one of the principles behind that, is how you can design simulate, coordinate, execute a complex project in a digital format. To do that, you have to get outside of the traditional tools of the AEC industry.”

SHoP Architects is a big fan of Rhino and Catia and builds a lot of its own tools for geometry solvers which are used at scale. The firm has cut its teeth working on projects with complex geometry that were built off site. This involved talking with manufacturers at the concept stage to start optimising for fabrication.

Information, such as optimal steel sheet size helps reduce waste, lower cost, and act as design constraints early on in the process. This means the final design does not need reengineering once all the work is done. SHoP then makes reuseable templates for the assemblies it creates.

From this, SHoP has got heavily into the fabrication side of things, sometimes bypassing the drawing phase and even just delivering the model and the G-code, whilst keeping track of job tickets through factories. On site the firm uses laser scanning to ensure the assemblies are to specification and communicates installation through screen shots of the model.

With all this experience in offsite and manufacturing, SHoP Architects creates a ‘cousin’ company called Assembly OSM to deliver modules for high-rise residential buildings (12 to 30 floors), all based on templates for building systems, including mechanical.

Watch Cerone’s NXT BLD talk here

Conclusion

There are no off-the-shelf solutions to link digital architecture to digital fabrication. Every firm that has made progress connecting the two worlds has done it through belief, investment, experimentation and sheer bloody-mindedness. However, it doesn’t mean that this situation won’t change as lessons learnt by these pioneers will eventually find their way back into features in standard software. The use of Inventor and Catia for defining architectural design is currently niche but there is a chance that next generation BIM tools will have the underlying technologies required to span the design to fabricate chasm.

Defocussing from technology solutions for a moment, it’s clear from Sinclair, Cerone and Bell – all architects – that to wholly embrace the process, the industry needs to start thinking about the design of buildings differently.

If designs are to flow from concept to construction, the ‘Kit of Parts’ approach appears to have the longest legs, mimicking automotive and aerospace. But this still puts a lot of work upfront to design flexible parts with construction-level detailing. As Sinclair points out, less project think and more of a program mentality, spanning projects. Bell has done this with the Facit Homes’ adaptable chassis (see below), where every house is a variation on a tried and tested theme.

Facit Homes – bringing the factory to the construction site

Bruce Bell has a long connection with AEC Magazine and NXT BLD. His UK company Facit Homes uses vanilla Revit with its own family of parts, which are optimised to create highly defined BIM models. Through a secret sauce, they are flattened and G-code is created to fabricate on-site via a router in a shipping container.

In a way, Bell has developed his own expert system that is designed for houses out of mainly one material, that is cut up on site and nailed together to make box sections. Every building created for individual clients is a variation on a long-tested system.

With a deep central resource database of the common products used in fitting out, Facit can predict the cost of its buildings within 1%. As the company also manufactures and assembles the building, that reduces risk and means the company’s fee spans design, construction and delivery. What is incredible is that this all done with off-the-shelf software.

Recently Bell has raised his aim and is looking to develop a giant robot which can cut and stack enough panels to build out entire estates. His talk at NXT BLD highlights the journey he has been on and the solution that he will be bringing to market, which features an onsite micro-factory.

Watch Bell’s NXT BLD presentation here

The post Connecting architecture to fabrication appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Rhino 8, the latest release of the flexible Mac / Windows CAD tool from McNeel, is now available. The new version introduces new modelling tools, a speed boost for Mac, PushPull workflows, SubD Creases and better drafting tools. There’s also a more customizable UI, a faster render engine, new Grasshopper data types, and more.

Rhino 8 includes several new modelling tools that can help architects create simple rectilinear models for conceptual design. This includes PushPull, which appears to work a bit like SketchUp by allowing users to grab a face and push or pull it, extruding or extending, Auto CPlanes, which is designed to make it easier to draw on the face of an object, and Gumball, a new direct modelling tool.

Gumball allows users to quickly move, rotate, scale, copy, cut, and extrude geometry without typing commands or clicking a toolbar button. McNeel says Gumball can be used for concept modelling interior and exterior architectural forms.

Rhino 8 has also introduced a number of clipping and sectioning enhancements to help support various drafting and fabrication workflows.

ShrinkWrap creates a watertight mesh around open or closed meshes, NURBS geometry, SubD, and point clouds. According to the developers, it is ideal for creating meshes for 3D printing, but has many other use cases.

For more complex forms, SubD Creases allows the user to create a feature between a smooth and a sharp edge, without adding complexity to the SubD control net.

The Cycles Render engine has also been updated for faster, GPU-accelerated raytracing on Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs using AMD HIP.

Rhino 8 for Mac, which runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, features a new dis-play pipeline powered by Metal that is said to delivers a 3D performance boost that’s as much as 24 times faster than Rhino 7. The user-interface on Mac is also now closer to its Windows sibling.

Finally, Grasshopper, the visual programming language and environment has been enhanced with new Rhino Data Types. According to McNeel, this allows users to bake geometry with custom attributes, import more file formats, control blocks, use native materials in the display pipe-line, create hatches and annotations, and many other expanded workflows.

There are many other new features. See New in Rhino 8 for a complete list.

The post Rhino 8 boosts architectural modelling appeared first on AEC Magazine.

The Apple iPad has been on a journey. It started life back in 2010 as a giant iPhone that didn’t make calls (unless they were via VoIP), but went on to finally cement a tablet market that had previously failed to attract many customers.

Today, with desktop-class Apple silicon, the iPad continues to provide portability, along with long battery life and pretty decent pen input.

We have already seen some great AEC application developments for the iPad, but historically, these have been mainly for the consumption of AEC data – via Autodesk BIM 360, Graphisoft BIMx and so on — rather than the creation of designs. If you go back to around 2010, you’ll find that iRhino 3D also started life as a navigator/viewer.

