Loren Cook Fan Company provides Revit Families of all of their fans use with Revit MEP 2009. I have a couple of questions regarding this.
1. How can I open these files Microstation or a Bentley Building Product?
2. If I can't open these files now, will I be able to in the future? Is this in Bentley's Plans?
3. My final question is for discussion. What is the best course of action for the community/Bentley to take? I know I keep harping on this issue, but the availability of Revit families from manufacturer's continues to increase and the availability of PAZ/BXC/CEL/DGN files continues to stay the same (from what I am seeing). I believe manufacturer data is incredibly important in the future of BIM/VDC. Are we as Bentley users responsible to continue to push our manufacturers into generating Bentley files? Is Bentley responsible to make conversions between Bentley and Revit "Just Work"? Is there a combination or middle ground?
There will come a time when using BIM tools as an "easier" way to extract 2D drawings will no longer be acceptable. There will be an expectation from Owners/Architects/Engineers/Facility Managers/General Contractors/Subcontractors to see the Rooftop Unit from the Manufacturer in their building. I hope we aren't headed towards a dead end...
Everyone,
I have been informed by Bentley there is an avenue to request manufacturer data. I was unaware of it prior to posting. If you go to http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Corporate/Bentley+Partner+Program/Content+Partners/Infrastructure+Partners.htm , there is a form which allows you to request Bentley contact manufacturers about producing content.
It is very good to see that Bentley is being proactive in this regard.
Thanks,
Jordan
Although I didn't check a lot of the available info on this site, it seems to only be PDF files??
John K.
JordanH: It is very good to see that Bentley is being proactive in this regard.
Jordan,
As John already mentioned, this is the Heavacomp PDF library containing marketing material you could get directly from any of the listed manufacturers or from several building information providers on the web. Many of these manufacturers provide DWG CAD-files which are not part of the Heavacomp library. (Why?, Why not also as DGN?)
The Heavacomp merits are that they have made a comprehensive collection of these materials. However the information is provided as it comes from the diverse manufacturers. However, there are information providers on the web which have harmonized and standardized such information, so that it is directly compareable and even more valuable.
Although it might have been a good move of Bentley to buy Heavacomp it is far away from showing anything "proactive" in providing product libraries to their customers.
What we need are 100% compatible object libraries for our daily work, which can easily be adjusted to comply with our company or client CAD-standards.
Regards
Gunnar
Roadblock ahead?
Ideally, BA, BBMS etc should be able to import Revit files / families as components so that Bentley users can 'ride the market'. Not sure if Bentley's recent agreement with AutoDesk gives Bentley access to Revits' libraries as well as DWG.
But, even if importing was possible, there needs to a way to retain the intelligence contained in the incoming objects. The object attributes / tag information can probably be translated realtively easily but what about the parametric behaviour? No point knowing that the pipe is 100mm in diameter if there is no link between this attribute and the CAD elements and other linked / dependent data. Changing the attribute should change the CAD element and vice versa, ie the CAD element should not imported as 'zombie / dead' data.
Bentley needs to come up with a computational design platform that supersets Revit's methods. Maybe like what they are starting to do with OpenPlant's use of ISO 15926.
As AD starts adding intelligence to DWG, such as Dynamic blocks (ACAD2006) and constraints modeling (2010) and other vertical app objects, it will be interesting to see if Benltey can develop its own 'design intelligence' model while accommodating (or in the worst case, reverse engineering) AutoDesk's model. This must be a huge overhead that will slow development down. Hopefully, we won't end up in a situation where AD starts to set the 'parametric' or 'design intel' agenda because Bentley and the other vendors are always too busy trying to reverse engineer their model for interoperability requirements.
Though I don't know anything about plant, and ISO 15926 - for me it seems that there is the big difference between plant and building.
Why don't we have an ISO-standard for parametric design in the building industry? As long as everyone tries to do things on its own, the building industry won't get any much further. That applies to everyone, regardless if the name of the company is Bentley, Autodesk, Nemetschek, Tekla or Graphisoft.
The IFC format may be a beginning, but it's far from enough.
Maybe Bentley could open source the PCS format?
I'll be anxious to observe Bentley's response when they finally see their opportunity and chime in on this issue. I expect that'll come soon now that the term IFC has been directly referenced.
At our firm we utilize not only BA but RevtArch but we've so far found the Revit plug-in to be somewhat cumbersome to "plug-in" to our workflow. The fact that it's a generation behind on the Revit side is a problem now that on the Revit production side we've been strongly encouraged by their v2010 conceptual massing tools to keep our deployment at the current version.
Andreas' comment about all the non-Autodesk companies trying to do their own thing rather than rallying around IFC and supercharging its development is such deja vu for me. I recall sitting in several conf rooms at an annual NCGA conference a long time ago (I don't recall the year). Microsoft had just released NT3.0 and Autodesk had just released v11, which digested together had the clear potential of opening the floodgates of PC networking and PC based multi-user CAD systems onto the AEC community. The firm I worked for at the time was way ahead of most of their competition in that we had been utilizing high-end (for the time) multi-user CAD systems (not Intergragh...one of the others) for quite a while already but that were written for VAX/VMS and Unix OS's. I recall very vividly observing a panel discussion between the various Unix vendors bickering (UnixInternational was, at that ime, even suing one or more of the others at the table at the time) over whose flavor of Unix should be crowned king and why all the others should just get abandon their respective derivatives. So we all know how that story evolved. IGES was pretty fresh at that time too and was fighting hard to gain the support of the various CAD vendors. Just like the non-Microsoft OS vendors the non-Autodesk CAD vendors couldn't overcome their egos long enough to support a neutral, industry standard CAD vector file format. So we all know how that story evolved too.
I'm encouraged, however, by the memory that the Bentley brothers at that very time recognized, as did I and countless others in the AEC community, what was looming and they obviously reacted to it very wisely. I've begun examining the IFC format myself and my personal opinion so far is that it might still be too complicated right now to be expected to be adopted by any but the most BIM literate product manufacturers. I understand that Volker Thein at Bentley has been on the cutting edge helping to mature the IFC file format but, holy cow, I think a lot of effort beyond that of one specific man's (and beyond one specific firm's of course) needs to happen and probably fairly soon. I might be way off base but I'm interpreting Autodesk's recent introduction of their ADSK file format as being a threat to the rest of the vendors that they intend to try to kill off IFC. I hope I'm not seeing history repeat itself but, wow, it sure looks like I might be.