• Tag: aec

    Civil 3D: Alignment Creation – Free Entities

    Posted on by David Medeiros

    Alignments are created in Civil 3D by selecting AutoCAD objects or by using specialized tools.  Sometimes selecting objects is appropriate, but when the alignment is required to be very flexible in terms of editability, utilizing those specialized tools can be critical.

     

    There are three types of Alignment segments present within those specialized tools: Fixed, Floating, and Free.  The use of these tools is not always obvious, so we have created 3 video which explains the use of them.

     

    The last of the three videos, Free Entities, can be viewed at this link or below.

    Civil 3D: Alignment Creation – Floating Entities

    Posted on by David Medeiros

    Alignments are created in Civil 3D by selecting AutoCAD objects or by using specialized tools.  Sometimes selecting objects is appropriate, but when the alignment is required to be very flexible in terms of editability, utilizing those specialized tools can be critical.

     

    There are three types of Alignment segments present within those specialized tools: Fixed, Floating, and Free.  The use of these tools is not always obvious, so we have created 3 video which explains the use of them.

     

    The second of the three videos, Floating Entities, can be viewed at this link or below. Come back in a week or two for the next video.

     

    Civil 3D: Alignment Creation – Fixed Entities

    Posted on by David Medeiros

    Alignments are created in Civil 3D by selecting AutoCAD objects or by using specialized tools.  Sometimes selecting objects is appropriate, but when the alignment is required to be very flexible in terms of editability, utilizing those specialized tools can be critical.

     

    There are three types of Alignment segments present within those specialized tools: Fixed, Floating, and Free.  The use of these tools is not always obvious, so we have created 3 video which explains the use of them.

     

    The first of the three videos, Fixed Entities, can be viewed at this link or below. Come back in a week or two for the next video.

     

    HOW OUR AEC E-LEARNING SOLUTION IMPROVES EMPLOYEE RETENTION

    Posted on by David Medeiros

    This story was originally published by Eagle Point Software

    AN AEC E-LEARNING SOLUTION CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOUR EMPLOYEES.

    Employee retention is one of the biggest ongoing goals for successful companies. Improving retention allows you to keep your top performers, promote from within, and avoid the time and cost of replacing staff.

    A recent survey from The Harris Poll found that 70% of employees would likely leave their current organization if its training and development offerings weren’t up to par.

    Let’s explore how our AEC e-learning solution, Pinnacle Series, can help deliver the development employees are looking for and improve retention at your architecture, engineering, construction, or manufacturing organization.

    1. Promotes lifelong learning
    2. Makes workflows more efficient
    3. Personalizes training
    4. Empowers their career goals

    PROMOTES LIFELONG LEARNING

    Learning helps us grow and achieve goals throughout our lives and careers. But often, employees feel like they’re growing stagnant. If you provide the opportunity for them to learn new skills on their own terms, you’ll build the kind of culture that encourages growth.

    MAKES WORKFLOWS MORE EFFICIENT

    Pinnacle Series is full of training videos, documents, and other resources employees can use to improve their skills at dozens of important AEC programs e.g., software skills, company guidelines, health and safety knowledge, and more. And they can do it the minute they need answers, for instance, in the middle of a project. Instead of interrupting a co-worker, they can hop onto Pinnacle Series, watch a quick how-to video, and get back to work with confidence.

    PERSONALIZES TRAINING

    Employees often don’t benefit from a one-size-fits-all course enrollment or seminar that doesn’t fit their individual needs. They feel it’s a waste of their time. In addition, it can be labor-intensive for managers to figure out the required training needs for every employee, especially within larger organizations. With Pinnacle Series, the concept of personalized learning is built in. Users can take KnowledgeSmart assessments to generate a custom learning plan that fills their skills gaps without repeating information they already know.

    EMPOWERS THEIR CAREER GOALS

    By equipping your employees with new skills to move forward in their careers, you’re helping them and your organization. You can invest in and promote from within.

    Want to see for yourself how our AEC e-learning solution can help your organization? Schedule a demo or free trial of Pinnacle Series today!

    Are you a current Pinnacle Series customer? Log in now or connect with your Customer Success Manager to see how you can leverage our platform in your employee retention efforts.