A lot has changed since then. Today’s reality is that the iPad is now powerful enough to run design-based desktop applications. One only has to look at Shapr3D, the excellent Spaces by Cerulean Labs (read our review) and SketchUp for iPad (read our review)  to see how the iPad has become a viable laptop replacement for creatives.

The question is, will iRhino 3D remain a handy portable viewing and mark-up tool, or play a wider, more creative role in conceptual design?

This fact has not escaped McNeel Associates CEO Bob McNeel or the company’s lead on business development, Scott Davidson. In response, iRhino 3D has been relaunched with the full Rhino tech stack underneath and offering big possibilities. It requires the latest operating system, iOS 16. And, as it runs on an iPad, it obviously also runs on an iPhone, but you would have to be pretty desperate to do anything on such a small screen. For now, the 12.9-inch iPad would be ideal and there are rumours of an even bigger device in the works, with the possibility of a 16-inch model at some point in the future.

Rhino has not been ‘ported’ from the desktop. Instead, it was completely rewritten from the ground up and performs exactly like other versions, but with an interface that makes the most of a touch environment.

New horizons

Before readers get too excited, it’s important to stress that the initial version is intended for model viewing and mark-up only. But we have been assured by McNeel executives that, under the hood, the entire functionality of desktop Rhino is there already. Over time, that functionality will be exposed as the company finds out how users want to use the system and what new additions make sense in product development terms.

Apart from the power of the processor, Apple has with each generation of chip included more and more direct memory cache and expanded the addressable memory per application. This allows bigger programmes to run, working with bigger data sets. In other words, with each generation, the iPad is becoming increasingly usable for professional modelling use.

One of the original ‘melon twisters’ of the original iPad was its complete lack of a file system, or rather, its lack of exposing a file system to the user. This has been addressed over time, but even for long-time users, finding where the device stores files can sometimes be an absolute mystery. The safest option is to link the iPad to a cloud storage service. iRhino 3D supports iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and other cloud storage providers. There’s a built-in file browser, too.

When models are loaded, they can be displayed in shaded, wireframe, rendered, ghost and X-Ray display modes. This is for all object types, breps, curves, meshes, point cloud, text and annotations. You can pan, zoom and orbit by dragging your fingers on the screen, providing instant and accurate control of the viewing position. The software supports any previously set up layouts (page views) and objects can be selected and queried for information.

There’s a built-in mark-up tool that works with the pen, which allows drawn highlights, text mark-ups, and some dimensioning. The software also supports an augmented reality (AR) mode.

Community feedback

In common with most McNeel products, iRhino is a work in progress and with the active user community, the company really listens to feature requests on its forums. Moreover, developers actually reply back to posts.

While it may not initially seem that iRhino 3D has made dramatic steps forward, the company has had to go back to the drawing board in order to support Apple silicon and the new Metal graphics. While that work was being done, adding in the Rhino engine for later exposure and usage made sense.

Now, the question is, will iRhino 3D remain a handy portable viewing and mark-up tool, or play a wider, more creative role in conceptual design? That, of course, will be down to users. I wonder how far away we are from Grasshopper running on an iPad?

The post iRhino 3D – Rhino on the iPad appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Autodesk has long been trying to improve data flow between its disparate applications. To specifically help improve the flow of data between Revit and Inventor (Autodesk’s 3D CAD tool for product design and mechanical engineering), Autodesk developed a plug in for the Forge Data Exchange Connector component.

This made it easier for Revit users to share specific subsets of data with Inventor and combine architecture model with fabrication elements that will appear in the building. It meant all users could work on the latest data and there was less hassle when creating specific files.

Autodesk then expanded the Data Exchange Connector to include Microsoft Power Automate, a popular tool for building automated business processes that can be used to share data between hundreds of apps.

In essence, collaborators can share subsets of design data with a wide number of applications like Excel, generate insightful PowerBI dashboards, as well as get notifications with Microsoft Teams, Slack etc.

The connector comes with some pre-defined workflow template examples for the Power Automate platform, helping those who are project managers, VDC managers, or BIM managers. Autodesk is now adding another connector to the exchange ecosystem, to include the highly popular McNeel Rhino.

Rhino Exchange Connector

With its generative Grasshopper capability, Rhino is one of the leading conceptual design tools in AEC, used for anything from simple massing models to complex façades. The new connector allows users to move geometry and property data from Rhino to Revit – or from Revit to Rhino. This keeps project designers on the same page and aware of the latest changes to levels, grids, floors and (curtain) walls.

Autodesk claims that without its Rhino Exchange Connector, sharing data for consumption by other applications can result in lossy or incomplete translation, requiring time intensive workarounds or third-party plug-ins to capture the full extent of the information being shared. Autodesk says this new Connector offers a step forward for interoperability and collaborative work, and better syncs Rhino and Revit workflows for more seamless design development.

To use, install the Rhino Connector into Rhino, select the geometry that needs to be shared, and create a Data Exchange. The Data Exchange is published to ‘Autodesk Docs’, the cloud-based common data environment, where data can be stored and accessed from Revit or any other application with an available Autodesk Data Exchange Connector.

The workflow can be seen in the video below.

Rhino.Inside

Autodesk’s latest development follows on from McNeel’s own application connector, ‘Rhino.Inside’, which is a range of plug-ins that embeds Rhino into other 64-bit Windows applications. ‘Rhino.Inside.Revit’ specifically allows an unprecedented level of integration between Rhino and Revit, enabling Rhino to run in the same memory space as Revit. This means that whatever Revit creates, Rhino can read, and whatever Rhino creates, Revit can read, communicating through their APIs.

Rhino.Inside.Revit also makes it easier to apply Grasshopper scripts to Revit geometry and read the recipes for each and every object.

Scott Davidson at McNeel explains how Rhino.Inside.Revit contrasts to the transactional nature of Autodesk’s Data Exchange Connector, “Rhino.Inside.Revit is quite a bit different in that it is a live integration of Rhino and Revit as someone is working on their desktop.

