BIM Objects and other resources

Danny - you hit it.

It would be great if there was a way for us all to share in a controlled envirnment to help develope good pieces.

Eric

Glad you can 'see it' ..... (would seem obvious from my desk ....)

For example, here in the UK, pretty much any kind of project of any significant size, then the internal partitions/drywalls will be from either

http://www.british-gypsum.com/

(part of ST Gobain, who also manufacture lots of glazing, ..... and other stuff)

or

http://www.knaufdrywall.co.uk/

They've got the vast (vast) majority of the market

For cladding there are (amongst others)

www.tatasteelconstruction.com/.../kalzip

(part of Tata Steel)

or

www.permasteelisagroup.com

These are names that come up again and again. Everybody in architecture knows of them

Bentley seem to do pretty OK with their 'catalogues' of steel sections/members and M & E equipment.

But are pretty thin when it comes to 'architectural' components and systems.

I'm still puzzled as to why Bentley are not dealing/negotiating with such companies

AECOSim dataset and GC ready components available for downloading anyone.

Also, these are big companies, they have resources well beyond most architectural practices.

Do they realise how long it actually takes to develop a 'production ready' dataset? A lot longer than most architectural practices have (even the big ones), ..... that's assuming they even have someone in their company who has the know how to do that at this point it time.

I just read somewhere (from a reliable source) that product manufacturers account for around 60% of construction industry turn-over (architectural practices probably account for about 1%, ...... but they have quite a large say in which of the 60% gets used!)

C'mon Bentley ........ 'and that makes tax dollars sense folks' (or something along those lines)

yea.... but I think rather than going after individual manufacturers, it would be a good to start by ensuring that all the objects available in the NBS www.nationalbimlibrary.com portal have dgn equivalents. Apperently, only 10% is in dgn format.

Problems with previous component libaries like Seek etc is that they don't have very consistent formating. IFC is supposed to cure this. Maybe Bentley should also take steps to use IFC as the benchmark and provide portal sites like the NBS wilth software or an automated service to convert IFC objects into kosher dgn objects.

The other big problem was that anything that was uploaded would eventually need to be updated by the manufacturers. All those changes to the geometry and -more prickly- the parameters that were embeded previously in your local model would need to be tracked and managed. Sounds like something ISM or Design History should be well placed to deal with.

Bentley has a plugin for Revit to convert to ISM. Maybe this should be used to provide a conversion service to automatically convert any Revit components uploaded to the portal site into dgn components. Maybe AecoSim should have a link to the NBS (or any other portal) that works like the current link to Google Warehouse that would run any Revit components thru some kind of Bentley-Plugin-in-the-Cloud service as it is downloaded and converted into a bxc with all the correct F+P and DGS info? Maybe there should also be a Sketchup Dynamic Components tool that converts them into PCS-type cells or even maybe GC-based components as well.

To function as a national portal or clearing house for BIM objects, the NBS will need some enterprise-level 'big BIM' firepower. Bentley with its big infrastructure info management expertise would be a good partner. It has all that eB, EXor, AssetWise etc experience.

It also has OpenPlant iRING experience with dealing with translating between schemas, semantic web stuff that IFC is also based on.

And Bentley also has this SpecWave thing. I think it will be quite a few years before we see architects write specs this way, but it sounds like just the thing for anyone that is interested in creating and maintaining a BIM component/spec library at national level. Maybe Leon G should call Stephen H and John G.

NBS Create already has plugins to integrate its spec-writing tools into Revit and ArchiCAD. AecoSim would do well to have one as well. BIM productivity is heavily dependent being able to leverage pre-packaged parametric content, and specification-oriented portals like the NBS would the natural place to search and filter by performance criteria (using IFC).

There is even an NBS API for annotation, but I guess easy to annotate based on items or DGS info... once the component is imported into AecoSim.

I would like the portal like Google warehouse you suggested.

Open any site - if it downloads a file - take it to a utility and drop it as a cell and ask what library to place it into.

THEN and this would be the COOL part.

Bently then keeps this cell (If you selected that option which I hope everyoen would)

It is SAVED.

All the uploads we as users can upload are uploaded.

Then one person at Bentley monitors this process and creates libraries of stuff.

Maybe they are just singular items also that we can grap from the Bently Cell Cafe'

And Maybe a tool that allows you to add them to the library as they are created  (2 steps - show you the cell and origin - give you the option to change and open another instance of MS to edit the model in the library you just created or selected.)

AND YOU KNOW we could do the same thing with parts, walls, all assemblies, etc. etc. etc.

hmmm... interesting image:

Bentley keeps an 'escrow account' of your upload .... in an ISM... on Select.

Select subscribers down load the cell from the ISM which tracks the transaction.

The most popular cells gets tracked and the author gets outrageous prize money :-)