C3D still ain't BIM

[JamesMaeding]

As time goes on, Autodesk is becoming more and more bold about calling its civil engineering offerings as BIM.

THis pdf does a nice job about explaining how BIM is not just for architects:

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/what_does_bim_mean_for_civil_engineers_ce_news_1008.pdf

While moving toward BIM is great, and having client expectations high is good for people who continually educate themselves and improve, people need to understand that 3D is not BIM, and simply making some program that models a portion of your design, is not BIM.

I might as well call my old TI-86 calculator and simple autolisp routines BIM, by the current definition of "anything electronic that helps with design".

The term BIM only came into being because programs like archicad and Revit made people design with objects ONLY.

No more lines, arcs, polylines and ambiguous items that modeled something piecemiel, you now draw walls, doors, windows, roofs and so on.  Not only that, but the objesct are real life things, and fit how the industry designs them.

Civil 3d has elements of BIM, but is a quantum leap below BIM status because its tools are generic.

Use a corridor to model K-rail?  Sure, but the computer knows nothing on how that K-Rail should behave.

the only reason that works anyway, is because most of what civils do is based on an alignment, profile, and section.

At least the math behind a corridor matches real design practice, while pipe networks are not even real design.

Shall I predict that the Civil 3D name will change within 5 years to Civil BIM?

This name game is childish and for Autodesk to know the full history of the word BIM and to misuse it is very telling.

I'm not sure if they are trying harder to convince us or themselves.

[apweng]

I'll offer my 2 cents for what it's worth...

First of all BIM has caused more confusion that not in our industry - I wish the term remained with the architects.  Model based design is the term we try to promote in the civil engineering industry - you build the model and extract the data (detailed design for example you extract sheets, quantities and construction staking data).

BIM as applied to our industry is nothing new.  In the early 90's we use to go after the transportation planning projects because it put us in a better position to get the detailed design and construction admin work.  We would effectively roll the planning data into the detailed design project - this could be called BIM.

In the land development/infrastructure/transportation industry C3D could be called a BIM tool for the following reasons:

1. It is easier leverage data throughout the project planning to construction life - planning, topo survey, detailed design, construction and as-built data collection/reduction.  The less data is recreated throughout each of these phase, the more BIM oriented the process becomes.  Object reactivity could fall under the definition of BIM.  Beyond construction, and prior to planning there are a whole other range of processes (asset management, for example) that also arguably contribute to the BIM process.  Civil 3D plays 1 part in a much larger picture.
2. On individual projects BIM could be defined as the efficient sharing of data - where a system of drawing/data architecture is created that promotes data sharing versus duplication.  This way the changes propagate through the dependent drawings and data sets.  Imagine a large transportation project with highway

In my opinion BIM is what engineers should be practicing as part of conducting their professional duties.  It's efficient and it makes sense to leverage and not recreate data.  The software industry came along and put this tag word on an efficient process and called it BIM, which has resulted in no end of confusion, and understandably so.

Anyway it's a topic that's always interested me, hence the post.  Thanks.

Andrew

[mathewkol]

I couldn't care less about what it's called. BIM is on the tongue of seemingly everyone right now. Ask 100 people and you'll probably get 100 different answers. That you don't think Civil 3D is BIM is meaningless to many who have their own opinion of what it means.

It doesn't matter what it's called; Civil 3D does what it does If some call it BIM and some not, so be it.

[JamesMaeding]

Its funny how the architects, who do have real BIM programs, have no ambiguity whatsoever in what is BIM and what is not.

You ask 100 of them what is BIM and what is not, and they know.

The civils that call their programs BIM have side motivations, like selling software maybe.

Half the reason I post on this is to encourage the third party programmers to keep going.

I think Autodesk is doing great work, but calling it BIM only has temporary benefits that will backfire.

[JamesMaeding]

In a marketing sense though, the term BIM implies similar functionality to progs like REVIT.

Autodesk knows this and specifically wants that implication.

They gradually built up to calling it that, which is a dead giveaway in itself.

[odoshi]

BIM is more than just a single piece of software. How much Civil 3D fits into that model is really the issue. Objects, with their properties and reactor methods, along with the other modeling algorithms are certainly key. But it needs to be able to fit into a bigger picture for true lifecycle management. LandXML helps with this, in that you can round trip your data to other systems for analysis and reporting. And this idea started back in the Softdesk/Land Desktop days, only "BIM" wasn't the buzzword back then - at least not in the civil circles.

But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot be a closed box claiming the be-all end-all BIM solution. If Autodesk wants to continue their success, they need to keep developing things like LandXML, a robust API, and continue adding more intelligence in their own product without tieing people down to an "our way or the highway" approach to design.

Mike Caruso

http://civildisobedience3d.wordpress.com/

http://www.whitemountaincad.com

[JamesMaeding]

right, especially when the "our way" does not encapsulate the real design of something.

[O.Maille]

Building Information Model?

For a start Civil 3d is not really delivering information to buildings through a model except maybe road and sewer levels.

Infrastructural Information Model - IIM would be a more suitable term.

Whether alignments or lines etc are used to create the objects doesn't really matter, we do end up with a model that has information attached to it; it may be limited and inflexible information but it is information all the same.

Yes there are different definitions of Information Models and Civil 3d is a very limited form of an information model, mainly pipes, surfaces and roads are models where usable information can be extracted.

To be a truely usable Information Model i think C3D is lacking two things;

INFORMATION - they need to let engineers add data to the objects rather than limit the scope, only this year after 6yrs of asking can you associate a catchment area to a pipe of correctly define its roughness, still can't define a manufacturer or number of houses served. Roads/assemblies need detailed info on surface type and properties.