“You could look at this as a way to share and store other types of files within your Revit construction project. Rhino files alongside other formats that need to be used in a large project. In addition to the geometry there is also parameters that are stored/exchanged with the Rhino files.”

Rhino.Inside.Revit is free to use but you will need a full license of Rhino on your machine.

Proving Ground Conveyor

Proving Ground, a US software development and consulting company, has developed Conveyor, a plug-in that allows users to import Rhino objects into Revit as native elements.

The software integrates / extends ‘Rhino.Inside.Revit’ by adding a user-interface, which is Rhino-based (not Grasshopper-based, as Rhino.Inside.Revit comes).

The workflow demonstrated in Autodesk’s video for Rhino Connector Public Beta appears to strikingly similar to the workflow of Conveyor.

Proving Ground Conveyor costs $695. Proving Ground also develops Tracer, which can be used to connect BIM tools to Microsoft PowerBI.

Conclusion

The whole Data Exchange Connector concept seems to reflect what advanced customers have been doing for quite a while through applications such as McNeel’s Rhino.Inside, Speckle (https://speckle.systems) and Proving Ground’s Conveyor.

While Autodesk is seemingly trying to build one connector to rule all connections, it’s not completely clear what the cost will be to use it. Autodesk may use its own token-based system for each transaction. At the moment, however, it’s in beta and free.

There is also a question as to how deeply Autodesk would choose to integrate these tools to provide comparative rich feature sets and continue to maintain them, vs dedicated teams of developers with specific commercial products such as Proving Ground and McNeel.

To join the public beta sign up here

The post Autodesk links Revit to Rhino with new connector appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Chaos has added new real-time viz workflows to V-Ray 5 for Rhino and V-Ray 5 for SketchUp, with ‘dozens of improvements’ to V-Ray Vision and a new Live Link to Chaos Vantage.

Launched earlier this year, V-Ray Vision offers a real-time view of a Rhino or SketchUp model that updates while you work. It is designed to serve everything that comes before a final render.

The latest update expands on its core feature set, bringing more options into its ‘always-on’ viewport.

New features for V-Ray 5.2 include: shareable 3D scenes where users can package their V-Ray Vision scenes for others to experience in real-time 3D on their own machine; video recording, where users can record their real-time experiences directly to video to share walkthroughs and presentations; support for sun animations, grass and photometric IES light profiles; and ‘highly efficient instancing’ where scenes using multitudes of instances, such as forests, grass fields, packed parking lots and more, can now continue to operate at real-time speeds.

If designers need higher fidelity, Chaos says they can turn to Chaos Vantage, which can be now directly accessed through a new Live Link.

According to the company, with Vantage, even the most complex scenes can be explored in fully ray-traced real time with no extra setup. Vantage is currently free for all users.

“Whether it’s real-time ray tracing with Chaos Vantage or game-quality graphics with V-Ray Vision, this new update makes it easier to apply real time to any stage of the design process,” said Konstantin Gaytandzhiev, V-Ray for Rhino and SketchUp product manager at Chaos.

“And the best part is whatever tool you choose, the same lights, materials and scene setups will apply down the line, so designers never lose momentum.”

V-Ray 5 for Rhino and V-Ray 5 for SketchUp also include several updates designed to simplify tasks that would otherwise take users hours.

These include: a new scattering tool that is designed to build believable terrains and detailed scenes by adding hundreds to millions of objects and Chaos Cosmos models to any surface in an ‘intuitive and memory-efficient’ way; new V-Ray Decals that make it easier to project unique materials onto objects of any shape without any extra mapping work; and 200 new ‘render ready’ Chaos Cosmos materials.

There have also been some V-Ray Material improvementsspecifically to make transparent and translucent materials more realistic, as well as Light Gen improvements, which allow users to add their own HDRIs to the hundreds of HDR environments included in the Light Gen library.

Several of these features are also available for Grasshopper in Rhino.

The post Real-time boost for V-Ray 5 for Rhino and SketchUp appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Australia based architect and software developer, Parametric Monkey has launched MetricMonkey.io, an application to help design better buildings from the feasibility stage. The company says it intends to build the world’s most advanced feasibility tool to specifically empower architects.

The company explained, “As architects ourselves, we know that this is the key to fulfilling our mission. We know some bad actors in the industry are only interested in maximising returns for developers. Chasing a quick buck in the name of cramming more apartments into a cookie-cutter building is not what we are about. We want to leave the world in a better place than we found it, not worse.”

Parametric Monkey’s research indicated that 25% of organisations provide feasibility studies for free. This figure increased to 48% when only existing clients were considered. This dynamic means that there is minimal incentive to improve the design outcome, resulting in under-baked designs. Parametric Monkey says that 36% of organisations don’t run any environmental analyses whatsoever during the feasibility stage leading to mediocrity.

MetricMonkey.io came out in beta last year and from the feedback customers said it removed the heavy lifting, complexity, and guesswork from feasibility studies. A video demo can be seen below.

Parametric Monkey explains, “We’ve seen first-hand the pitfalls that professionals repeatedly fall victim to. We’ve seen how development applications have gone to court because they used the wrong north. We’ve seen buildings built in the wrong location because someone accidentally moved the context model. And we’ve seen clients upset when the final yield doesn’t match the initial feasibility study because the model and schedules were never in sync.”

The company has integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) features such as Grid Projection so that projects are always correctly geo-referenced. Integrated Grid Convergence functionality is also in the product to ensure that environmental analyses are accurate. Eliminating the root cause of errors will save its customers time and money.

MetricMonkey.io features

MetricMonkey.io is built on top of McNeel Grasshopper and the developer has created its own UI and components. This means it will easily integrate with existing Grasshopper workflows.

Automated building massing is generated from the building footprint and just entering height or storeys,  MetricMonkey.io does the rest. There’s also 3D creation tools to hand craft your massing. MetricMonkey.io will reference the geometry and include it for its calculations and analyses.

