WHAT IS BIM AND HOW IS IT USED IN PRACTICE?

what's up guys and welcome back to another episode here on the architect Network today let's talk Bim now with everything going on in our industry with AI and game engines and and other Technologies disrupting what we do I wanted to talk about Good Old bin so bin is still a foundation of becoming an architect and is a key component in how we actually deliver buildings today and right now the demand for Bim Savvy Architects is continuing to grow and actually far outweighs Supply it's really hard to find good Bim Architects and by adding bims your skill set can be one of the best ways to increase your your value in the industry right now so in this video I wanted to talk through what is Bim how is it used in practice and the challenges we currently face in the industry this video is also an introduction to our new ATN Revit Master Class where I take you through the essentials of getting started with Revit and how I've been using it in practices like big over the last 10 years you can check it out in the link below or go directly to architect.network and don't forget to check out our Discord where you can join a community of Architects sharing knowledge around Bim computation and other topics without any further Ado let's jump into it as always if you like this video give it a like and a subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues don't forget to check us out on Instagram for upcoming videos podcasts and courses foreign so the first things first let's define what Bim is but I'm going to describe it in uh in a couple different ways so let's start off with the basics what is Bim well Bim stands for building information modeling but what does this actually mean well Bim is really just a 3D model and the moment it kind of becomes a Bim model is when the geometry itself is not just a meaningless shape but it's packed full of data and information inside it so you know this column that I'm hovering over here it is not just a cube it actually has information inside it and now um what I'm going to do is jump into Rhino and Revit to just explain that a little bit more what is the difference between what I call modeling and modeling environment versus a Bim model or a Bim environment okay so in Rhino if I want to make a wall essentially I have to make a box or use the box command and I can you know give it some Dimensions let's say 600 ml by six meters by you know three meters high right this is my my box now I can put that on this layer and I've applied a concrete texture to it right so I can give it some materiality but outside of that uh there's not really much more information I mean it's just a dumb box wrapped in a texture the only other thing is I can put it on a layer that says wool and so now it's kind of you know I know that everything on this layer is a wall I can give it a name called wa01 but outside of that there's no real information this geometry has inside of it like Rhino does not know that this is a wall there is nothing special about the geometry it is just a box that's wrapped in the texture and I can give it a very very base level amount of information now if we jump over to Revit and look at that same process let's see the difference between the two now that I'm over in Revit let's build a wall first thing is instead of building a box there is actually a wall component so as I draw the raw it's it's first of all really simple I'm just drawing a line and then Revit does the what does the rest if I select the object it is in a category called wall it knows that it is a wall it's also got different types of walls based on either the dimensions or build up or any other kind of stuff so there's a sub type of different types of walls right and then also when I have this thing selected look at all the information that's embedded inside it right I can con you know see how high the wall is I can see length area volume I can also input stuff like the mark could be my wa1 or whatever there's a whole bunch of information I can see what level it goes from there's tons of information and there's even more information inside the type of that wall I can actually see the build up of the wall I can create more complicated walls like you know structure insulation finish you can also see like this the statistics inside here uh if I go back uh you can also see more complicated information like analytical properties materials and finishes a bunch of more parameters where I can put the cost per square meter the a URL of a website of uh maybe a particular uh Mass Timber product that I'm using or or a manufacturer that I'm using like all of this stuff can be embedded in this in this piece of geometry and this is the difference between a modeling environment and a Bim environment right this piece of geometry is packed with all this information inside of it the other thing that's unique in this Bim environment is not only is the information embedded in the geometry and you can access it but you can actually control the the geometry through the information so here this curtain panel that I have on my screen is controlled by these uh information if I update it all of the families uh that I have populated my model with update at the same time so I can also control the geometry based on the information and so here you see these are all the same types of family this is all the same curtain Wall family that I can also use that information to control the geometry so it's a two-way street and this goes through for all elements in Revit a column has specific column parameters a floors have have their build ups and their own parameters everything single element in Revit a curtain wall has parameters for how it's divided into panels even the mullions inside the curtain panels have information inside them that control them and give you information on how to build it even simple chairs you'll have the manufacturer maybe even the specific product especially if it's like Furniture it's bought from a specific person in a specific company you can embed all of that information into your Bim model so that covers the pure definition of what is Bim but there's another way to describe it it is a completely different approach to how we have in the past developed projects so beforehand we had this era where we had a 3D model and a 2d 2D model like a rhino and a AutoCAD right and you you updated one and then you went back to the other you updated the plans then you had to