Now Autodesk has two green thumbs! In a press release published earlier today, Autodesk has announced that it has acquired ECOTECT. Let’s see how they weave Revit, Green Building Studio and Ecotect together. FYI, here is a description of ECOTECT from the Square 1 website: Ecotect is a comprehensive environmental design tool that covers a […] Read more..
Category: AEC CAD/BIM
Digital design, CAD and BIM-related tips, news and comments with a tendency towards architectural and engineering uses.
When Wii Met SketchUp
Every movement, orbit, walk, zoom etc. in the movie above is controlled with the wiimote instead of the mouse. This way, one is not bound to the computer while navigating in SketchUp – perfect for presentations. I have been amazed for a while by Johnny Chung Lee‘s experiments with the Wiimote and particularly the […] Read more..
IFC 2×4 Alpha Release has been Published for Comments
The IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability) has just released the latest version of the IFC specifications as an Alpha version for discussion. If you have never heard about IFC, then consider this a great file format to exchange object-oriented building information (= entire BIM building models) between various CAD and analysis applications. Most CAD software […] Read more..
Hopping with a Rhino
Inspired by one of David Fano’s recent blog posts, I decided to give Rhino’s Grasshopper plugin (formerly called Explicit History) a try. It is pretty amazing what can be done with it and how easy it is to use. I haven’t venture too far at this point – there’ll be more to come when I […] Read more..
3D to 2D: Getting Images out of CAD Software
A comment on one of my SketchUp posts prompted me to provide clarification in the form of a new post rather than just a quick reply. The issue was that exported images from CAD files (SU in this case) can be quite grainy. To export an image of the current view in SketchUp, go to […] Read more..
“Building a 3D World” – Using SketchUp for Presentations
So far I have used SketchUp for a lot of things, but a 50-minute presentation wasn’t among those. Besides, one of the big no-no’s for “classic” Powerpoint presentations is having too much happen on-screen (flying-in arrows and the like). Given the dynamic 3D interface of SketchUp I was curious if flying around inside its space […] Read more..
Reducing SketchUp File Sizes for Google Earth
One problem when exporting a SketchUp model that contains images as textures to Google Earth is file size. You do not want to have a building model that weighs in at more than 500kB. A 1 MB file may be justified for a very complex building, but anything beyond that will a) load slowly (remember […] Read more..