Keynote announcement 2022

Proudly we are announcing this year BILT Academy keynote talk will be held by Jose Ariza. He is going to talk about: How to win the race of digital transformation in the AEC industry (Spanish: Como ganar la Carrera de la transformación digital en el sector AEC).

Jose Ariza is a Mechanical Engineer with more than 10 years of experience in the AEC industry working on multidisciplinary projects. He works as EMEA Technical Specialist at Autodesk focusing on cloud collaboration and digital transformation for different industry segments in EMEA helping multidiscipline customers to achieve their business goals using Autodesk Technology.

Mentor announcement 2022 #5

Luis and Pedro are going to lead the workshop 5 Introduction to Parametric Design with Grasshopper 3d.

Luis E. Fraguada

Luis Fraguada is a developer at McNeel Europe, specializing in AEC applications, interoperability, 3d on the web, and 3rd party developer support. Luis joined McNeel Europe in 2015 and is currently developing on several projects, including rhino3dm and Rhino.Compute. Luis also helps to manage the development of Food4Rhino, a platform for 3rd party developers to share their apps and resources with the Rhino community. In addition to this role, Luis initiated and manages McNeel Europe’s participation in EU Funded research projects including Innochain, V4Design, MindSpaces, and Ecolopes.

Pedro Cortes

Pedro Cortés is a developer and technical support specialist at McNeel Europe. Since he joined the company in 2021, he is involved in the development of several projects, including Rhino.Inside Revit. Pedro also has experience as a Rhino and Grasshopper trainer, coordinating the Training Course for Resellers and participating as a teacher in events and workshops. In addition, Pedro collaborates in Food4Rhino webinars, a series of talks in which professionals and experts share their advances in the use of new technologies (AI, ML) with McNeel tools (Grasshopper, Rhino.Compute, Rhino.Inside).4

How to Listen to The BILT Academy Podcast

Mentor announcement 2022 #4

Moty Vaknin

Moty will be leading workshop 4 on Quality control in multi-disciplinary projects. In this workshop, students will be introduced to the most important aspects of quality control in a multi-disciplinary working environment. BIM models will be discussed regarding the requirements per discipline, reaching from architects, structural engineers and HVAC. Specific software will be introduced that allows BIM managers to evaluate the quality of each model and in combination with each other. As a result, you will understand how to report and communicate issues among stakeholders.

Moty Vaknin Is a CTO at WeBIM, a Company based in Israel. WeBIM is an innovative company that has a strong passion to improve the construction industry by applying BIM methodology throughout the whole project lifecycle. Moty is We BIM Education Manager for Autodesk ATC (authorized Training Center) and AAP (Autodesk Academic Centre) in Israel. With over 10 years Working and Training in BIM Platforms. Moty is one of the forerunners of the BIM revolution in Israel.

Mentor announcement 2022 #3

Kelly Cone

Kelly is going to lead workshop 3 on Reality Capture with Laser Scanning. This class will delve into the world of point cloud data processing. A number of the recent scan to BIM projects will be presented and discussed. We’ll play with some scan data (surveyed at UPV) and attendees will gain an insight into practical modelling procedures for as-built projects and experience semi-automated Scan-to-BIM software.

I am passionate about process and technology innovation and how they can change industries and people’s lives. My education is in architectural design and documentation, but my experience within the AEC space is far more varied.

I have implemented various practice technologies into design, estimating, and construction teams and workflows; worked on amazing projects such as the SaRang Global Ministry center in Seoul as a designer, and Renzo Piano’s addition to the Louis Kahn Kimbell Art Museum as a contractor; and have had the privilege of growing and leading one of the most talented VDC & Process Innovation teams in the industry.

Those experiences have taught me there is a better way to create our built environment, and I want to make that way become a reality. As a first step in that journey, I have joined ClearEdge3D to help them develop the tools necessary for design and construction firms to get the most out of reality capture within the AEC industry, with the goal of closing the gap between the virtual and real world.

How to Listen to The BILT Academy Podcast

Mentor announcement 2022 #1

Francisco Tabanera

Francisco is going to lead workshop 1 on BIM management in the design phase from an architectural perspective. This workshop covers the fundamentals of information management in digital design projects and interdisciplinary collaboration efforts.

