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Rob Snyder for Bentley hero?

fostertom — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:58:41 GMT

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[quote user="dominic SEAH"]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.[/quote]

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.

Message from Rob Snyder

Rob Snyder — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 20:54:33 GMT

"Observation space is going straight up. Sense-making is not keeping up." (I read somewhere)

Message from Rob Snyder

Rob Snyder — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 20:05:06 GMT

...

blogging for multiple audiences

Rob Snyder — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 03:17:34 GMT

Earlier this year I started blogging also at another blog site. A smaller audience than here on Bentley Communities, but just another channel, and so far there have been readers from 64 countries.

Thank you for reading my posts!

Here is the other blog: http://dagsljus.wordpress.com/

Intelligible Information Environments

Rob Snyder — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 03:48:22 GMT

This youtube recording http://youtu.be/kQPxPF-lf5I is a presentation of recent research work from Bentley’s Applied Research Group.

This is the essence of drawing (a fact forgotten, simply because of our familiarity with it)

Rob Snyder — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:43:02 GMT

new blog post:

This is the essence of drawing (a fact forgotten, simply because of our familiarity with it)

DIRECTIVE ENVIRONMENTS (POINT CLOUD)

Rob Snyder — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:39:45 GMT

a new blog post

DIRECTIVE ENVIRONMENTS (POINT CLOUD)

Goodbye LOD, Hello (again) location-specificity

Rob Snyder — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:34:14 GMT

Please see my new blog post: Goodbye LOD, Hello (again) location-specificity

Dagsljus (Daylight)

Rob Snyder — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:49:44 GMT

I have a second blog (in addition to this one), just another way of communicating with others about topics of interest: http://dagsljus.wordpress.com/

relationship of drawings to models

Rob Snyder — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:02:38 GMT

Industry needs to begin to consider the general condition of the relationship of drawings to models..

The general condition is:

A model is an environment

A “drawing” draws one’s attention toward a location of accountable reliability, within an environment.

These two simple statements make very clear that, conceptually, drawings and models are inseparable from each other; one does not productively exist without the other. However in our common experience with drawings and models, they are separated from each other. This is worth consideration.

Drawings, as they have been known (for centuries), draw attention toward things within a proposed real environment (within the world as environment) while of course omitting that environment. Drawings omit the environment, and this omission is first among the techniques of drawing. Omission of the environment permits a narrowing down of attention and its focus. The result of the omission (of the environment) is a drawing in the abstract. What remains after omission of the environment is an author, a viewer, and a focused attention.

What then of the environment? What of the model as environment? Any of us familiar with the hours, weeks, and months invested in the creation of models understand very well the limitations of the idea that a model is to serve as a representation of the totality of an environment. First, the effort required for a modeling of totality is exhausting and seems, despite some partial exceptions, never quite reached. Those of us who have spent many years of a career in pursuit of reaching it know the limits of this thinking better than those who have not attempted it and have not encountered the practical limits, repeatedly.

However, let’s not let practical limits inhibit our thinking. Brushing aside practical limits, imagine that some soon available automation will make it possible to model total representations of an environment. What then? Will we then have arrived at the point we had been seeking? Where have we been trying to go? It is worth thinking about this in comparison to the conventional communication device of drawing. When drawing arrives at its destination what is found is an author, a viewer, and a focusing of attention.

These (author, viewer, and focus of attention) are tenacious to an extent that they are not going to fade away as the capacity for a totality of environmental modeling increases. That is to say, quite directly, that the idea that industry is in the midst of a transition away from drawing and toward modeling is an idea that is untenable conceptually, and therefore (and even by common observation) of little use practically. This does not mean, of course, that meaningful progress is not coming our way. It simply means that by looking closely at the terms in use (drawing and modeling), we can learn to ask better questions, and by doing so arrive at a better place.

Rather than moving away from drawings, and toward models, where we are going is toward an environment within which an author may draw attention toward things. This opens up rich possibility for the idea of environment, and the idea of what it means to draw (attention toward, within an environment). We are only just beginning.

www.youtube.com/watch

Frontier

products

tangerine

Rob Snyder — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:03:04 GMT

Where I’m from, trees bear fruit. A tree is an environment (a combinant environment by the way). Within that kind of environment are nodes at which things are combined and transformed in ways that make them specifically useful and close at hand. Such an environment is considered to be productive. tangerine tree

Models, as we have known them, are environments, and not particularly productive ones. That is changing now. We understand the difference between a barren environment, and an environment that will yield the nodes at which things are combined and transformed in ways that make them specifically useful and close at hand for work.

Please see: http://bit.ly/UsliAP

A start of things

Rob Snyder — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 07:23:49 GMT

A drawing defines a location of reliability within an environment, but it leaves out the environment. So it is insufficient.

A model defines an environment, but omits designating locations of reliability. So it is insufficient.