come back to 3D and update to 3D and it was this back and forth and it was kind of silly because we were spending time developing essentially two models and two different formats at the same time so Bim is a completely different approach where it's a more holistic approach where you build a 3D model and you extract from it all of the stuff that we need so we simply slice the model to create plans and drawings elevations sections all this kind of thing if you want to quantify things we we just simply calculate all of these things from a model we can collaborate with the model we can visualize and so it's really extracting out all of the stuff that we need and this has also got a slightly different approach a mentality when you're actually working in a Bim environment because often I find people are working in a 2d view for example here you've got a 2d view I have my floor selected people get into the approach if I delete that it's just deleted from that view because they they're kind of in that AutoCAD a mentality but actually keep in mind that you have that four selected in 3D it's also in your elevations and even when you select a line in a schedule you're still selecting a 3D thing so it is a switcher mentality that you're not only working in 2D you're working in 3D simultaneously and this information can be controlled in many different formats so from that 3D model we're extracting our drawings all of these drawings are simply slices and and maybe some drawing on top of our model you can also enrich your drawings with things like this like axos of the model and this is all just put onto views of our 3D model that are put onto sheets and annotated on top of and so we can create our plans our sections we can even create stuff like this like call outs of specific 3D elements and schedule how many panels we have for example these are not line by line drawings these are all drawings directly from a 3D model and so if anything changes here all my drawings update so documentation is one of the main things that uh you know we we extract from the model the other thing is quantities of course we can now with if all the elements are modeled in our 3D environment we can simply schedule that how many panels we have in our in our model we can see uh the surface area of glass we can see the width the height all of the things that we might need to actually go quantify and build it the other key element and of this overall approach is also the collaborative aspect so you know in Rhino and AutoCAD only one person can work in that file someone has to close it for someone else to work on but in Revit and Bim environment multiple people can work on the same model at the same time and so this is a key aspect of the collaboration side of Bim and also what makes it very powerful is everyone is accessing the model at the same time and changing their respective parts of the project which makes working together and collaborating and communicating so much better than the kind of 2D ERA this also expands not only within your own firm but within firms outside of yours so you can collaborate with uh your your structural engineer your facade consultant your m e consultant and all these different people even the contractor right so this collaboration aspect is not only internally you might have a team of 10 of people working on your product but then accidentally you've then got people a team of 10 in the structural the structural all Engineers the the facade guys and all that kind of stuff so you can collaborate on a much wider basis and coordinate and communicate in a much better way and then of course we can also use this model because it has so much detail and information inside it we can use that model with real-time rendering platforms such as twin motion enscape where you can actually go around and View and experience the model so here you can see an enscape I'm flying around I'm actually looking at the the Bim model I've been using with you know populating with enscape assets and things like that so I can visualize it as you would do from Rhino but it also comes with some cool Bim specific things so I can actually in enscape click on objects and see all that information so it can be used as a way to communicate some of the Bim aspects of the model it does also come with some again Bim specific features where you can coordinate on it you can you can create issues which are little tags and you can say hey this column is the wrong size and there is an issue with it and you can describe someone I need you to move this and change the dimensions and you can create issue so this is one of the way that you can actually use real-time rendering to coordinate with Bim which is also a super powerful uh powerful aspect of real-time rendering combined with Bim and so this is the completely different approach from the 2D era in this 3D era you simply have a 3D model and we are extracting all of the stuff that we need to actually build or deliver that building and so this era is kind of the 3D era of Bin before we had the 2D you could call it 2D Bim or it is just called 2D Bim and this is where using a 3D model to extract your drawings schedules a communication visualization and all that kind of stuff and this is called a different dimensions of Bim and there are other are further dimensions of Bim so not only are you creating a 3D model just to produce drawings and all that kind of stuff but the other kind of Dimensions have been we've got 4D Bim that's where you start to model and sequence out the construction sequence so this part goes on First and this part goes on next and etc etc uh 5D Bim is when you did in a detailed way add costing information these can usually be co-specific codes and elements that plug into much more advanced costing software Facilities Management so the people that use the building afterwards can use the Bim model in some way and also add their information to the model 70 Bim is when you have sustainable sustainability stuff embedded in the in the model so that could be carbon and carbon consumption LCA and also the analytics side of how your building performs and then you've got 8D Bim which is when you start to add health and safety and all these other kind of things so I'm not going to delve into these too much but just to put them out there there are various different version like dimensions of Bim and they are defined so if you ever hear everyone talking about 4D Bim 5D Bim this is what they're