From Ground to Sky: End-to-End BIM Solutions for Modern Building Design

JUSTIN TAYLOR: to this session today, From Ground to Sky. Our agenda today begins with a warm welcome to you all, and a thank you for joining this session. Hopefully you're going to find it interesting, thought provoking, educational, and inspiring.

After a quick who am I and why am I presenting to you today, we're going to take a look at the current industry trends and go on a short journey through the history of CAD, because it's important in this session that we understand where we've come from and where we're going just to set the scene. Then we're going to take a look at the new Autodesk outcome based solutions before closing out with a quick Q&A.

So I'm Justin. I'm the AC Solutions Product Manager at Autodesk. We won't talk about how old I am, but you'll get an inkling of that when we come to some slides later on with the history of CAD. Suffice to say, I've been around in the industry for a while now, and in my previous roles it's included Principal of Sustainability Consultant, Principal Consultant in Construction.

Sustainability is very close to my heart. I'm both Green Star and BREEAM new construction certified. And interestingly enough, sustainability is woven through all of our new outcome based solution decks.

So a few people have referred to me as a Swiss army knife when it comes to work. I seem to be one of those people who get called on when they don't know who else to go to. That's all good. But anyhow, it's enough about me. Let's begin.

For me, this slide sums everything up. Interesting times. We live in interesting times. A little bit scary, a little bit exciting. But why do I say this? Well, I'm wondering who amongst you have read the Autodesk STATE of Design and Make Report. If not, I highly recommend it. It's a good coffee break read. I'm going to highlight a few key takeaways from the report which are pertinent to this session today and why I believe we're living in these interesting times.

The first insight we're looking at is a good one. The industry has a positive outlook. Leaders feel their companies are far more resilient and they're more digitally mature and making meaningful progress on their AI journeys. I'm going to come back to this one at this point later on.

In 2024, cost control is the top challenge that businesses face. It's closely followed by upskilling and talent retention. Again, we talk more about this later on. And great lead sustainability has now become a key priority for most of us. This is really good news.

However, leaders and experts say that just having the latest, greatest software and implementing it is not enough to drive effective change. This is interesting. We need to look at the skills required for the future, a future which constantly comes at a quicker and quicker rate.

The ability to work with AI is the top digital skill that organizations are looking for. This is followed by digital design and software development and programming. Industry professionals say that these skills are essential to unlocking the digital transformation in their business.

But let's just back up for a couple of minutes and let's talk about the business challenges highlighted in the first couple of slides. And to do this, we need to go on this tour through the history of CAD.

To understand what's happening with digital transformation, let's begin right back pre mid-twentieth century, the age of manual drafting. In the 1950s and '70s, early computational tools were developed by institutes like MIT, and they were the precursor to CAD. But they existed on very, very expensive mainframes and they weren't available to the general population.

1970s to 1980s, the development of CAD systems. And this is where I began my career. So now you can start working out my age if you want to. 1986 was when I was first introduced to AutoCAD, and what a revolution that was. It could undo errors easily and copy geometry. Made my life a lot easier.

As we progress through the development of advanced features in CAD, the early days of BIM, AutoCAD with AC tools, if any of you remember those. And software continued to develop in complexity and power with the likes of Revit coming into the market as well as 3D printing and VR to the integration with other technologies.

By around 2015, there was widespread adoption of BIM for complex building projects. And I mean not just a single discipline using it, but the fully coordinated models, including architecture structure and MEP systems. And now we have the rise of AI. But I want to highlight is this time frame has been speeding up through each stage.

Here's another way we can visualize this, which shows the development of the software in a linear process. We began with traditional design, hand drafting and computer aided design, products like AutoCAD. This was all about capturing design intent, capturing decisions in a 2D format. BIM introduced technologies such as Revit and parametric modeling, and then it became about managing and coordinating information.