City model data can be added via a single-click context import based on project location from a pre-loaded database. If the city data isn’t in the database it can be imported separately.

Grid projection positions of datasets are set automatically and Grid Convergence means all of environmental analyses are using True North, not Grid North, for improved accuracy.

MetricMonkey.io can stream data into Autodesk Revit automatically via Rhino Inside. Through this seamless link, it will create native Revit elements, including topography, mass families, levels, floors and materials. The software will geo-reference the model by adjusting the Project Base Point and Survey Point.

Parametric Monkey has included a Knowledgebase to accelerate the learning curve, by explaining complicated concepts.

The post Advanced feasibility tool MetricMonkey.io launches appeared first on AEC Magazine.

For readers of AEC Magazine, Enscape probably needs little introduction. We’ve been big fans of the real-time rendering and VR software since the 1.8 release when we tested it out for this ‘Revit to VR’ feature.

Back then, the software was incredibly easy to use, and that’s what made it so appealing. With very little effort you could go from Revit to Enscape and explore the nicely rendered model on a desktop display and inside VR.

The Enscape application was essentially a real-time window into your BIM model. Everything was driven from within Revit. Simply push a button on the Revit plug-in and seconds later the model appeared in Enscape. Most impressively, it maintained a live link, so any edits made in Revit, be that moving objects or changing materials, automatically updated in Enscape moments later.

At a time when other real-time viz applications were still grappling with file-based transfer, this was truly ground-breaking. Design visualisation really had become part of the design process.

In the years that followed the product grew massively in terms of capability. It added support for ArchiCAD, Rhino, SketchUp and Vectorworks. And, as the visual quality increased dramatically, including support for Nvidia RTX real time ray tracing, a much stronger emphasis was placed on deliverables. This included videos, high quality stills, 360 panoramas and standalones (rendered .EXE file or web).

However, as more functionality was layered onto the software, the workflow became somewhat fragmented. As most of the functions continued to be driven through Revit, users had to continually swap between applications.

The good news is, with Enscape 3.0 released this week, everything has changed. In a significant re-write of the software, the new version offers users a more fluid and intuitive design experience by reducing the reliance on the plug-in and pushing more functionality into the application itself.

The new UI for Enscape 3.0

The first thing you’ll notice about Enscape 3.0 is the brand new user interface. Only critical controls, such as the asset library, have remained inside the CAD/BIM plug-in. Everything else has moved to the standalone Enscape application.

Even so, the new interface is incredibly clean. A single toolbar at the top of the window can be toggled on and off. It includes a dozen or so icons for things like visual settings, view management, collaboration, and BIM information – and for generating viz assets such as videos, screenshots and deliverables.

To guide new and old users alike, a context sensitive help window gives tips on every selected command. Most of the controls have keyboard shortcuts, handily highlighted by tool tips.

Visual settings / view management

The Visual Settings dialogue, which controls the look and feel of the scene, is now found inside Enscape itself. It’s also had an overhaul, specifically in terms of how presets are managed.

Through a single dialogue box, users have control over render style, render quality, camera projection, field of view, depth of field and various Photoshop-style adjustments. There are also effects such as motion blur, vignette and bloom, as well as atmosphere for fog, illumination and wind (which controls the animation of grass and trees).

Once you’ve had a good play around with the settings and are happy with the results, you can save it as a preset.

In previous releases, presets had to be loaded in individually. Now they can be picked from a list inside Enscape, so you can quickly cycle through the options and see them instantly applied to the scene.

View management has also been improved. Previously, this was done inside the CAD/BIM application, so the workflow was fragmented. Now it’s handled directly inside Enscape. Views can be modified in Enscape, regardless of where they were originally created (CAD/BIM or Enscape).

More impressively, individual 3D views can now be easily linked to custom Visual Settings presets. This could be particularly useful for client presentations, making it easy to switch between views and render styles at the click of a button.

With batch rendering you can then render all of the views you have set up. Clicking the new ‘safe frame’ button shows you the exact frame that’s going to be rendered according to pre-defined settings for resolution / aspect ratio. Previously, you’d have had to do a quick test render to check it was framing the shot correctly.

Video editing in Enscape 3.0

For Enscape 3.0, the video editor UI has been revamped and it’s now easier to add keyframes at the beginning or end of a path, or anywhere in between.

For each keyframe, you can punch in values for focal point, field of view or time of day, so you can create some nice video animations or time lapses with transitions from day to night.

It’s also now possible to view these keyed in values on the timeline itself, rather than just on the camera path, which gives a much better overall view of the video during production.

Once you’re happy with the results, simply hit export, choose resolution, and frames per seconds, all from within the same video editor. Previously these settings had to be defined in advance in a separate dialogue box.

Materials and 3D assets in Enscape 3.0

For data consistency, all materials and 3D assets continue to be applied within the BIM authoring tool. In Revit, for example, you use the Revit Material Editor to define the appearance of surfaces. To increase realism you can work with custom textures, bump maps and displacement maps, as well as video textures.

Enscape also comes with a large collection of 3D assets including furniture, lighting, vegetation, people and vehicles, all of which can be accessed via the plug-in.

Assets are created in house by Enscape, some of which are adapted from Evermotion assets, but optimised for real-time rendering. In Enscape 3.0 there are several new assets for specific regions and cultures. You can also create custom assets from OBJ or FBX files – either download from a library like TurboSquid or model yourself.

In Revit, Revit families can be linked to an Enscape asset. So, in your plan view for example, when you’re printing or scheduling, the Revit family will show up, but it’ll still display as a high quality asset in Enscape.

BIM workflows

When we first looked at Enscape, you could only bring across geometry and materials from Revit – not BIM information. This changed last year, when users of both Revit and ArchiCAD could finally take advantage of the “I” in BIM.

