Autodesk University 2015 Grab Bag Wrap-up Part 1: It’s About Time

I recently had the privilege to present an AU wrap up at both Revit DC and Revit RVA user groups. I thought I would massage what I shared with them and slap it up here. Overall, I had a great time at AU this year. I hadn’t been in several years and I forgot what a great combination of design and technology it is. I also forgot how much sleep you need when it’s all over. I am not sure that I got out of bed on Saturday. Sorry, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. AU.

These are the things that I picked up either through classes, on the exhibition hall floor, through conversations, or just through gut feelings. These were the things that I was thinking about after I left the conference, for one reason or another. I tended to ramble in this article, so I am breaking it up into 4 parts.

It’s About Time

These are the things that I feel we have been hearing about and promised for years, and it’s finally time.

The Model Is King

Ever since the emergence of Revit and BIM on the industry, there has been a push to get everyone to work in the model, make your model important, collect your data in the model. If you’re reading this, I am probably preaching to the choir about how important the model is, but I think it has been a tough sell for many of us. At the end of the day, we just need to print paper… that’s the usual excuse. And frankly, a lot of the promises of what the model could do for us or how easy it would just didn’t hold up. I think we have finally turned a corner. There were vendors on the hall floor that were so confident in how easy it was for their technology to be able to get the proper data out of a model, they invited visitors to simply walk up with their Revit file on a flash drive and they would make the magic happen. There were so many classes and vendors on working with the model and sharing data from the model, and you didn’t get the sense that people were rolling their eyes at it anymore. The idea of interoperability was huge, and that’s not interoperability with a DWG file, it’s foundation is the Revit model file.

The Cloud

Are you tired of hearing about the cloud? I am. But, if you looked at either running applications from the cloud or hosting documents a couple years ago, it’s definitely time to take another look. There are probably other solutions out there, but I spent some time running Revit through a virtual machine via Amazon Web Services. I was amazed at how the performance was. Last time I looked at running Revit through the web, there was a lag that made it completely unbearable. The setup I used had completely done away with this lag. This is totally a viable solution now.

I was also really impressed with how effective FormIt 360 is, even moreso that it is a cloud based app. First and foremost, it is Autodesk’s attempt to replace Sketchup. I sat in on a lab with the head of the FormIt team, and it is absolutely ready to replace Sketchup in the design workflow. It feels like it has some way to go for those of you who use Sketchup for presentation work, but it is already a superior tool for design. The modeling is just as easy as Sketchup, and it integrates into a Revit workflow with far greater ease.

Last in the cloud is hosting documents. BIM 360 Docs was officially launched at AU, and it looks sharp. There is a waiting list to get rolling on it, but the team took the time to fill a lot of needs for sharing and marking up docs online. It’s mainly in the construction end, but it is definitely a solution I am going to keep an eye on.

Virtual Reality

Everyone who saw The Lawnmower Man was excited over the potential of VR. So, maybe five of us. Luckily, Virtual Reality became more prominent over the years, and not only through amazingly horrible sci-fi movies. We saw promise after promise of it being integrated in the AEC world, and while we saw some neat applications, they were all at the experimental end, or just for the firms with the really big wallets. That’s not the case anymore. Oculus Rift had a strong presence at the conference, and they were really fun to play with. There were multiple visualization offerings that could work with VR for people to choose from. If you don’t want to pay whatever for a Rift, you can fork over just a couple bucks and get a Google Cardboard or something akin to it. Combine that with Stingray or Max and your Revit model, and you have a high quality and inexpensive VR solution. There isn’t much of an excuse anymore.

That’s it for the first part of my wrap-up. To recap: all of these have been talked about for years, and frankly, were either too expensive or really didn’t work effectively before. It’s definitely worth your time to reevaluate.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll be covering the tech that just isn’t quite there yet.

 

We’re All Getting Twitchy

Warning: I’m a geek.  A pretty big one.  I try to keep these posts to be on the low end of the geeky spectrum and relatively accessible to those of us in the design industry who like and use technology.  This post may…scratch that… this post will leak far over onto the geek end of the spectrum.  You have been warned.

So, we’ve all seen Twitch now.  Or we’ve read about it.  Only those that live on the west coast, or apparently somewhere in the Pacific can actually test it out.  No.  Not the islands.  Actually physically in the Pacific.  This is what I saw when I tried:

Do you have a boat out there running Revit?  Neither do I.

But I digress!  Basically, it’s remote processing and hosted computing for some of Autodesk’s apps.

And it’s about damn time.

I don’t know when the guys at Autodesk Labs first started thinking about this, but my brain started getting tickled to the idea as a possibility several months back when I heard about the announcement of the OnLive video game service.  If these guys have actually worked out a way to avoid the latency and possible speed hiccups of the Internet, and push really really high end video games to my screen, then there is absolutely no reason it can’t be done with high end BIM and modelling software.

High end PCs to run Revit and other apps are expensive.  I could argue that in the business world, aside from these production workstations, there isn’t much need for the typical user to have a PC that costs more than $500.  Our typical workstation runs us about $2500-$3000, and we don’t even get the uber high end stuff.

But if Revit could move to the hosted model, businesses could keep their hardware costs down.  IT departments wouldn’t have to waste time deploying and maintaining software on hundreads of PCs and could focus on what they are really good at (namely, napping and drinking Mountain Dew).

And Autodesk would benefit as well.  Piracy would be a thing of the past.  The subscription model that is the Holy Grail for all software companies would be a given.  They could start charging per hour for little spurts of licenses needed, like in the summer when we always get a bunch of interns, and then proceed to run out of licenses on our FlexLM server.

And for the really big firms that don’t want to share the time?  Autodesk partners with a hardware company, and rents out a Revit Rack.  A preconfigured, preinstalled series of rack servers that the local network users login to.  IT does a quick setup for IP address and the like through a nice web interface, then the Rack gets monitored and maintained and supported remotely by Autodesk.

Can you tell how giddy I am?  I am giddy.

If the latency issues and file sharing questions are resolved, then performance for the end user could be better as well.  If the virtualization for servers movement has shown us anything it’s that PCs and servers are wasted power.  For the majority of time, your PC sits there and twiddles its thumbs.  We spend the big bucks for gobs of RAM for the 15 minutes a day that your PC has to think really hard.  Aggregating the hardware resources into a shared server means more power for everyone.  Chances are you are not going to be rotating that 350,000 sf model in 3d view the same time that someone else is.  So for that minute, you get more RAM and horsepower from the shared resources.  And if more people come on board, you don’t need to spend $3000 in hardware and unknown costs in IT setup time, you just need to spend a couple hundred bucks to add some more RAM and maybe another hard drive to the server that hosts the application.  Oh, and you want to work on your model on the road or from home?  Piece of cake.  You just need an Internet connection.

This makes so much sense.  This SCREAMS it makes sense so much.  It’s good for firms, it’s good for Autodesk, it’s good for users.  It’s not often that everyone wins.

The Autodesk Labs guys are pretty darn smart, but they hit it out of the park with this.  I have no idea if anyone from Autodesk reads this blog (I bet “no”), but I hope that the business side of the company realizes that this is the future and they need to make it happen.

/nerd hat off