Rob Snyder for Bentley hero?

Do we have heroes in the Bentley world?

The inventor of Accudraw C1994 - Rob Brown - was one, without doubt, apparently with much input from MS-teacher hero Keith Little - but all that happened a bit before I entered.

Robert Aish seemed the next star, but somehow 18yrs on his GC is still an unimplimented potential, which maybe Adesk will do more with, since Robert jumped ship. In 2008 Volker Mueller's brief to develop on-the-fly or what-if assessment tools (similar to IES's building energy tools maybe) seemed to me to be an ideal 'generative' use of a GC extended to script non-graphical attributes as well as physical elements. But Bentley seems to have dropped that ball too. Acquisition of Hevacomp is NOT it!

Now, I'd draw attention to Rob Snyder, if everyone doesn't already know; see Rob Snyder's Blog, and http://dagsljus.wordpress.com, and just look at http://youtu.be/kQPxPF-lf5I! This is hot stuff, which if implimented would put Bentley way ahead and answer many of the present grumbles about the multiple fussy, undocumented, geek's-delight, unintegrated bolt-ons that has lately made MS into a fragmented, overweight dinosaur, while competitors race ahead in the useability stakes, for example

Unknown said:
You mean like Revit? Revit DBLink? Revit Ideate BIMLink? etc etc

Mstn has tags, fields, Feature Solids / DDD's variable table, GC, AecoSIM has its DGS, F+P, PCS,PFB.... and they all don't talk to each other. To echo Emil, Bentley needs to round up all those little coders working in isolation and get them working on ONE 'parametric' platform for this stuff. They will probably need to knock up something like Revit's user-parameter-centred change management system... so that when something is changed somewhere... it gets 'revised instantly' elsewhere else. The change management system tests and marshals the updates centrally, and does not rely on each coder to 'manually' dictate the steps from their little module's perspective, which is the same as pre-ordaining that none of them will 'talk' to any other module or tool.

Revit even has a Dynamic Update scheme that organises how third party tools propagate their changes amongs themselves and the host platform.

Back to http://youtu.be/kQPxPF-lf5I, about 14mins in, fantastically wonderful dynamic clipping, such as SpaceClaim and others already have.

Rob writes dense but clear stuff that crystalises what I've been longingly groping towards, or somehow hoped grandaddy MS/AECOsim would already have, when I re-bought-in a year ago.

Bentley pioneers amazing research vision but in the end delivers so little, too late.

  • FWIW, native 64bit would be the first hurdle to clear before making the type of changes you're referring to.  There's no sense in developing 32bit features that will only have to be replaced by 64bit versions in the near future.  Cart before the horse, and all that.     ;-)

    Also, Parametric Content Modeler is the first step towards that single parametric 3D modeling tool.  It's obiously too soon to know exactly how it will pan out, but AFAIK that's the direction we're heading towards.  

    Lastly..   Rob's blog articles are great!   I may work at Bentley, but I still get a lot out of what Rob has been posting.  



  • Geez! I just finished reading the U.S. Patent description by Autodesk for a “change management” system that was cited by Dominic. What an unholy bunch of tripe! In three-thousand words (or whatever) it didn’t do anything to contribute to the definition of parametric building design that wasn’t already documented. I cite Eastman’s (et.al.) paper: Specifying parametric building object behavior (BOB) for a building information modeling system. The only contribution is that the Autodesk Patent is much more garbled. I’m surprised they received a patent for such common every-day ideas about parametric modeling. It offered absolutely no unique or distinguishing ideas to the field. Looks like a document that can be used to slam anyone who produces a parametric modeler with an Apple-style law suit. While I applaud Autodesk for their parametric engine, this Patent is a bit of a farce.

  • Tom,

    " it didn’t do anything to contribute to the definition of parametric building design that wasn’t already documented"

    I don't think that they would have suceeded in getting a patent, if the concept wasn't novel in some way.

    I don't don't think BOB and BIM were around or had much mindshare when Irwin Jungreis et al conceived Revit. They came from a MCAD Pro/E background, apparently.

    What I find interesting about Revit's 'contextual change engine' is that it provides a centralised change management system. The patent describes a convoluted way of marshalling, forward-chaining propagations in advance of commiting those changes that is interesting.

    Why is this interesting? Its very computationally expensive... so why do it? Revits founders must have seen something that compelled them to provide such a system. It reminds me of all these dynamic typing, reflection, managed code, garbage collection, compiler as a service stuff that the software platforms guys provide.

    If eveyrthing can be linked to everything else and the user or third party developers are allowed to define their own dependencies... then at some point you need an overarching 'traffic cop' to manage the way things propagate... so that everything can 'revise instantly'.

    I wonder if the new PCM will have to do the same thing at some point.