Francisco Tabanera is a technical leader and partner at Modelical. With a background as an architect for several years at Sagrada Familia’s design team, Francisco joined Modelical to help with several tasks, from challenging large project development to corporate implementation. Currently, he is the leader of the Innovation department in Modelical. Francisco got his Bachelor in Architecture from Barcelona Tech – ETSAB and earned a Master in Advanced Design and Digital Architecture from ELISAVA.

How to Listen to The BILT Academy Podcast

Mentor announcement 2022 #2

Bernardette Soust-Verdaguer

Bernardette will be leading workshop 2 on BIM and LCA implementation in the design process. This workshop focuses on theoretical and practical aspects to integrate an environmental assessment based on the Life Cycle Assessment method in the design process in BIM.

Bernardette Soust-Verdaguer is a Ph.D. Architect, who developed her career in various countries such as Uruguay, France, Spain, working in the field of sustainable buildings, especially on the use of environmental assessment tools and digital design tools such as BIM. Currently, she is working as a researcher and invited Professor at the University of Seville (School of Architecture) where participates in National and International Projects (IEA EBC Annex 72) focused on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and BIM integration. She is associated to the Green Building Council España, where participates in the Circular Economy working group.

How to Listen to The BILT Academy Podcast

Mentor Announcement #7 & #8 Summit 2019

Dear all,

I am very excited to announce our mentors for the workshop Collaboration with IFC.

via GIPHY

Drum roll for…

Diane Ramage & Andy Waring

Diane Ramage

Background

I have 30 years construction experience gained within construction across a range of projects and sectors and as BIM Manager at Keppie Design I develop our standards and procedures to align with those of the UK, and now the international, standards, providing guidance to staff and management while ensuring over 70 Revit users have continuing software and procedure skills development.

I’ve been using BIM software and methods since 2004 and have applied them on Architectural projects ranging from small residential units to multi-million commercial and healthcare schemes, working collaboratively with all other project consultants and clients. I have been a passionate advocate of BIM collaboration throughout my career and relish the fact that every day still teaches me something new.

I’m also part of the Keppie team who develop partnerships with further education establishments since I have also previously lectured in Architectural Technology and keep in contact with the education sector, where I’ve collaborated with lecturers in course development. I’ve trained others in implementation of BIM methods, technology and software since 2004 and as a committee member of the Glasgow Revit User Group I’m a firm believer that spreading and sharing knowledge will help the wider construction industry and ultimately be beneficial to the whole industry.

Her Motivation

I take great delight in watching students engage with the subject matter and progress their understanding and skills and I believe my experience can help students put the context of their learning experience into practical use within the “real” world of the construction industry. I’m excited to be taking part in BILT Academy as a mentor because it’ll be an opportunity to share experiential knowledge and help students transition from education to the workplace with confidence in their skills.

Andy Waring

Background

I graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and became an architect in early 2017 completing various projects across the Sports, Education and Justice sectors with a combined project value of £70M in that time. I became the BIM manager of Holmes Miller Architects in early 2018. Holmes Miller has 3 offices, in Glasgow, London and Guangzhou with just under 100 staff. I lead the development and implementation of in house standards and content aligned to international specification and provide extensive training around various standards and tools both in house and externally. I also handle most ICT related matters and specialize in research and development projects ranging from the development of fully automated model validation procedures and various tools to aid parametric design and production. I am also developing integrations between finance software and various analysis tools for the SMT. Outside of Holmes Miller, I am a committee member for the Glasgow Revit User Group (GRUG) and have previously been the chair on various industry summits.

His Motivation

With concepts such as virtual digital construction and BIM becoming mainstream, we need intelligent and motivated students with the right knowledge to be productive and push the industry into the 21st century. Industry collaboration with education is vital to ensure that students are aware and prepared to join us in dragging the construction sector into the 21st century. I am delighted to be offered to opportunity to be a BILT Academy mentor to help guide the innovators of the future.

Key Learning Objectives

01- Learn how to collaborate with IFC files within Revit and to export an IFC from Revit

  • Open an IFC using Revit and save as a Revit file
  • Link a native IFC into a Revit model
  • Export a Revit model to IFC  
  • Export formats
  • Location of Revit IFC Export mapping table
  • Simplified Export process
  • Overview of IFC advanced export settings

02- Learn about the BIM interoperability suite for classification of model elements, and to prepare your model for COBie data

  • Where to access the suite and an overview of the elements
  • Classification manager overview
  • COBie overview
  • Workflow for COBie population in Revit

03- Learn about Revit Model Checker and how to customise it to suit standards

  • Overview of Revit Model Checker
  • Why /when  use model checker
  • Example of validation process using model checker

Short Q&A

1)Where do you see the importance of collaborating with IFC? Why this kind of standards are important for the AEC industry?