talking about one of the things I wanted to touch on is how Bim is actually used in practice and and what is the kind of basic ways that most practices are using Bim and so uh Bim is mostly used in practice today as a way to streamline the design process particularly from the early design stages to that documentation status as we kind of talked about with the 3D bin we have these two worlds right where we design in one platform in in Rhino because it's it's good it's flexible allows to iterate very quickly in those early stages and then we transition over to Revit that allows us to document and streamline our documentation process and we use each one for what it's best at uh this is particularly like to illustrate this process of evolving from 2D to 3D Bim this table basically goes through uh moving from One Design stage so this is the American design stages from SD to DD and as you kind of start the next phase of the project in theory the more time you work on the product the more it's going to develop but at the same time you also need to be developing uh your your deliverables right you gotta create plans elevations sections all this kind of thing because that's the thing you have to deliver at 50 and and and at the end of the stage now in a perfect world this is my how it look but if you spent more than five minutes in practice you will know that it doesn't look like this at all it's much more like this right you come in you start your stage you get off to a good start and then you get some critical information from the engineers which changes a few things then you push really hard and you have a review of one of the directors and the design completely changes Direction and there's this you know this is the Real World Of Products it's very up and down and in the 2D era of Bim there was always this moment where it's like okay there's this pens down moment now we have to stop any kind of Designing and and iterating and we've got to actually produce the drawings and we had to go and and draw the plans again because they've changed all the columns are in different locations so you almost had to draw every drawing from scratch because it wasn't necessarily linked to a 3D model so the first kind of implementation of Bim in practice is to just simply streamline this process with a Bim model as you can see from that 3D Bim era you have if you have a 3D model and you have all your views and plans and drawing setup if you change the geometry of that building it doesn't affect you as much because all of the views will just update because they're just looking at your 3D model so that is the simple goal of Bim at the beginning is just to streamline your documentation process and this feeds back into the design process because now you free up designers to spend less time drawing plans line by line and they're able to kind of spend more time where they make the most amount of impact which is actually in Creative problem solving and thinking so this is the simple goal of being being used in practice and that's regardless of whether you're using it to collaborate internally and externally so all of these drawings you know we can we can automate this process um by simply setting workflows up to create our drawings and updating models and things like that is not so much of a problem because these are all just referring back to our 3D model of course the other way that people that we used Bim in practice is it's a much more efficient way to collaborate and coordinate either internally or externally so what I mean by that is that even sometimes a project comes in no one is making us use Bim like the client doesn't necessarily want a Bim model as a deliverable we would still use Bim as a way to streamline our process as I've just talked about and a much more streamlined way for us to collaborate so that everyone is working on the same thing at the same time we can coordinate between ourselves within different aspects and areas of the building but we can also do this on a much bigger way of collaborating externally with other consultants and other disciplines so we can also collaborate in the same model with the engineers or the facade Consultants the m e consultants and all these other kind of people and so therefore we can also create a much more coordinated uh a set of documentation drawings and models so in the 2D era we're able to resolve identify and resolve a lot of issues that we may not have caught until much later stages causing later problems in the 2D era of Bim and deliverables and so in in simple the three ways that Bim is being used in practice is one as part of the design process and that's largely to do with the second thing of streamlining our documentation process if we can streamline the production of drawings and documentation that feeds back into the design process which allows designers to spend more time designing and also the collaboration and coordination we can deliver a much more coordinated model either internally as well as externally which means that the drawings that we're delivering are potentially of much better quality and we we try and reduce the amount of issues that we'll face in the future by looking and coordinating this on a 3D level rather than the 2D level so that is the very basic way that I see Bim being actually being used in architecture practice today let's also touch on the most used Bim software that's currently in the industry now you can check out a video that I did on YouTube before which kind of sums up all of the tools and Technologies we have available to us that was from from last year but it's still relevant today this has more Bim Focus so specifically in the world of Bim what are the most used softwares without a doubt Revit is the most industry uh used uh Bim platform that we have at the moment we then also have archicad which is a second I wouldn't I wouldn't say a close second because it's probably not it's not as good as uh at the collaboration side and that is a big reason why it wasn't as widely adopted but you do get some pretty uh people that use akikata are very passionate about how good it is and it does have a lot of Pros you've then got vectorworks which is an earlier Bim platform I almost see it as like a a 2d era uh Slash 3D era I see vectorworks used a lot in maybe smaller practices or particularly like uh you know designing homes and and things like that that kind of scale I see a lot of people using vectorworks and then I also put