Enscape 3.0 doesn’t add any new BIM functionality per se, but it’s worth spending a little time here to explain what it can do, as the software starts to blur the boundaries between real time visualisation and design review.

Since Enscape 2.7 objects can be selected in Enscape and their associated BIM information displayed, such as dimensions, manufacturer details, or prices. This is great for team meetings and client presentations, as object data can be viewed immediately without having to reference back to the BIM authoring tool.

Enscape 2.8 built on this, adding basic issue management capabilities. To create an issue simply right click in the Enscape window. This places an Issue Marker, to which you can add comments and a thumbnail for a quick visual reference.

Issues automatically become part of the design application project file and can also be exported as a BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) file. However, to really beef up the capabilities for team collaboration, Enscape also offers an integration with the cloud-based issue tracking platform BIM Track.

Once synced to BIM Track, issues can be managed, added to RFIs, assigned to specific users and tracked for full accountability.

Users can access all the issue data through BIM Track’s web viewer as well as Revit, Navisworks, Tekla Structures, AutoCAD, or Solibri.

Conclusion

For a product that’s taken six years to go from version 1 to version 3, Enscape 3.0 doesn’t deliver the headline grabbing features that one might have expected. But Enscape, as a company, isn’t like most software developers.

Since the release of Enscape 2.0 in 2017, there have been a series of point releases, delivering hugely significant updates. In that time we’ve seen the introduction of BIM information and BIM collaboration, as well as huge advancements in visual quality and realism, including support for Nvidia RTX real time ray tracing.

But what Enscape 3.0 brings to the table shouldn’t be underestimated. By moving many of the commands into the Enscape environment and reducing the reliance on the CAD/BIM plug-ins, Enscape has delivered a much more user friendly and efficient tool. Having to continually move between applications broke the workflow and the feeling of immersion within the scene.

However, the Enscape community is known to be very demanding. And while some might initially feel underwhelmed by the new release, once the new workflow benefits have been experienced, we expect a positive reception. We’re already looking forward to version 3.1.

AEC Magazine interview with Enscape’s CEO

Meanwhile, to find out what the future might hold read this AEC interview with Enscape CEO Christian Lang

The post Enscape 3.0 review appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Rhino occupies a very special place in most AEC firms’ armouries. Despite the success of the multi-purpose 3D CAD tool, its developer, Robert McNeel and Associates, doesn’t operate like an American corporation. In fact, it is the very antithesis of how most CAD software firms function.

McNeel is employee owned, privately held, and these things combined are probably the reasons why the company is so loved by its customers. Of course, it’s also low cost and an absolute monster when it comes to defining complex geometry.

At the heart of the development ethos is the concept that Rhino is a generic modelling tool, neither skewed towards manufacturing nor architecture, and equally applicable to both. While new features may provide core functionality, such as mould design, it’s not essentially a full or dedicated feature set, and other developers or customers are welcome to develop on top.

Rhino is just as at home in sneaker development, jewellery design, auto body, CAM, as it is in ZHD or Foster + Partners – the only rule being that the geometry it defines can be manufactured.

As the AEC market moves towards digital workflows, and digital fabrication starts to become more common, Rhino’s importance is becoming even more apparent.

In addition, there is Grasshopper, which sits inside Rhino and has become the single most used generative design platform, driving everything from simple Python scripts to defining the surfaces of the most complicated curved buildings being manufactured today.

However, defining geometry isn’t Rhino’s only superpower. With broad support for industry formats and the unique ‘Rhino.Inside’ development platform, the power of Grasshopper and Rhino geometry can actually be used as a glue to link BIM systems and drive geometry creation in popular BIM modellers that lack the generative ‘chops’ or are notoriously unfriendly in OpenBIM environments.

Rhino Inside has been in development for some time and Rhino 7 sees the official release of Rhino.Inside.Revit, which brings Rhino and Grasshopper into the Autodesk Revit environment.

Rhino.Inside also works with ArchiCAD, Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, BricsCAD BIM, ACCA Edificious and many others. It’s a potential invisible wire harness for all data between BIM and / or viz systems.

Rhino 7 includes a host of other new features and is arguably the biggest release in the product’s history. These include SubD (SubDivision) surfaces, which look to be great for exploring organic, manufacturable shapes in architecture, a new display pipeline, enhanced drawing creation, better rendering and easier access to Grasshopper scripts. More details can be found in the box out at the end of this article.

With such an epic release, AEC Magazine caught up with company CEO Bob McNeel and Scott Davidson (business development) to dig a little deeper into the feature set of Rhino 7, together with some exploration as to how Rhino is developing into a collaboration and data sharing tool within the broader AEC space.

AEC Magazine: We’re finding that architects are getting increasingly frustrated with BIM tools because they want to get back to designing, as opposed to getting bogged down in detail documentation. They want design fluidity through applications from various providers. Rhino.Inside is already making a mark here.

Scott Davidson: If you look at the philosophical BIM process, what we’re seeing is very much a move toward wanting the freedom to design and not to worry so much about the details of Level 300. I know it’s important at some point in the project, but it’s not important now.

And we’re also seeing where part of the model might be at a LoD 300 already, but a different part might still be an LoD 200 because not the whole project gets done at once. The only reason this became clear to us is because of Rhino.Inside.Revit. We are starting to see how people are using the two applications. Customers want to be able to use Rhino longer in the process, get more analysis, more data, more freedom to design, and then they want to get it over to Revit quicker.

Now, what’s also interesting is I’m finding many times, they want to take parts of the building out of Revit and they want to put it back into LoD 200.

It’s beautiful. People can now literally, with Grasshopper, wire that system up and as the project moves forward, they can wire the relationships – those relationships are dynamic.

A stupid, but good example would be that the floors are pretty set, you’re in design development, but you’re still kind of messing with facade. In this case, we’re feeding floors into Revit. And they’re real floors, they’re super hard coded. The floors may live in Revit and we can pull those floors into Rhino dynamically.

