What is your workflow for architectural drawing in Bricscad?

Severn Clay-Youman

 All,

I'm considering moving to Bricscad for a small architectural studio. My previous experiences have been with Autocad and Revit .  Autocad was fast, but did not have enough tools to take care of things like scheduling rooms, doors and windows, Revit was nice in terms of being able to schedule everything and to get instant sections and elevations, but much too cumbersome for simple things.

I was presently surprised when I downloaded the V15 trial - Bricscad has come a long way. What's not clear to me yet though is if there's a workflow with the new 3d and BIM tools that's closer to Revit, or do people pretty much just use it as an Autocad replacement still? 

What's your typical Bricscad architectural workflow?

Thanks,

Severn

Tomas Polak

Hi,
I have been also wondering about this. In BIM tutorials from Bricsys, you can see the 3D modelling part - which seems like a big step forward in V15. But i didn't see anything about creation of sections, views, views of room walls etc. This is the crucial part - it's nce to have a 3D model, but you need to get proper 2D drawing out of it. 
In my experience, the generated views in V14 are too unflexible to be useful as they are (I've been creating furniture drawings in 3D - I had to use workaround to move generated view into model space to work on them further). Generated views seems to be preferred way of doing things from Bricsys' side.
Blocks created out of section planes seem like more flexible solution, but there's a big problem with this workflow - these blocks are not regenerated automatically. This is the reason I don't use this technique.
I am really interested in what others have to say about this topic.

Tom

Tomas Polak

Hi,
check out this topic - BricsCAD used in architecture modelling:
https://forum.bricsys.com/discussion/23504

TOm

Erik De Keyser

 Hi,

A few things about our BIM development. With BricsCAD V15 we have introduced a new way of modeling for the AEC market, based on 3D direct modeling. It is an ongoing development. The goal is to have the absolute most intuitive AEC specific modeler in the industry - 100% based on .dwg. We noticed that there are 30 million SketchUp users - a product that is very popular in the preliminary phase of a project. But once that's done, people have to restart in Revit or any other BIM product. And we noticed as well that most Revit users later go to AutoCAD for detailing the project. Some common sense tells us that if we do all these steps in one product - BricsCAD BIM - then we might have a nice value proposition. We are of course aware that today our BIM offering is not complete yet. In the next couple of weeks you will see a first implementation of the database part for BIM objects. We are working hard on IFC import and export and have made a lot of progress there too. Also a smart solution for doors and windows is evolving well, together with streamlining 2D section views and the synchronization with the 3D model. The goal is to offer the best and most modern BIM solution covering the Architectural- and MEP side of the construction market. We are working on API's to offer to MEP third party application developers - many have already their products available on BricsCAD. They are compatible with our BIM models from day 1 because all is based on .dwg. But we want to offer them a common growth path including a IFC import and export. And then with Chapoo we have a 100% cloud based collaboration system that we will use as a modelserver. In Chapoo we have developed our own 3D streaming viewer which is in test phase. It is an amazing product allowing live sectioning, annotating, browsing building elements' data, all super fast. 

It's time people have a choice. You can expect a lot of evolution in our BIM product for the months to come.

Thank you for your enthusiasm so far.

erik

Severn Clay-Youman

 Thanks for your reply, Erik - I applaud your efforts! I would encourage you to think about making Bricscad as extensible as possible - expose as much of the data as possible, even a Python scripting interface would be valuable. 3rd party extensions are nice, but if I can write my own tool in half a day which solves a problem now, your software becomes a lot more valuable.

Also, I posted this in the Windows forum, but what initially brought me to your software was the Linux support!

Thank you.

Tomas Polak

Hi Erik,
thanks for explaining Bricsys' point of view. I also appreciate your efforts. I was very happy to see BIM module as integral part of BricsCAD.
What you described is actually what I was thinking recently. I work at a small architecture studio - we mainly design interiors. So far I am using pure 2D workflow. When visualization is needed, I re-model everything in Blender. This often leads to duplicated work. I was looking into Sketchup, but even though I read peopole are using it for complete technical documentation, I never saw output form Sketchup, that I would call "technical drawing". So it seems to me I would have to buy and learn new software, but I even after creating the project I would have to export it to 2D cad software. Creating everything in BricsCAD seems like a really good proposition, so I am glad to hear that you guys are thinking the same way I do. Hopefully .dwg format is robust enough to provide all the functionality and performance one needs for all the 3D+2D stuff.

Severn - funny thing is I also use BricsCAD under linux .