I work for a company called, EastCoast CAD/CAM. We’re part of the HVAC and mechanical CAD and CAM software tool industry. We support sheet metal, piping and plumbing contractors with MEP software solutions.
Over the better part of the past four years we've been building MEP content and embedding our fabrication capabilities inside of Autodesk’s MEP Engineering platforms. Our current AutoCAD MEP Fabrication solution is gaining traction as more detailers and contractors are standardizing on how interoperable we are inside of AutoCAD MEP. EastCoast is built on open standards with a fully transparent and open interface. Our intention is to work jointly, alongside other Best Practice Software Solutions from Autodesk and other forward thinking BIM-based companies. Additionally, and insuring data sustainability, EastCoast’s MEP content is managed via an platform-independent industry-standard SQL Server database. If you are curious and don't mind digging a bit, you’ll find thirty-six (36) EastCoast duct objects bundled inside Revit MEP (search for duct objects with a “.dtl” file extension.)
EastCoast has been working closely with Autodesk over the past year to build a tool to address the "use case" of taking a model from Revit MEP through to fabrication - "without redrawing." This tool would be a good fit for firms wanting to take advantage of staying BIM compliant, designing and modeling in Revit MEP and going to fabrication without redrawing. We plan to release the beta this coming, June 2010. For the process to work, Duct that was drawn in Revit MEP must be part of a "Connected System."
In reference to the downloading to CNC plasma tables, our current CAD and CAM solutions support most industry CNC tables including the Lockformer table you referenced above. We have also built but have not yet released a download from AutoCAD MEP via a Vulcan CAM tool to a Lockformer table. An important point to make is that with this Revit MEP Fabrication beta release there will be a way to bring your model through to your CNC tables.
To get the most out of your CAD Fabrication for AutoCAD MEP platform we recommend:
Windows 7 64 bit, minimum 8G RAM
Nvibia Qadro FX 1700 or better (min. 512 card memory)
3 GHz dual core processor or better
NHDaveQ
Dave Quigley
EastCoast CAD/CAM