If we are just doing the façade in Rhino – here’s my maximum span and my material – I can embed that in the Rhino model and have that automatically fill into the Revit model. When I’m ready I can have it fill in. As I’m messing with the façade in Rhino, the Revit model is updating, and the drawings are getting done.

Bob McNeel: Yeah, once we move into the same memory space, we share the two SDKs (Rhino and Revit). It’s possible to write lines of code in Python, where one call is using a Rhino geometry function and the next call is writing something to the Revit SDK library. We’re deeper core with Rhino.Inside than Dynamo is.

It’s almost too hard to get your head around what’s possible. I mean, we’ve even gone as far as writing a widget in Grasshopper that runs a Dynamo cluster.

SD: Yes, you can actually drive a Dynamo definition as a component in Grasshopper. A whole Dynamo one dimension is a single component Grasshopper. But its integration is crazy. I mean, the workflows that are possible are just nuts.

You do have to understand both. That’s part of the problem. There are only a few people that understand Rhino, Grasshopper and Revit to the extent in Revit API where this is possible.

BM: Of course, we’ve had this in the field for a while, but what we’re basically finding is those internal teams are the ones actually using this. What they’re doing is they’re actually just rolling out new tools to their user community of Revit users. And these Revit users may know nothing about what’s happening underneath. A user may think they’re working in Rhino and another one may think they’re working in Revit. But they’re actually working in this combined product.

Another thing that may not be obvious is that basically all plug-ins to Rhino and Grasshopper now run in Revit. And every Rhino plug-in, including CAM products and our development partners’ applications, they can all run in Revit.

SD: Also, the 49 file formats that Rhino reads and writes…. now Revit reads and writes those file formats too. It’s the biggest new version of Revit they’ve ever had!

AEC: We are amazed by how many features you’ve crammed into this new release. It’s like three releases in one! What were you thinking about when you decided on this feature list? Is it just a case of a whole load of things that didn’t make the previous release overlapping?

BM: It was a timing thing. Part of it was that we needed to get the SubD stuff up to par. A lot of that was core work that had to be done by very small group of people just because of the type of work it is. And so basically, it allowed other people to work on all the other stuff, which just needed to be hooked up. It wasn’t inventing stuff from scratch, like the SubD project was, which was really going on for about three years.

This is core geometry. What that means is that you touch every Import/Export function, display pipeline, the picking engine, plus, then you’ve got to do all the core geometry work. And, the SubD stuff is a classic problem.

The classic SubD implementation is basically just a mesh or refined mesh at various levels. For the Rhino community, where everything’s got to be at manufacturable precision, we had to develop the core technology to have the limit surface be a spline surface, not a mesh. That was the first bit of work, doing the robust math for that. While there are many (research) papers on how to do it, it turned out most of them had a lot of errors and actually didn’t work. I mean, they were just proof of concept.

But then the other piece of it, once you got that calculation to work reliably, was that it had to be fast as we needed to build a system that allowed push / pull on a SubD object. That was actually a spline surface that would change and update as quickly as a mesh-based version.

AEC: So how much better is this than T splines?

BM: Well, it’s better and it’s different in a couple ways. There’s no patents involved, so that means that we can publish this, we can let people play with it, we can expose it in SDKs [Sofware Development Kits], we can put it in open source projects that we support.

In terms of data structures and stuff, our SubD is actually compatible with Pixar’s open SubD. So, if you use the same control net from our SubD, and hand off to another open SubD project, they’ll get the same limit surface with their calculations.

Now, the other system’s output may be a mesh, but for downstream applications like rendering, STL printing and, of course, animation and all of that stuff in the movie industry, they are identical, so there isn’t a loss going that way.

But on the same hand, it can go the other way as a spline surface, so you can export it as a STEP file or whatever, and it’ll come in as ordinary B-rep.

AEC: But then you can also turn it back into a SubD on demand?

BM: You can in certain cases. It depends on what somebody does with it later. If you take a trimmed B-rep, something with round holes, a typical mechanical part, there’s not an obvious way to always go back. SD: Every SubD has a NURBS equivalent, but not every NURBS model has a SubD equivalent, because they’re two different geometry types. But going back the other way, you know, that’s where QuadRemesher comes in. We can QuadRemesh and go back to SubD. Now it’s a different SubD, but it’s close to the NURBS.

While you can take a mesh and QuadRemesh it and go to SubD, and therefore go to NURBS, there is a limit to how damaged the mesh can be. We don’t have all the tools to do mesh repair in all cases.

BM: We’re not dealing with crap scans. I mean, that’s a whole another ballpark.

SD: If you have a mesh, and the mesh is somewhat well defined, we can get it to SubD, therefore we can get it to NURBS. That makes sense. The whole idea that you can repair a mesh is not exactly how we would put it. It would be more like, ‘we can take a mesh and get it to a SubD using the QuadRemesh technology’.

And QuadRemesh is really the glue that allows us to go from mesh to SubD to NURBS. And in fact, many times from NURBS back to SubDs, if you need to do that.

AEC: Rhino 7 was the first time the Windows and Mac versions were released on the same day. What’s changed?

SD: I think part of getting a shorter timeline between multi-platform releases is that we’ve gotten to the point where we’re not writing the Windows version, and then releasing it, then turning around and having to essentially write the Mac version again.

BM: Yeah, we build from the same source code now. And a lot of that work went on with Rhino 6.

AEC: What about Apple’s new M1 processor? Will you be supporting that in Rhino 7?

BM: There’s two parts to it. There’s support for Apple’s Rosetta 2, which is actually pretty impressive, in that they actually convert Intel code into native M1 code. The problem with it, of course, is it’s new, and they don’t have all the edge-cases covered.