Revit then came along with Dynamo and the beginning of generative design advanced this and speeded up the process. And as we move into AI, we move from generative to design into machine learning and products like Forma, and it uses machine learning to carry out various types of analysis very, very quickly.

Back in the days, it was thought by many that CAD and BIM would cause job losses. In practice, this was not the case. We evolved and we adapted to these new workflows and possibilities. We produced better designs. And that's what's going to happen with AI. Today we see an approximate reduction of 50% time in what it takes to complete a project as opposed to back in the '80s. 50% reduction. That's quite incredible.

However, the glass half full or half empty? It's not all good news, as I'm sure you're aware. According to my new best friend, ChatGTP, this rapid development of software also came with a price tag. And I'm not talking about the actual cost of the software. I'm talking about the knowledge and digital skills cost. Let me explain.

Back in the transition from drawing board to CAD, it was a one to one swap. CAD was just an electronic drawing board, albeit that you could work faster. But the difference then was that we had to learn how to use CAD and all the updates that came as well as learning our profession. But hey, at least my drawings were now at the same standard as people who were way more skilled than me on a drawing board. But yeah, so it was a one to one relationship.

As we moved into the 2000s, things started to change. And quite often, designers would be using between two to four products regularly. This meant more learning, more keeping up to date with the annual production product releases. And it's not just the design software, the CAD. We're talking about things like the visual stuff for Adobe or Corel. I remember using that back in the days.

As we move into the early 2000s, things changed and it's now between 6 and 10 pieces of software that a designer, an architect, or an engineer or a constructor is using on a day to day basis.

A quick question for any of the Revit users in the audience or listening to this recording. Who actually spends time each year learning the new functionality that's released? We just don't have the bandwidth. And it's just speeding up. And more and more technology is coming onto the market, which can enable our work and increase the speed we can work and allow us to generate better designs. But it's a heavy burden in terms of resourcing on the knowledge and digital skills. It's a lot of balls in the air that we're juggling.

Another interesting fact is that we have about five years until AI has truly changed our world. Which, incidentally, is about how long it's going to take for an average company to become digitally mature. So think about your organizations, your current digital maturity, and the number of designers who need to be upskilled and hold that thought.

AI can certainly be a great help. There is no doubt. It can automate many tedious, difficult tasks and free you up to be the creative people you want to be. I doubt many of you trained as an architect or an engineer to spend your days checking building codes and regulations.

Here's a simple example of how visual scripting in Dynamo can run this type of checks. So here on a multi-story building with a new regulations in the UK. In this case, it's measuring the restricted travel distance to a safe point. The script is run on a model and it's highlighting any of the flats which do not conform to the regulations. It's using generative design. It's possible to have the software also produce design options, which would already conform to this.

But with Dynamo, we can enter the requirements from the regulations, program them in, run them on our Revit models, and instantly get feedback onto any of the units which do not conform. They're highlighted in red and the distances are given. To do this on a multi-storey building manually could take an awful lot of time, and without doubt things can get missed.

The second video shows a very quick overview of Forma placing mixed use buildings and parking on a chosen site. It's based on rules. It's able to generate many design alternatives in seconds using generative design and then analyze things like the wind, the noise around the site, using machine learning from thousands and thousands of projects. Just how long would that take you to do manually?

Great stuff. I know. But as I mentioned earlier, change is happening faster and faster. Companies have fewer resources who can react to these changes. And there's little time to learn what the changes are or how they will affect your business. Our ability to keep up with all of this is reaching the zenith.

This is why Autodesk is developing outcome based solutions. They're a roadmap to support you and your company on the digital journey that lies ahead. They help balance time and resources efficiently by providing a logical structure and a path forward. They help mitigate the chaos that's going on around us and allow us to focus on the job that we need to do.

For FY25, these are the current solutions which support the building design. We have things like site feasibility, BIM for MEP systems renovation, adaptive reuse, something which is very pertinent and with the LA 2028 games, something that Autodesk is the software vendor for this. And the entire aspect around the games is about reusing and renovating existing infrastructure. We've got operational and embodied carbon management, flood risk simulation. In construction, asset commissioning and handover and construction safety management. And there's more coming.