    Environmental Acoustics Inc.

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva
    Success Stories

    Environmental Acoustics Inc.

    Located in Mississauga, Ontario, Environmental Acoustics Inc is an exclusive distributor of the LogiSon® Acoustic Network. This networked sound masking, paging, and music system is recognized as an industry leader that’s installed in hundreds of millions of square feet worldwide and earned numerous awards for innovation, performance, and ease of use.  Environmental Acoustics Inc. prides themselves in designing and installing “sound masking” systems that provide acoustic comfort and higher levels of speech privacy within the office, medical, and hotel environments.

    Automating AutoCAD’s design process with SolidCAD’s built-in plugin

    The Challenge

    Whenever Environmental Acoustics (EA) begins a new installation, they start their project by studying the building layout drawn as an AutoCAD file. Their experts identify required components (e.g., speakers, power supplies, etc.) and insert them as AutoCAD blocks. The EA experts use AutoCAD’s lines and arcs to model wires and connect them to the component blocks. However, because AutoCAD has no relation between components and wires, EA faced many challenges in having a clear and standard way to properly mark their AutoCAD files.

    Often, many of their experts worked on different installations at once, and each drawing would contain incorrect components or redundant wires that were once attached to a component that was either moved or deleted. This often resulted in a final AutoCAD drawing that contained various design errors.

    With a growing increase of errors, this also complicated the company from creating Bill of Materials (BOMs) since there was no standard way to quantify the wires used in any of their projects.

    The Solution

    After identifying the issue, EA turned to SolidCAD in need of a solution that would streamline their process and limit the number of errors and rework their design files. SolidCAD’s programming team developed an AutoCAD plugin that can be added to any AutoCAD version between 2018-2022. The plugin was built to show a list of available components which can be dragged and dropped into the AutoCAD file. The plugin also added a new command which allows users to select two components to wire them. Behind the scenes, the plugin uses the standard AutoCAD entities such as blocks, lines, and arcs which flatten the learning curve. This allowed users to only select from standard design options when adding components onto a drawing, which always ensured that every user followed the same design expectations for all their projects. In addition, the plugin was also designed intuitively that whenever a component was removed, it would automatically delete any incoming and outgoing wires attached.

    To help solve the issues of generating BOMs, SolidCAD ensured that the plugin automatically generated BOMs for components and wires that could easily be exported into Excel which would automatically contain any cost information related to the materials used in the installation.

    The Results

    After undergoing the process of assessing current procedures performed by EA, SolidCAD was able to help EA to:

      • Generating BOMs from 30 minutes into milliseconds
      • Standardized design files with the built-in component blocks while still allowing admin to add/edit/delete components as necessary.

    Testimonial

    SolidCAD’s development team delivered an AutoCAD plugin that not only improves our design process and eliminates errors, but also showed their commitment to delivering high-quality automation services.

    - Stan Klas,
    President at Environmental Acoustics Inc.

    Products & Services Used

    • Programming
      • AutoCAD
      • .NET framework to create AutoCAD plugin
      • C# to write the plugin
      • XAML to create UI

    Similar Projects

    Procepack

    PROCEPACK is a firm specializing in the purchase and sale of packaging and process equipment. They serve customers from a wide range of industries from food and cosmetics to pharmaceuticals. They leverage their vast and…
    Read More
    Manufacture Scorpion Success Story

    Manufacture Scorpion

    Manufacture Scorpion is a manufacturer/distributor whose mission is to make the world’s best pneumatics and vacuum technologies available quickly and easily to North American companies. As the largest Pneumax partner, they have exclusive agreements with…
    Read More

    RGTECH

    RGTECH is a specialty precision machining company. Founded in Lévis, QC by experienced industry professional, Rémy Gagnon, RGTECH works closely with several industries including the medical, optic/photonic and electronic industries to provide high quality parts…
    Read More

    Bring your designs to life in Lumion 11.5

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva

    This story was originally published by Lumion on the Lumion Blog.

    With Lumion, you can render more than a building. Render your client’s dream home, render a story about design that moves emotions, render the space where life happens.