Another part of this, for us, are things like we use OpenGL on both platforms and Apple has basically abandoned that now, for their own ‘Metal’. So, for us to really support that, we need to re-engineer our Mac display pipeline for Metal, which is something we’ve had on the burner for a while. But that’s a big project; it’s not trivial. So that’s one piece of it.

Then the other one for us, is to build our own native version, which means we can do a better job of fine tuning the code. The problem is, like a lot of software, we’re reliant on a lot of people, for example, all of the .NET support. We use that on both platforms and that means we have to wait for Microsoft to release their whole ecosystem. And who knows how quick that’s gonna show up? And when it shows up it’s not going to be 100% on the first day.

I’m guessing we’re a year out on a full-blown Metal build of our own. Hopefully, we’ll have a Rosetta compatible version in the next six months, but we still have some things we’re not sure about, but we’re working on it!

As we have been working through it, we run into things, and we talk to Apple about it and it’s nice to work with Apple, because they’re actually great. I mean, first of all, they’re big Rhino users, so that helps! And then the other one is they actually understand supporting people going through this, they’ve done it before, they’ve got the infrastructure and they put smart people on it. They don’t put bullshit barriers in the way. While sometimes they’re a lot slower than you hope, it’s fine.

I can see why they did it but, timing wise, it was kind of a pain in the butt for us because we got our first pre-release boxes just as we were starting to wrap up Rhino 7. So these machines basically sat on the shelf. We’ve only got a couple of people that have had time to look at it.

Everybody is excited about it right now, of course, because, you know, Apple’s curated hype, but the pain for us are people buying M1 boxes right now and expecting Rhino to work.

AEC: You’re not even approving it for use with the Rosetta emulation, you’re saying it is not supported?

BM: We’re just telling people it’s not supported. I mean, we’re hopeful that we can have something more exacting to tell people in the next few weeks, so sometime in January [Ed this interview was done in December 2020], we’ll be able to actually say what the limitations are and what issues we are having to deal with. We may have to do what we did with the early Mac versions, which is say, ‘hey, this is Rhino but these features are missing’.

AEC: You’ve added some additional 2D drafting features to Rhino 7? I thought you were leaving 2D to other applications?

BM: My view is we need to let people stay in Rhino as long as long as they can. It’s not that we feel like we need to replace something else that people are using. If people already have a solution out there, I mean, as long as AutoCAD or AutoCAD clones are out there, I don’t think we need to do drafting.

Some of those things are cheap, some of them are basically free, and they are great drafting tools. That said, of course, you know it’s a time consuming bump in the process for customers.

The one place that we can get away with doing drafting, I think, is what I would call shop drawings – put enough stuff on a piece of paper so you can hand it to the guy in the shop, and maybe he understands what you’re talking about, even if you’re also sending him the G code. He’s still got a picture he can look at, as maybe he’s not able to look at the 3D model. You’ve got to give the people those tools. Consequently, we’re continually moving the bar up with each version.

One of the things which is not really a drafting tool, but sort of fits in that category of toolsets, is single stroke fonts. Yeah, these are used everywhere, all the laser guys don’t want to burn the hell out of things, and welding robots that do bead welding. There are all kinds of applications downstream that aren’t really 2D drafting tools, but they’re 2D, right?

We’re always kind of bumping into those corner cases and we try to remove them because somebody’s exporting this stuff out of Rhino, they’re putting it into some kind of illustration or drafting programme, and then they’re trying to figure out how to get it off to a machine, or out to the shop.

AEC: For Rhino, is injection moulded parts and toolmaking an important market?

BM: Yeah, that’s another use case. The essential geometry calculation to figure out where those mould lines go, so parts will come out. It’s a heavy-duty math problem and to hand that off to some other product, especially when the shape is freeform, is not something that that, you know, anybody but a bunch of math geeks can figure out.

We’ve actually had the math in there to do that for a while and finally one of our guys pointed out that they keep having to help people figure out how to use this stuff. We’ve just wrapped it up within a user-friendly interface.

We’ve got customers in shoe companies and toy companies building these little plastic parts. And they have hundreds of people just working on the mould. The shoe folks tell me that for every designer they have in Germany or Portland, Oregon, they’ve got somewhere between 60 and 600 people developing the moulds!

Just think about shoes for a minute. Shoes are the worst for a number of reasons. The fact that you’ve got to do the left and the right shoe and then you’ve got to do all the different sizes. And what most people don’t realise is shoes don’t scale. You can’t go from a size six to a size nine. They aren’t even on a linear scale and even.

And then another layer of complexity on top of that, is these things are made from multiple materials. What people don’t realise is that some of the materials expand when they come out of the mould while some of them contract.

AEC: Laser scanning is now much more in focus and you’re enhancing point cloud support. But you’re targeting large point clouds, which I’m guessing is for architects?

BM: That’s another area where we just tweaked things a little bit. Luckily for us, there’s also still some third parties out there that are working in that area. I just saw some new stuff from EPFL (The Rhino plugin Cockroach). They had a big research project going on and they just released a whole suite of tools in a Rhino plug-in to deal with this kind of stuff. The great part about the universities – they get a ton of money from the EU, research funding, and then they release most of it to the public. So, somebody can build products on top of Rhino, or use pieces of it. I would avoid promising anybody anything in that area.

AEC: How about rendering tools?

BM: That whole area is such a rat’s nest of stuff. We’ve always had a rich environment for plug-in rendering in Rhino. The first thing with Rhino 7 was to replace the rendering tools that we had in Rhino and replace the core rendering technology with Cycles, which is what’s in blender. And that just opens up a whole bunch of capability.

One of our guys is on the core team for Cycles in the blender project, so he’s going back and forth between what he’s implementing for us plus, making sure its compatible with a bunch of stuff, particularly on the material side, which is looking pretty good.

SD: This is good to talk about because it’s a pretty sophisticated advancement and not just as to what we have in Rhino. We have Cycles and Cycles is modern and supports a bunch of modern technologies like denoisers, right? Everybody has come out with denoisers lately – Nvidia, AMD and Intel all have their own denoisers, and we support all three. It takes renderings from 20 minutes down to two! Kind of crazy numbers.

