How far will Bricscad go with 3D?

Tim Neumann

I was curious if anyone had some inside info on just how far Brics was going to venture into the 3D realm? Will it eventually rival/surpass something like Spaceclaim or maybe Inventor Fusion? Read that a russian company is selling the C3D kernel (used in the parametric modeler Kompas) and was wondering if Brics would go in that direction like it did with Ledas. Or maybe I'm just being insane and need to just shut up. 

John Gaunt

I am interested too.

I am seeing contracts calling for jobs done in Revit - no matter how useable etc, can any alternative program satisfy such conditions?

File format was always the stranglehold Acad had, allowed it to keep an often undeserved head start.

Tim Neumann

I used to think that 2D would suffice for what I do (pressure vessels/piping) but this past year we've had customers request 3D models. Using V12 pro it takes a while but it can be done. We're a small office so Sworks or Inventor is out of the question so that leaves me to convince my boss to upgrade to the platinum version which has some additional bells and whistles to help in this regard.

John Gaunt

High priced software is beyond my SOHO business as well.

V11 still works better for 2D than V12 or V13 for me even though I upgraded, so haven't bothered exploring their 3D features.

Do you know the main purpose of customers asking for 3D, Tim?

If it's to plonk into a bigger picture surely that has to be in a compatible format, presumably with your notes, dimensions etc left at the doorstep?

Ralph Massie

I work in 3D almost all of the time, and find it's great to avoid clashes and V13's live section is almost ideal. But I'm getting concerned about the proliferation of 'BIM' and 'IFC' in job specs. Is Brics going to do anything in this direction.

Tim Neumann

John,

Customers want a 3D model to plug into their existing plant layouts for checking locations and interferences. Can't see any other benefit

from my point of view. I assume architecture/BIM would have different requirements than the field I'm in.

John Gaunt

Tim, my work is mechanical services and I suspect project administrators want the same ability to overlay our ductwork and plant equipment with architects' models and somehow combine a mechanical BIM with theirs, as well as hydraulic, electrical and fire services.

Such bold ambitions in our building industry don't inspire much confidence when coordination is so poor now, but I see some non-architectural specific software making a feature of their ability to address it. Maybe they want software to do what they can't, rather than save time.

They might be asking for Revit today, but if that doesn't speak seamlessly with say Archicad it seems to me the plan is already off on the wrong foot.

The more models are combined with other disciplines the more detail would have to be dropped off in the same way I believe a complex 3D model has to lose notes, dimensions etc to still be readable, IMO. More impressive, less useful.

Knut Hohenberg

I would second Ralph and others:

3d is on the horizon, and so are open (standardized) model formats. Bricsys seems to have oriented itself clearly in the first direction, but their stance towards the second remains completely in the dark.

They also seem to have abandoned the idea of delivering an unspecific base cad to a certain extent (IMO the platinum version is only interesting for users in the MCAD domain).

As to the MCAD strategy, I'm not really qualified to comment (as an architect) - but to me, the lack of STEP and IGES support seems to undermine the fitness of the platinum version in this domain, and the silence from Bricsys in this respect is hard to understand. Of course (on windows), the gap can be more than filled by purchasing rhino, but the price tag will not be acceptable to many.
A possible alternative might be using FreeCAD (a cross-platform FOSS project) as a bridge - this parametric cad based on OPEN CASCADE supports both formats - but unfortunately not ACIS, for which a non-free add-on from opencascade.com is needed. To my knowledge, there are no plans in the FreeCAD community to support commercial add-ons, but it may be interesting for MCAD users to ask for this.
Since the geometrical possibilities of OPEN CASCADE surpass the subset of ACIS currently exposed in BricsCAD, a FreeCAD capable of writing ACIS could not only serve as a bridge, but would also allow for parametric parts with geometry that BricsCAD cannot create to be used in BricsCAD's new assembly functionality.

As to the AEC domain, having no visible strategy towards BIM will IMO increasingly limit the share of the market that Bricsys can reach - I think most bigger engineering or architectural offices will see themselves confronted with the need to work with IFC in the near future (and the smaller ones some years later). It remains to be seen how the announced release of the former architecturals will fit into this picture, but the lack of information on this is somewhat discouraging.
Since Bricsys apparently has no big appetite to venture deeper into the AEC field, I think the most promising perspective for dwg users would be to rally behind something like BIMserver.org - a database that stores models in IFC as native format. I never used this software and cannot comment on its maturity and performance, but an addon (.tx?) that allowed BricsCAD to query parts from this db for editing (and push them back, of course) would be high on my shopping list...
As a side effect, this would enable true concurrent engineering.

But this doesn't mean that the 2d part of BricsCAD could be left as is - I'm really looking forward to an overhaul of quite some basic editing functionality...

Good god, what a sermon, hope someone can make sense out of it.