LRUG March Meeting

The invitations have been sent out for the meeting this THURSDAY at Foster+Partners 22 tickets went in the first 10 minutes of sending the invite so be quick it's first come first served as always.

We will have three presentations (one of them is only 10 minutes). Here are the details:

Amplifying Your Design – Frank Schuyer

Changes in the industry workflows

Revit Journals and how to manage them – Philip Barnes

Getting Revit to run faster and more reliably

Oceanwide Centre Project – Jens Majdal Kaarsholm

“Oceanwide Center will be the tallest residential project on the US West Coast. The presentation will cover how one of the biggest, and most complex high-rise projects in downtown San Francisco was put together in Revit, using a wide pallet of software and custom Dynamo scripts.

We were two years ago asked to get the Oceanwide Center project up and running in Revit as a BIM project. A huge skyscraper project in downtown San Francisco, with a very complex shape and design, where the main tower tapers in towards the top, so every single floor plate is different. The team back then had zero experience in Revit, and it was one of the first Revit projects in the office in general. So this whole approach would probably seem totally insane to many people, and for many months I had my doubts how this would turn out as well. But now after more than two years into it, we have gotten planning approval from the city, broken ground, and we have proved that nothing is impossible with the right mind-set. This presentation is a story about how we managed to pull this huge and complex project off, with a team of very skilled people that all had different backgrounds software wise. In the presentation I'll be showing how we approached it, both from a technical BIM point of view, but also which initial thoughts about the setup etc. we put into it. And how we managed to transition a team of people who were used to work in Microstation with a traditional 2D mindset, to do a really complex Revit project as their first BIM project ever.

The project is made up of various different software like Digital Project, Rhino, AutoCAD, Microstation etc., but with a strong focus on building as much as possible as native Revit geometry. The only way to do this, was to write and develop a lot of custom Dynamo scripts, which turned out to be extremely beneficial, and hugely time saving. Looking back on it now, I can't really imagine how we would have managed to do this without the help of Dynamo, especially with the amount of changes that would constantly happen to the design. So during the presentation I'll also go into more detail about how these different scripts were developed, how they work, and how we used them, but without going into every single node.

Another thing we have been pushing a lot on this project is the use of virtual reality, game engines and real time rendering. I'll in the presentation show how this made a really huge impact for us, and how this have helped our architects make decisions faster on the fly, and show some of the opportunities that a live rendering game environment gives to a project like this.

To cut it short, this project and presentation is really about using the best parts from every piece of software, and how we stitched that together as a successful BIM project in Revit.

More information about the project can be found here: http://www.fosterandpartners.com/projects/oceanwide-center/”