Then you’ve got the materials. One of the things that people have asked for, for decades, is can I have compatible materials across multiple rendering tools? PBR (physically based rendering) done by Disney and Pixar and whoever else, is a step in that direction. We support PBR materials.

Now, PBR is really great, because you can do a lot of sophisticated maps and we can take the bitmaps and textures from another product and use those in ours. But, there’s some kind of unspoken advantages here such as Adobe Substance Designer outputs PBR materials.

So now you can use Substance and read Substance materials into Rhino and use them in your renders. You can also use Substance as a kind of a 3D painter. But if you want to talk about AR and VR, and virtual worlds, and all those things, if you look at Unity, or Unreal, or Nvidia’s Omniverse – they use PBR materials too!

Now, we’re pushing out to those, and have ongoing work to be compatible with Enscape, TwinMotion (which is free for Rhino users) and all of those type of tools. Rhino 7 is very much a play into all of this but it’s also a lot of the foundation work that’s going to play into AR/VR virtual worlds. We want to play, and we want to play well with all these tools. We want to be able to store their information and to be able to write their information out. Enscape is a great example; it’s very important and very popular.

AEC: So what is the AMD ProRender play for you then?

SD: ProRender is there. It’s AMD’s play into using their GPUs and we can support all that stuff. It’s one of our strategies and you’ll see this throughout Rhino 7, is that we are really trying to be compatible with the SubD engines, PBR materials, the way we can get in and out of other products. We are trying to be a better player on the world stage of CAD information. The possibilities are crazy, whether you’re a movie artist, a jeweller, or an architect, all have different platforms to work with.

As renderings change from the static image to the virtual, AR, and then at some point totally immersed, different universe (you know, aka the Unreal, Omniverse etc.), we’re working with all those partners to try to push forward and let people play.

Rhino 7 – technology highlights

SubD surfaces SubDivision surfaces are nothing new to the world of CAD, but the Rhino implementation, new for Rhino 7, is incredible, dynamic and totally interactive. This is great for exploring organic shapes quickly and removes the faceted nature of complex geometry meshes. McNeel’s SubD surfaces (pictured above) can be converted directly to manufacturable solids, derived from scans or meshes, as well as translated into NURBS.

Rhino – QuadRemesh

Following on from SubDs, Rhino now has a very powerful command called QuadRemesh, which can generate quad meshes from pretty much any group of surfaces, solids, meshes, or SubD surfaces.

Display pipeline

GPU development is the one constant in the computer world that continues to drive acceleration of 3D software. Rhino’s OpenGL display pipeline has evolved to make use of the latest GPUs, shaders and graphics memory. The 3D display is now even more silky smooth and handles larger models, shaded working views, unlimited viewports, draw order support, clipping and full screen. Both Windows and Mac versions of Rhino 7 are significantly faster. McNeel claims up to 10x performance improvement in wireframe and shaded modes.

Documentation

Rhino is predominantly a 3D modelling package but McNeel occasionally enhances the drawing capabilities as the company recognises that there is still a need to provide drawings for fabrication. Rhino 7 has a Layouts panel, which simplifies many of the tasks associated with layout management, which was perhaps not as easy to use before. Gradient and transparent hatches have been added to enhance 2D drawing layouts and can be accessed from the horizontal tab below the viewports.

Rhino – Grasshopper

A new GrasshopperPlayer command lets the authors of scripts distribute their Grasshopper files to run directly from the Rhino command prompt. The concept here builds on the idea that many firms have tool makers for projects and design teams, and this is easy way to include non-Grasshopper users in computational design.

Clash is a Grasshopper component that can search through any selected objects to find objects that touch each other. One wonders whether, that if this was combined with Rhino.Inside.Revit, it would be a quick way of clash detecting without ever really leaving Revit.

Rendering

Rhino has always had a range of options when it comes to rendering, either out of the box, or through the broad developer community. With this release, McNeel has sought to take the latest technologies for collaborative working with photorealistic modelling. Rhino 7 natively supports PBR (Physically Based Rendering) photorealistic materials, with emerging standards being backed by Pixar and Adobe, they are becoming the standard for material libraries, content authoring and scanning applications.

Similarly, McNeel has added support for the latest swathe of denoisers in Rhino 7, improving the quality of images and rapidly decreasing render times.

The post The Rhino 7 interview: SubD + Rhino.Inside.Revit appeared first on AEC Magazine.

In the first of its kind, the Millennial Architecture and Design (MAD) Collective is hosting a free, weekend long, online MADCon Virtual Convention aimed at the Architectural student community.

With 24 sessions over 3 days, the aim is to provide advice, resources and presentations from a global range of creators.

Talk topics are diverse, from in depth CAD help to talks on education and life within a practice. CAD-wise, the weapon of choice seems to be Rhino, with a number of hints and tips sessions looking at integration between Rhino and Revit and 3D massing in Rhino.

For those of you interested in Rhino, AEC Magazine’s interview with Bob McNeel and Scott Davidson on the superb new release is well worth a read.

From the prospectus we found: Holistic design thinking, How Architectural education is changing, Alternative careers in architecture, YouTube tutorials, Building LinkedIn profiles, Creating a personal brand, RIBA Future Architects and plenty of sessions providing advice on navigating the profession. The speaker list and biographies for the three-day event can be found here.

All the sessions of MADCon Virtual Convention will be archived after being broadcast live. There are also Zoom hangouts for networking and mixing between sessions.

The MADCon Virtual Convention is co-curated by members of the MAD Collective, Sana Tabassum (:scale archi-community) and Gabriel Chek (archlogbook). Those looking to take part in the community event can see the full agenda and sign up for free here.

The post MADCon Virtual Convention for Architecture Students appeared first on AEC Magazine.