Either of these on its own, is no longer sufficient. Communication must be elevated and made clearer. The two must be combined, just as sound and film were combined in the 1920s. Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, at the time in 1926 said it was a bad idea and would never be commercially viable. He was wrong.

In 2012, the combination is the start of much more to come.

A frontier in visual communication (recap and concept: define locations of reliability within environments)

Augmented reality for building construction (drawing-augmented models augment…the environment)

Subsurface excavation (a visual transformation)

These are a starting point for many things underway.

A new kind of documentation

Rob Snyder — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:27:02 GMT

The blog post hereincludes:

background discussion of visual media describing essential characteristics of drawings and models (as media)
an introduction of new forms of combinant environmental media that keep intact within them the provision for the authored directive visual statement
links to research developments extending the concept further

Any evaluation of modeling should now include an assessment of what modeling can do for the clarity of documentation. Abstraction is a significant problem. Construction firms often report that deciphering the meaning of abstract drawings represents a very large amount of time, and some even say it is their firm’s greatest challenge. Interpretation no longer need be as difficult:

A new kind of project documentation (please see the blog post above) did not exist before 2012, and is only available from Bentley. It makes it easier for you to create documentation that is clear and understandable. It makes it easier for you to see what you are doing, understand what you are designing, and control the scope and completion status of your drawings and models. Likewise it makes those drawings and models more useful for construction firms. Now they can more easily, correctly, and thoroughly interpret and understand your visual communications. It saves you time and money, and it saves them time and money.

Deliver drawings in models instead of either one alone. If you were in the movie making business you would want to author and deliver movies with sound and picture integrated and synchronized. Do the same now with drawings and models, and enrich both media.

Northwestern University Symposium on Technology for Design and Construction

Rob Snyder — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:27:26 GMT

I am happy to say that I am presenting on the following topic at the second annual Northwestern University Symposium on Technology for Design and Construction (August 15, 16, and 17, 2012) http://techforconstruction.com/

“Hypermodeling”

Sometimes (or often) in human experience, familiarity with a thing tends to conceal what a thing really is, and what it may become. For that reason there can be significant reward in trying to look at things in new ways. When we ask, “what is a drawing?”, and “what is a BIM model?”, we can ask this conceptually with the belief that a search for what something is can lead to an understanding of what it can become.

In the case of drawings and models, have we become so familiar with them that “what they are” is hidden from us in such a way that we have difficulty imagining what they can become? Drawings have been with us for millennia. And certainly we are well and truly familiar with models as well, even in their more recent form: BIM models. It is interesting, in fact, that one of the primary functions of BIM models is that they are used to automate the production of drawings. We know this, but we don’t often go further; we don’t ask what drawings and models are.

For drawings, a useful conceptual interrogation is to ask, “what is drawn?” Drawings indicate their author’s “drawing-of-our-attention-toward” locations in a project. What is drawn, is one’s attention, toward something. An author chooses locations, then draws our attention toward them with graphics (automated or not) together with the author’s embellishing graphics and commentaries. The sum of these activities (a drawing set):

fulfills the author’s contractual obligation for visual communication,
is recognized legally as such, and
has its conceptual basis in the “drawing-of-attention-toward”

This tells us something about BIM. While BIM automates the production of a set of drawings derived from a model, that model is no replacement for drawings, and cannot be, because models (BIMs) generally do not demonstrate the above-mentioned quality of “drawing-attention-toward”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xAfZEK7hrY&context=C3659722ADOEgsToPDskJtsThIZxjLPm_r7ZYWQpni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqLDk8gO1Yw&context=C3ee320bADOEgsToPDskLM3cDSEF5I798PyyloUG2I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYUHMT-gTR8&context=C35915f2ADOEgsToPDskJh-_ac9f0U0X7Mseu3rMVO

In his talk, Mr. Snyder will ask “What are drawings?” and “What are models?” and will attempt to clarify why the answer matters. He will then introduce the concept of Hypermodeling, Bentley’s solution to supply that “drawing-attention-toward” by augmentation, in-situ, in such a way that communicative effectiveness is elevated, along with its advantages over BIM. He will then show a few examples of its successful use (see youtube links above). Finally, he will talk about the future of hypermodeling, and make a parallel with some of Bentley’s latest research results related with hypermodel-augmented panoramas, continuing Bentley System’s efforts aimed at elevating the communicative capacity of media through a convergence: of evolving forms of environmental immersive media, and the conceptual basis of the medium of drawing itself, “drawing-attention-toward”.

We see next steps in the application of this concept including its continuation into other forms of environmental media.

One of our current research projects explores it this way: drawing-augmented models (hypermodels) become hypermodel-augmented panoramas (hypermodel-augmented reality). See this link: http://communities.bentley.com/other/old_site_member_blogs/bentley_employees/b/stephanecotes_blog/archive/2012/04/12/be-together-2012-sneak-peek-2-augmented-reality-and-hypermodeling.aspx