in the new kid on the Block which is blender bin blender is like an open source modeling platform it's really interesting uh modeling platform but it also some people are releasing some kind of Bim add-ons to it to give it the functionality of Bim I wouldn't say it's kind of competing with the others yet but I just put it in there because you might want to keep an iron in it for the future could potentially be the next thing who knows in terms of computation what computational tools do we have at our fingertips in the world of Bim well Dynamo of course is the you know computational plug-in for Revit it is the grasshopper for Revit and for years that is what's uh what we've used to utilize computation Revit however as of a few years ago we now have Rhino inside which is where you can open up Rhino and grasshopper and use it to create Revit geometry uh you know bring geometry from Rhino to Revit and vice versa and so now we have a singular computational tool of grasshopper that can be used in Rhino and Revit and of course we will be following this course up with a rhino inside course so stay tuned for that and then of course you've got you know your more coding based computational tools I've put python here because that's probably the most used uh the most popular coding language that is used in Revit for example and there's even great plugins that allow you to get underhood a little bit called Pi Revit and things like that that are really powerful for in terms of computation so those I would say are the main Bim computational tools you can also turn your rhino model into Bim with some specific plugins there's visual Arc which is a plugin that tries to or that brings Bim elements into Rhino particularly on drawing production and also more kind of parametric elements and blocks I've not used it that much myself but I'm always been interested in trying to implement it a bit more but it's definitely one interesting one to check out the other one is a grasshopper plug-in called elephant which I do have a fair bit of experience using where you can actually embed information in geometry and it's particularly powerful for kind of fabrication level uh information uh where you can utilize rhinos the power of rhino modeling and grasshopper computation to create very complex Bim models finally I wanted to touch on and talk about the the promise of Bim versus the reality now whenever you have a new technology or new approach that is affecting and has to be adopted on an industry-wide scale particularly like the aec industry it is obviously going to take time before it is fully adopted and fully embraced by all disciplines and this is one of the things that uh one of the reasons why we're in an era where we've not necessarily reached the true promise of Bim because of the certain realities of how we work in practice now for sure Bim has affected uh and has improved and streamlined our design process but at the same time we we still have these different worlds that we work in for different things we have you know again Rhino for when we design Revit for where we document and this whole Suite of other things that go around it and part of the reason why we have all these separate tools and why why the tools are not quite delivering what we need is for example some of the software that we use for example Revit is over 20 years old at this point all of this have have kind of stopped almost developing it at PACE the base code is still almost 20 years old and for that reason it's it's not really kept up with the needs of the industry and that's a big reason why we work in separate worlds and we don't have this one fixed world or platform that we design document document and deliver our buildings but that is on the horizon so you look at the suite that we have we we you know this is a very simplified version of the tools that we use in practice we design in Rhino we document in Revit we use grasshopper for computation and we can visualize things in in real-time rendering like enscape or twin motion or something like that but the interesting I think we're in an era where these are starting to conjoin we have plugins that allow us to talk from one another like Rhino inside side but then we will I think see in the very near future like game engines having a big effect like will we see an environment that stitches all of these things together in a game engine like environment I've put unreal here because I think that's a really interesting one but you've also got things like Omniverse or maybe even Unity that could be could be uh the future of of to deliver the promise of Bim you've also got AI now coming will AI have a component in the future of uh the next version of Bim so we can use AI to automate even more of the things that we don't want need to do so that we can spend more time designing and making an impact and also where we start to see Bim go into the cloud a bit more so we start to collaborate a bit like how we now have moved from word which was a single file that we use on a computer to Google Docs where everyone is collaborating they can access them all at any time and from anywhere I really think this will be the future of delivering the true promise of Bim is the next iteration of Bim where all of these things are tied together possibly driven by game engines influenced by Ai and other kind of cloud-based uh platforms so one of the reasons why we're not seeing the true beam is because the true promise of Bim is because of the tools that we currently have within the industry the other thing is the realities of collaboration and coordination now it's amazing yeah if everyone's working out of Revit and is is uh happy to collaborate on projects but this isn't always the case for example like in this diagram uh let's say the architect is fully in Bim but the consultant may actually not be in in the world of Bim they maybe still be in the 2D era and therefore they collaborate with you by sending drawings and AutoCAD drawings and so then you have to type that into your 3D model it can be done but it just means that you're not collaborating really at the level that you that you could be also we also get uh scenarios where like another consultant here in this diagram is like an engineer where they are using a Bim model but they see it really just as a deliverable and therefore they just have like a a Bim person in the corner that creates the Bim model for them but the actual Engineers don't really spend time