    A building begins as a structure. Walls. Floors. Roofs. Windows and doors. All expertly crafted into a beautiful arrangement of form and function.

    When looking at the 3D model, however, you might feel as if something is missing. Maybe it doesn’t capture the energy and atmosphere of the space and its surroundings. Perhaps it doesn’t ignite emotions or make you want to be there. Whatever it is, there’s something about life that’s just not easy to show in CAD.

    With Lumion, you can bring your vision to life and tell a richer, more immersive story about the design’s role in the real world. A story that sparks imagination and helps clients fully visualize how life could unfold within those four walls.

    From the small experiences you share with others to the objects that decorate your home, life is full of feeling. The sofa, coffee table and chairs in the living room, for instance, become a gravitational center where families share peaceful moments together. Papers and pens and books are scattered across a busy home office desk, alongside used coffee cups and photos of loved ones. In the kitchen, the teapot boils and toast pops out of the toaster, signaling the start of a new day.

    These are not just objects, they are reflections of life. They fill spaces with character.

    Lumion helps architects unveil their designs as lived-in spaces, capturing the deeply personal connection between a building, the people who inhabit it, and all the unique objects they bring with them.

    You can render more than a building. Render your client’s dream home, render a story about design that moves emotions, render the space where life happens.

    What’s new in Lumion 11.5

    The latest version of Lumion reinforces its ability to make spaces feel alive with the everyday activities that occur there. You can let your imagination loose and tell a story about a room, a building, or even the entire project, exactly as you see it in your mind’s eye.

    Lumion 11.5 Pro comes with 123 new objects* in the content library, making it easier to add a human, personal touch to your renders. You can find 73 new retro-inspired objects that reveal the unique identity of spaces, including:

    36 eye-catching kitchen objects, including blenders, refrigerators, toasters, mixers and more. 12 furnishings from another era, including café tables and chairs, a jukebox, a popcorn maker and more.
    11 timeless pieces of office furniture, including sofas, desks, chairs, table lamps and more. 14 other stylish items, including clocks, radios, a sewing machine, TVs and more.

    Additionally, you can express delight throughout your scene with 50 new 3D characters, including a diverse variety of children, teens and adults of different backgrounds and cultures.

    These cheerful non-animated characters are ideal for communicating context, scale and emotion in the background of your project, whether it’s a sunbather relaxing on the grass, a child looking up with wonder, or a couple enjoying a beautiful view together.

    There are infinite stories to tell about your design with the mix of new 3D characters and retro-inspired objects in Lumion 11.5. When combined with Lumion’s existing content library of over 6,300 assets* and over 1,250 materials*, you’ll find yourself on a smoothly paved road to rendering creativity, to bring your designs to life.

    Availability

    Lumion 11.5 is available from June 1st, 2021, as a free update for Lumion 11 and Lumion 11.3 users. Lumion 11 users can download the updated version on your Lumion Account.

    Have more questions?

    Contact us today info@solidcad.ca

    Lumion 11.3 Release Overview

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva

    Architects love using Lumion for one important reason — it breathes life into rendering.

    Lumion makes the process feel like a natural part of your craft, helping you produce beautiful results with ease at every phase of the design project. Its elegantly simple workflow guides you through a rendering experience peppered with moments of unexpected joy.

    Whether for design development or the big client presentation, Lumion 11.3 continues to enhance the rendering process by bringing architects and the art of rendering even closer together.

    No longer will you need hours of frustration and guesswork to produce compelling images and videos of your project.

    With Lumion 11.3, the flow of ideas from your imagination to the computer screen encounters so little friction that rendering becomes an effortless tool in your design toolbox.

    Show the life and emotion in your project, and enjoy the process along the way. Learn more about how Lumion 11.3 changes the relationship between architects and rendering.

    Watch the recording of the webinar by SolidCAD’s product specialists Samuel Plante and Stephane Faulkner and learn all you need to know to get started with Lumion visualization software.

    The webinar covers the overview of Lumion software including some of the new features from the latest release.

    Revit MEP and CTC– Schedule XL

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva

    Having troubles keeping your MEP notes from Excel in Revit up to date? Schedule XL is the right tool for you.

