The Goa BricsCAD-BIM Event: Some Key Takeaways
Benglauru, India
DesignSense Software Technologies, in association with Architect Dean D’Cruz promoted Design Center hosted an evening of BricsCAD-BIM & CADPower presentation at the Design Valley on September 3rd, 2015.
The event was attended by about 30 leading architects from Goa, which included practicing professionals, free-lance architects, students and faculty from leading architectural institutes in Goa.
We had the honor of having Prof. Dr. Ashish Rege, Principal of the Goa College of Architecture among the audience as well as leading professionals from Architecture Autonomous, Mozaic, Charles Correa Foundation and Studio Earth, to name a few.
Nainar highlights the ROI of Ayoga
We started off with a sneak preview presentation about Ayoga, our cloud-based project management and collaboration tool that brings together all stakeholders of an AEC project in one page and connects engineering (CAD & BIM) and non-engineering data together.
Ayoga promotes lean construction. It does not mean cutting costs everywhere and running a mean organization. On the other hand, it is about doing things smartly.
Ayoga is about enabling and empowering AEC professionals to use the latest mobile and cloud technologies to deliver an efficient construction work-flow that eliminates bottlenecks and encourages transparent decision taking.
Next on the agenda, and the title presentation was BricsCAD, and how this new kid – BIM-enabled CAD on the .dwg platform now offers you a REAL choice, to build intelligent building models within your CAD environment and democratically transfer and share them using industry-standard formats like .dwg and IFC.
The hour-long presentation of BricsCAD and CADPower showed new ways to do things that users have taken for granted.
We showed CAD tools that you never even knew you needed. The Q&A session spilled well into dinner time.
One of the heartening things to observe was the keen interest in BIM-enabled design.
With software like Revit being available in all educational institutes, academic awareness about BIM is pretty high, and that is a very positive sign.
With the concept of smart cities doing the rounds, smart buildings a.k.a BIM-enabled design is the way forward.
So, what is it that users like / hate in BIM software today? One common grouse is the closed, proprietary file format, whether it is the RVT format, VectorWorks or ArchiCAD.
Would you like to lock your BIM data to a software that maintains its primary data in proprietary formats.
What happens when your subscription-only plan expires? That is one of the key differences and an area where BricsCAD BIM scores.
With .dwg as the native format and IFC as the primary exchange mechanism, you are safe and in democratic territory.
BIM on BricsCAD today offers 3d modeling of buildings, complete with roofs, walls, slabs and floor classified as native BIM entities.
A structure composition interface allows you specify the different layers of a sandwiched wall, complete with dimensions, physical materials and presentation aspects like color/hatch etc.IFC import and export ensure that this data is shared and transferred to other users accurately, via dwg or IFC.
Forms in 2d of all shapes and sizes – the start of conceptual design
Turning the spot-light to concept modeling, we showed the capabilities of BricsCAD as a 3d sketching tool.
Using a CADPower-enabled tool that effortlessly converts any 2d sketch into a complete 3d form, in which you can define parametric walls, floor and roof thickness, heights, ridge lines and more. Perhaps the easiest way to create a 3d building with sloping roof is using BricsCAD.
Draw 2d forms in BricsCAD and easily transform them into 3D using CADPower.
And finally, the CADPower presentation showed some cool tips and tricks that can be used to extend the power of your CAD platform (be it AutoCAD or BricsCAD, yes, CADPower works with both).
From effortlessly playing around with polylines to stretch, offset, copy, rotate or re-shape them to creating elaborate Excel output reports and quantity schedules, the CADPower on BricsCAD presentation held the attention of the architects completely. We addressed a pain point that directly translates into money saved or money lost.
Your drawing is a warehouse of information. CADPower helps you extract useful intelligence from your drawings.
CADPower offers you 250+ tools to save time and extract the most out of your drawing. This slide says it all.
Networking over dinner: Architects Dean D’Cruz and Arminio Ribeiro in conversation.