in the model and they communicate to you via PDF or or some other like 2D form so again you're not really utilizing the true promise of collaborating in Bim and that's also partly to do with how the industry is fragmented uh and you know different disciplines work in different ways and then of course there's also like just the systematic ways that we actually build things right we're Architects uh we don't actually build things contractors build things right so uh sometimes you do get Architects over delivering Bim like we don't need to model nuts and bolts because we don't really get into that level of detail but the contractor will so there's also an element of uh delivering Bim for the right reasons uh what is the information that we need to deliver that for the next person to pick up because very much in the industry you get things like this like the the architecture Creator Bim model and they they may hand it over to an exact executive architect that rebuilds it and reinterprets it and the contractor then builds their own model and then the subcontractor builds their own model so we had this problem in the 2D era and to some degree you also get it in the 3D era um this kind of issue of like repeating or redrawing the same things through different disciplines um in a in a dream world maybe we'll see digital fabrication allow us like allow us to realize the true promise of Bim where you as a designer can design in this Bim environment you can create this Bim model and then that model can be used to collaborate and coordinate and go directly into the act of making either through uh digital fabrication like CNC 3D printing maybe in the future it could be more digital in like your model may just be overlaid in a 3D in a real world environment for Via augmented reality or something like that but the true promise of Bim may come when we start to connect these things in a fully digital design process from design to documentation to fabrication but at the moment our industry is incredibly fragmented that being said there are lots of uh stories or proof that the true promise of brim is out there and it is being realized this is one uh that I actually I actually worked on this product this was I was working for front this is zaha's Morpheus hotel and we at front were asked to deliver a create a bin model and the fabrication information for all the of the cladding of this exoskeleton and so the only way that we made this building become a reality is by using Bim and we were able to model uh the system behind the cladding obviously this is a completely freeform building no one panel is the same everything is unique and so we use the we harnessed the power of computation and Bim to model every single element and then create the fabrication drawings from this element and because of that the the complexity of the building was absorbed by the Bim model and when it came to construction we had very little requests for change orders very little rfis because so many of the conditions have been thought through in the digital world so that when it came to building in the real world it was a lot more uh of a seamless process and a building this complicated could probably only be built because we harnessed the power of Bim also that there's also stories of of uh stock texts like Frank Gary um contrary to what you may think of of Gary's buildings which are obviously highly complex in geometry and extravagant he's he's kind of well known for actually always delivering buildings on time and on budget of course this is not always the case but it's it's uh the vast majority uh I've been reading he they deliver on time and on budget and this is largely due to their very digital design process uh Gary and partners were very early in adopting Bim uh they were one of the first people to adopt Rhino and they also adopted Bim software from the Aerospace industry which allowed them to essentially model every single element of their building so they can resolve issues in 3D so when it comes to building in in reality they were able to you know negate any issues and then also what's interesting from a contractual perspective they actually set themselves directly under the client and even the contractor sits underneath the architect therefore they also allow that also enables them to kind of bypass the typical issues of uh industry being kind of very fragmented so that was kind of an interesting example of a start text using Bim to deliver the true promise of Bim and then finally I have also spent a lot of time working at Big where firsthand I've seen how much we can streamline our own design process whether it's simply internally but also externally and many of the products that you see online and and the renders of of these images of these projects often have a Bim model as I said we use it in many different ways it could just be internally to streamline our documentation process or it's externally because the thing is a large and complicated product that is going into construction and a a big part of why big has built so much in such a space short space of time is because of the adoption of Ben to streamline that process from design to documentation to built form and so behind every one of these products that you see a big there is always a Bim model being used in some way and that's exactly what uh ATN rabbit master class is all about we'll be going through everything you need to know to get up to speed in Revit whether you're a single practitioner or working in a large practice our course is made up of six modules that will go through all of the basics of modeling views and schedules annotation setting up drawing sheets collaboration and even creating your own families and at the end of this course we'll have your first product in Revit and we'll go through setting all of that up and also creating your very first drawing set and all of the standards and families that we create along the way so you can check it out right now in the link below this video or go to architect.network on our website and access it for just 39.99 and get started learning Revit today

Channel: ArchiTech Network

Views: 4,914

Keywords: architect, architech, technology, network, rhino, revit, grasshopper, 3dmodeling, bim, computational design, parametric architecture, parammetric, tutorial, buildinginformationmodeling, architecture, grasshopper3d

Id: Vp1r9UHNZ-c

Length: 35min 17sec (2117 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023