    Schedule XL allows you to create schedule views (drafting view or schedule view) within Revit from your Excel worksheets. Simply create an Excel file with your MEP notes in the format you’d like and push that information to your Revit project.

    Within Revit, select the CTC Schedule XL tool and add your Excel file that you’d like to be placed in the project.

    Once added, you can override/preserve any graphics or formatting of the Excel file

    As you make your modifications to the graphics, select “OK” and Schedule XL will create a new Revit view for you. Place the view onto the desired sheet.

    As your Excel notes update and change, you can use Schedule XL  to verify if your project has the latest updated notes. Schedule XL has a “Status” feature to indicate if your Excel note files are up to date. With the “Status” showing “Out of Date”, simply click “Update” to apply the new changes.

     

    Schedule XL is a great tool for including outside data from other sources (Excel) to be a part of the Revit environment. With a simple Excel to Revit workflow, you can get any information across to a project with minimal effort. Schedules can also be configured to automatically update when the Revit project is opened if the original spreadsheet has changed.

     

    Tip: 5 steps to great renders from Lumion

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva

    This article was originally published on the Lumion Blog.

    You’ve finished your 3D model and imported it into Lumion. Now, it’s time to make it look great. With all of Lumion’s functionality just inviting you to transform your 3D model into a beautiful render, it can be difficult to know where to start. This blog gives you step-by-step hints of what you can do.

     

    Villa, rendered in Lumion 9.5 by Gui Felix.

     

    As intuitive and dependable 3D rendering software, Lumion makes it easy to quickly breathe life into your designs.

    Simply imagine how you want to show your design, and you’ll find a wide range of easy-to-apply tools, features and effects. But before you start building a scene and rendering, there are a few questions you should answer first — 1) how do you want to artistically communicate your model and designs, and 2) how can you make it happen in Lumion?

    Building an artistically compelling image or animation of your designs requires a vision of what you want to achieve. To enhance that vision in your mind, some questions to ask yourself may include:

    1. What emotions do you want to convey?
    2. Are you going for light and colorful, grey and bleak, or something else?
    3. Should the images look realistic or sketchy?
    4. Which parts of the building are you trying to emphasize?

    To help streamline the development of your renders, we’ve provided 5 tried-and-true tips for transforming blank 3D models into beautiful, compelling images and videos.

    Step 1: Find the best point (or points) of view in your scene

     

    • Use at least one composition rule when framing and finding a camera angle for your image renders. Just a few of these rules include ‘simplify the scene,’ ‘use leading lines,’ ‘be creative with colors,’ and so on.
    • When making an animation, set the camera height to the human eye level. The camera angle shouldn’t be too wide so as to avoid perspective distortion.

    Interior wave lounge, rendered in Lumion 9 by ‎Kamon Tangruen.

    Step 2: Set up the scene’s lighting

     

    • Find the best position for the sun so that it draws attention to the parts of the building that you want to highlight. You can use the “Sun Study” effect to accurately simulate the sun location at a particular location, time and date. Other effects such as the “Sun” effect and the “Real Skies” can help you control the environmental lighting in your design.
    • Add interior and mood lighting. Even if the scene you want to show takes place during the daytime, interior and mood lighting can subtly communicate that the building is being used. You can also use volumetric lighting for an extra atmospheric feeling.
    • Balance the shadow brightness and coloring with the context surrounding the building. For example, outdoor shadows tend to show with a bluer color.
    • Avoid a high level of contrast in non-important areas. This is because high-contrast areas can sometimes direct attention to the wrong points in your design.

    Villa in UAE, rendered in Lumion 9 by CRIO Design Studio in collaboration with Arch. Alaa Hossari.

    Step 3: Make materials look beautiful with texture and age

     

    • When rendering, enable “Speedray reflections” and put reflection planes on big, flat surfaces.
    • Tweak the glossiness slider of the floor and ceiling materials. In many cases, making your materials a little more reflective will work better than static, non-reflective surfaces.
    • Do not use simple digital colors, include plain green, red, blue, purple, yellow. These simple digital colors can look ugly when applied to materials. Consider using a more natural (and more realistic) color palette for the entire scene.
    • Sometimes it is better to replace diffuse textures with plain colors (using the top slider in the material editor) and use bumps but without maximal intensity.
    • Consider showing a little age and weathering with the “Weathering” slider, located in Lumion’s material editor.