And I know this session is around AEC, Architecture, Engineering, and Construction, but we're also aware of the convergence that's going on in the industry. So this slide shows how through planning, design, build, operation, and decommissioning, we combine the combination of AEC solutions and design and manufacturing ones to support things like integrated factory modeling.

Now let's take a look at the solutions themselves. Each solution deck comprises of four sections. Firstly, a positioning deck. This sets the scene. It tells the story. We understand the problem and we look at the value that the solution can offer companies.

We look at the technology landscape. What products and tools do you need to deliver on this solution? And we look at the stages and the workflows, each stage supported by multiple workflows, again, aligned with the various pieces of software. And we're talking about a holistic story here. This is not about a single point product.

And finally, the planning and execution stage. The decks are designed to be a working living document with our account teams and our channel partners and you yourself, our clients, to work together and build out these decks as live working documents to develop implementation and training programs. Let's run through one of our solutions' site feasibility studies, in a bit more detail.

The beginning of the deck is the navigation. And if I click on the positioning section, we can run through a typical example of one of these solution decks. For site feasibility studies, we understand the issues at the moment that you face. Time constraints, cost, zoning, environmental impact, community acceptance. This is all very difficult and challenging until we introduce our solution, site feasibility studies. Purposely developed to help you deliver on site feas studies. It enables the efficient evaluation of viability and optimization of a potential site design.

We look at the current industry trends, unprecedented demand, project scope and complexity, distributed workforces, et cetera. We look at the current workflows and the issues such as fragmented processes or document based collaboration, overwhelming detail. And the solution we provide overcomes this by connecting via the cloud, using AI and generative design, using building information modeling, et cetera.

In the case of site feasibility studies, we also understand that this is often non-billable or cost sensitive work carried out. So you have limited resources to be able to apply to this, because it's non-revenue generating. And that can also limit the scope of what you're able to offer. With site feasibility studies as a solution, we can increase the amount of scope, broadening it, and allowing you to provide much more detailed site studies.

The solution decks explain how this can take place. So with site feas again, typically where we look at detailed studies are carried out, design development. This is where the analysis gets done. But using our solution and key products like Forma, we can bring that forward and allow you to do the generative design and the AI faster, earlier detailed analysis right at the conceptual design stage.

We back this up by research. It's interesting, but McKinsey and the MDI MDPI study indicates that only 35% of the AE industry has connected BIM processes. Sweden alone, there's an opportunity. There's $50 million that could be saved by using better data flows in planning at the early stage.

The solution. We describe it and we also talk about what it can support in terms of outcomes. So for site feasibility studies, we can improve design quality. We can help meet certification requirements. And importantly, we can help provide healthy environments for all of us.

Again, our solutions are built for a global audience. And this is an example of where site feasibility would come into play. So in America, pre-design schematic. Australia, again, pre-design, conceptual design. And in the UK, in the case of RiBA, strategic definition, prep briefing, and conceptual design.

As we look a bit deeper, we can understand the key components of any given solution. In this case, zoning and regulations, land use, physical characteristics, environmental impact, access and transportation, market analysis, financial feasibility all need to be taken into consideration.

But not only do we need to design for the now, we need to look towards the future. We know global warming is taking place. And so our solutions help you look into the future and understand what is to come and how we can help mitigate that.

I think this statement sums it up. What works now may not work in 25 years time. The now and the future are intertwined, and we need solutions that help us understand both of these realities.

As I mentioned, it's important to talk about sustainability aspect. So again, in all of our solutions, we address this. And in site feasibility studies, we help you address biodiversity, water cycle, solar energy, natural materials, and diurnal cycles.

Each of our solutions is built out with subject matter experts and lists out the typical stages that need to be performed. In the case of site feas, scoping the project all the way through to approval.