EXPORTABILITY - Information models are only useful when they can give information, C3D is relatively dynamic when working with C3D but trying to give information out of C3D is near impossible, can't even export TIN for example. Other than lables there are few ways to get information to others in a usable fashon.

[odoshi]

Add to that, the most frustrating thing is the underlying Map 3D GIS engine has next to NO compatibility with the Civil 3D Objects. The biggest benefit is the Coordinate Systems. There's been some headway in 2012 with the import GIS feature of Pipe Networks, but more needs to be done in that area. Maybe parcels, for starters?

[O.Maille]

unfortunately it would appear there will be more divergence from map in an effort to sell everyone two products instead of 1 similar to the way you have to buy decent render engines for 3ds to make it better than blender etc.

[JamesMaeding]

I guess the B in Bim for Civils would mean "Building civil stuff".  Maybe CIM would be better.

But here again, you will not find Autodesk changing the term because it would imply something different than the quality of Revit.

Its their product to market how they want, but they should know the people that have used Autocad for years, and make purchasing decisions, are not fooled by any of this.

At the same time, those same people should be impressed with the advancements that have been made both by the C3D team and the API team.  They just need to keep the BIM theme marketing under control, as its setting things up for dissapointment and I am seeing it a lot.

You mention the import pipe network feature.  I am wondering if the fact that pipe networks do not let you design true civil engineering profiles, like roads, where the PVI (grade break) locations have nothing to do with horizontal PI locations (curves), is noticed by anyone. For me, that property of pipe networks, and feature lines too, prevents them from containing the real design.  It also destroys what could be a nice interface for editing, as things "hinge" in ways designers do not expect, and do not have time to check.  We desperately need a decent utility modeling feature that uses real civil alignment/profile for its geometry and editing.

[Cadguru42]

I wonder if it'd be possible to basically have every civil object as a solid or 3d polyline instead of "fake" polylines and such.  Why can't a pipe just be a solid that's a shape swept along an alignment / profile similar to how 3ds Max and Maya work?  That would still give a 3d model of what's going in the ground and don't have to mess with the assanine part builder.  If it's a solid then it'd be possible to get the volume of it.  It'd be great if structures could just be plain solid objects that have data associated with them like part number, pay item number, volumn, etc.. They seem to be working in this direction for corridors as each shape or link along a corridor can be a solid.  It'd be better if the solids themselves had the data associated with them, but at least this is the right step.  And why couldn't an alignment and profile just be a single 3d polyline that's displayed in specific ways that the civils require for plan and profile views instead of separate entities?  They're really linked together, yet even in Civil 3D they're only half-way linked.

It just seems like that would be the logical thing to do since C3D is built upon Map and data can be associated with objects.  That's basically what Revit does, yet C3D doesn't have that ability really.  By having something like a solid as the entity type that would also allow C3D objects to be seen in other versions as well as other programs and would help go a long way toward this lunacy of non-backwards compatibility.  

Just my $0.03 (I'm better than $0.02).

[JamesMaeding]

You hit on an important point.

Its no problem at all to use regular entities of any kind to display and allow editing of you model data.

I do that now by simply keeping invisible xrecord data on my alignments, pipes, and structures.

In fact, sooner or later someone will get a civil object xml standard going, and everyone will be writing display and editing routines for the data.  Just like how the mp3 standard evolved and exists.

The data must be allowed to exist in many forms, I personally use text files so far and it runs faster than C3D for alignment based stuff.  I cannot say that for surfaces, they would likely a format that reads faster.

Anyway, Autodesk is still stuck in C3D mentality, which is version specific arx entities with no external sharing mechanism.

What I do currently is keep folders of text files that contain alignment data, and create display/editing objects as needed.

In other words, every object (entities with xrecord data) allows editing of the mother data.

You need this as it allows fast sharing of entire sets of alignments, then access to the data only when needed.

Similar to LDT and about every other civil program out there, you get a list of items you could deal with, and you choose what to deal with at the moment. Its the idea of a current alignment.  My prog has two current HA, and two current surfaces allowed.

This idea that you must create a data reference object to get data is killing C3D.  I am amazed Autodesk bottlenecks its sharing through data reference objects.

[Anonymous]

Think of building as a a verb... Civil engineers help build stuff... Or at least it's a good spin if it was originally meant as a noun. I think the future will tend away from dependency on alignments for objects, for the sake of dealing with non-linear designs (site work) or situations. For a campus or other site development projects, alignment/profile/corridor tools make no sense. Although the development focus has been on roads with continuous elements, autodesk will need to work more on discrete objects in the future (more like Revit), which will help the design for non-linear projects, but will also help for linear projects to introduce more of the BIM data/relationships.

[JamesMaeding]

right, the word BIM is actually a vague term, except for the software marketing situation, in which it becomes very specific.

When you are the seller of the software that arguably made the term BIM commonplace, it is deliberate when you start calling some other totally different software by the same term.

If I were on the C3D team, I would not appreciate being suddenly called BIM as its like Obama getting that peace prize.

What did I do to earn it that was not already done a few years ago when the product was not called BIM?

on the alignment subject, what are your ideas?

I would guess you mean u-v type surfaces, or some kind of solid modeling, but that would actually still be based on the idea of an alignment.

The problem so far is Autodesk has never made well behaved tools based on alignments.

Feature lines and pipe networks appear like they are based on alignments at first, but then you realize the are highly restricted by the rule that PI's and PVI's must happen at the same locations.  that is not real civil design.

Corridors are real civil design, and top notch too in their power.  Only problem is Autodesk has implemented them as a way to make surfaces.  They are not implemented as a sharable object.

When you do see software that uses non-restricted alignment geometry for all its tools, minor and major, then you would see that its not hard at all to model complicated civil stuff.

Things like manholes still need solid modeling, but their location is specified as along an alignment.