    GIF showing various wall materials, many of which were included in the Lumion 9.5 update.

    Step 4: Adding effects

    • Use the “Color Correction” effect (especially the first slider — Temperature) as it adjusts the color tone of the image and adds dark shadows where necessary.
    • Add a little bit of “Chromatic Aberration” and a very tiny value of the “Fish Eye” effect for a small, optical imperfection.
    • Add “Sky Light” and “Hyperlight” for still images and videos. For the most impact with Sky Light, turn the Sky Light render quality to ultra (which also means “ultra-slow render speeds”).
    • Use the “Sharpness” effect and set the slider to a low value to make the picture look a bit more ‘flat,’ as if were printed on a piece of paper.
    • “Depth-of-Field” (DOF) is really useful for narrow camera angles. Generally, you shouldn’t use this effect if you have wide camera angles.
    • Always add reflections to water and glass planes.

    Step 5: Extra details – every single shot needs them!

    • Furniture is very important for interiors and exteriors. Select and add furniture models from the Lumion object library and fill out some empty spaces. The idea is to make the spaces look “lived-in,” where you show how people might use a building, home, public space, etc.
    • Cars are really effective models when forming the “border areas” of a still render or a movie frame. Try to avoid having cars in the center of your composition.
    • By including people models in your render, you can easily show your audience how you’ve envisioned the relationship between people and a building design. Nevertheless, make sure that your people don’t dominate the render. Their faces should not be too visible so that you don’t distract viewers from the model design. Using silhouettes from the library is a good way to achieve this neutrality with the scene’s people models.
    • You can effectively create picture borders and backgrounds with trees and plants from the content library.
    • Remember that the background of your scene has a huge impact on the look of your building design. Even if the background is blurry, having the feeling of a real city or forest in the background can enhance the realism of the scene while making the entire render easier for the viewer to understand and digest.
    • While the “Real Skies” are beautiful and realistic, they can distract the viewer from the building in some cases. If you feel that the skies are distracting, you have a couple options. For one, you can use one of the “clear” Real Skies or you can add the Sky and Clouds effect and turn up the “cloud softness” slider to blur the clouds. Another option is to turn off any cloud effect and adjust the “clouds” slider in Lumion’s Build Mode to create a distraction-free, clear sky. Below, you can find a picture showing the difference between “no clouds” in Lumion and the clear Real Skies.

    Parameter Jammer using Revit MEP and CTC Tools

    Posted on by Rikki Kenzhebayeva

    Are you a Revit MEP user and frequently download Revit content from manufacturers or sources like BIM Object? Once that content is loaded into the project, is there a struggle to get the family properly to work with your schedules? Well than the CTC Parameter Jammer tool is the one to help solve these problems.

    Downloading Revit family content regularly brings along shared parameters to your project that are different from your company’s standards. This will give inconsistent information within the schedules. Use Parameter Jammer to deal with those problems.

    Here is a schedule with a family loaded into a project but does not have information populated because of the inconsistent parameters from the family to the project.

    Run Parameter Jammer

    With a simple user interface, there a couple steps needed to map the loaded family’s parameters to match the project.

    • Select your companies shared parameter file
    • Select the schedule that the family will be residing in
    • Select the family/families that the parameters need to be modified

    In the next window, you will get a list of all the Shared Parameters from the selected schedule along with the family parameters. From the family parameter list, you will apply what needs to be done to the family. Parameter Jammer will also find same named parameters and automatically map them. When you select the drop-down list, you specify a family parameter to match the ones in your schedule. It will only show parameters that have the same units. You can also create a new instance or type parameter for the loaded family.

    A final report will be displayed to show what has been done.

    As you can see, downloadable content being used in a project does not need to have much modification for it to work properly in your current projects. Parameter Jammer gives you the ability to quickly grab information from the new loaded families and map those parameters to meet your company standards. Your schedules will be up to date and have no missing information in a matter of a few clicks using Parameter Jammer.