What it allows you to do is collate all of that previous information from multiple sources in multiple formats, and it allows you to generate an information model perfect for analysis, design auctioneering, optimization, and presenting out to your stakeholders.

The timing's right. We know this. The industry needs to change. We believe that our platform will offer you connected data, connected teams, and connected workflows. Solutions decks are also backed up by customer statements, success stories where we've worked with our clients. Deeper dive into the stories.

The next part of the solution deck is around the technology landscape. And this is split into two parts. If we're with key high level stakeholders, we talk about the core products. What is the minimum you need to get the job done? And for site feasibility, this is Forma, it's Revit, InfraWorks, Autodesk Docs, and AutoCAD Map 3D. That is what you need as a minimal to get the job done.

However, there is an expanding technology landscape which can offer a enhanced value. We can introduce things like Workshop XR for virtual reality walkthroughs, Twinmotion. We can bring in reality capture from LiDAR in via ReCap Pro or drone photogrammetry.

The third part of the solution deck is all about the actual stages in the workflows and delving deeper. And we've built these out. We have information about each stage that you saw earlier in the positioning deck. We talk about the stage and we address the individual workflows that support that stage.

As an example, developing a contextual model stage two, we need to georeference images. We need to import contextual data, and we need to georeference a model. Each one of these slides is supported by a short two to three minute video showing the Autodesk technologies performing that particular stage. The idea of this is to, A, demonstrate that our software has the capabilities, and also allow you to share this internally amongst your teams and the wider organization to create awareness and understanding of the possibilities.

Here we can see the data being brought in from various free repositories. And very, very quickly, in a matter of minutes, we can generate a very detailed contextual model in both Forma and InfraWorks.

The moment the contextual information is in, we can immediately start to run various types of early analysis like solar, daylight factors, wind analysis, noise, microclimates, so we can start to understand the as is before we even begin developing out a site.

This second part shows InfraWorks bringing in contextual data from the Canadian government website. So the buildings are in a lot more detail, and every mature tree is accurately placed within the model. As I mentioned, each one of these stage slides is built out with a supporting video.

I will quickly run through this one by dragging the bar along. But you can see in this case, it's InfraWorks. And it's performing a zoning cost analysis. And the second part, again, is using InfraWorks, and it's performing a traffic analysis. We can understand things like what is the current traffic flow around an area before we build in or develop a new site.

Then we can create a proposal and we can compare the before and after. Even during construction, we can start to understand things like what's the traffic impact going to be if we open or close different roads for access. Interestingly enough, on the sustainability front, InfraWorks also allows us to output the emissions in CO2 and NOx.

The second part of the stages and workflows is then broken down even further. And this is where our consultants or our channel partners can work with you and start to build out a detailed training program or implementation plan. If I look at a couple of these, stage three terrain topography, you can see we list out the relevant pieces of software that we will need to work with and the basic high level steps that need to take place in order to deliver that particular core task or workflow.

This allows us to start having conversations with you around your current maturity levels and also your desire to become digitally mature. I'm just going to move through these. All the slides will be available in the AU class deliverables on the website.

The final part of the deck is planning and execution. As I said previously when we've worked with you or when our partners have worked with you, we've dealt with multiple documents when it comes to the planning and execution and the positioning and the training. The idea now is that this is in one deck. It's a live document. So we've added the planning, the execution, and the typical things like the initiative descriptions, the broader program scope.

As I mentioned, we're building out many solutions this year and over the coming years. So we can work with you to build out a long term one, two, three, five year development plan where we take you through your digital journey. We can then break it down on a weekly or monthly basis, stage by stage, product by product, workflow by workflow. We look at the stakeholder governance, the risk register, delivery key milestones, et cetera.

So that's my presentation finished, and I sincerely hope that you found it of interest. If you have any questions, you can reach out to the Autodesk account team that you work with or your channel partner if you want to find out more information. And with that said, I thank you for your time in listening to this, and I will now end this presentation. Thank you.