Working within Architecture I’m not the greatest advocate of the IFC format, I do think it’s very important that there is a method of interoperability through an open format but I see it more as a necessary complication to my job, since not everyone works across the same software formats. Industry software providers have resisted developing their platforms on a completely open format but the need for IFC import/export adds further time and effort onto projects where fee margins (in the UK) are very tight.


Additionally IFC still is not 100% accurate, and that margin of inaccuracy leave us at risk of being subject to legal disputes, hence it’s important that we adopt a workflow and method to interact with the IFC format, and we always ensure that any output in IFC format is clearly identified as being subject to potential inaccuracy or misinterpretation by the software used to read it as is the case with all exchange formats without a native editing tool

2)Could you briefly explain the difference between Open BIM and Closed BIM approaches? What is the need and role of IFC for Open BIM approach?

Closed BIM relies on every project participant using the same software, being version specific and requires no interoperability between different software formats.  This rarely happens, since CAD, Excel, Navisworks, images would have different formats but are regularly incorporated to inform the project design.

Completely open BIM would encompass integration of all formats, in particular IFC and COBie, and this happens on most design projects, but it can be a difficult, time involved process and unless participants are familiar with good workflows and processes and have additional interoperability tools to handle the tasks involved these integrations can cause expensive delays to project progress.

An ideal open BIM world would see all software platforms linking together seamlessly using the native software platform formats, but this dream is unlikely to become reality, hence the need for tools to use IFC format and interoperability tools.

3)What is the most important message you want to give to the students after attending your workshop?

Always know the limitations of the deliverables you are signing up for, find out if they are fit for purpose and make your clients aware of this from the outset.


We’ve looked at some of the collaboration tools we use to provide our design services. They are not the essence of our design services, and regardless of how much automation and efficiency these tools provide, never underestimate the need for your design individuality, your thought and intellect, your expertise to inform any construction project. They say a bad worker blames his tools, instead be the expert worker who simply uses the tools to enhance inspired design.

Mentor Announcement #5 & #6 Summit 2019

Very excited to announce this year mentors for the workshop Reality Capture. As recognized mentors of last year BILT Academy Summit 2018, they are back again and committed to present and teach students in scan to BIM workflows.

Drum roll for …

Conor Shaw & Kelly Cone!

CONOR SHAW

Background

Conor is a veteran BILT Europe speaker, Edinburgh to be his fourth appearance. As part of the panel discussion on standards in Delft 2013, he spoke about BIM implementation for small companies. In Aarhus, he presented work on scan-to-BIM applied to historic buildings and was rated a top 10 speaker. This was followed up in Ljubljana with some further work into the world of reality capture and BIM. This year he’ll be taking a different track and running a roundtable discussion, digesting the UNFCCC global climate talks and their effect on our industry. Trained as a construction engineer, in 2016 he received his M.Sc in Construction and Real Estate Management from the HTW Berlin. He established Shaw Architectural Solutions in 2014 which offers BIM consultancy services worldwide with clients include Engineers in Berlin, Surveyors in Belfast, Contractors in New York and Architects and private clients in Helsinki. Recently Conor has been involved in establishing a network of professionals with a shared vision of promoting ecological building practices and is currently in the middle of building a 185m2 guesthouse in Finland from wood, straw and clay.

His Motivation 

The BILT Academy mentorship programme is a very positive development of what the BILT conference is about. I have been involved previously with the European Architecture Student’s Assembly, a similar non-profit organisation, and am well aware of the benefits such experiences give to a student in the construction field. The unforeseen outcomes of involvement with an event like this such as; contacts made, experiences gained and personal truths challenged, can be greatly beneficial. In my own experience, it was the ‘extra curriculars’ in which I was involved (and not necessarily university attendance), which, in hind-sight, has had the greatest impact on my professional development. Therefore I see such a program as a very positive undertaking and am delighted to be involved again in Edinburgh!

KELLY CONE

Background

I am passionate about process and technology innovation and how they can change industries and people’s lives. My education is in architectural design and documentation, but my experience within the AEC space is far more varied.

I have implemented various practice technologies into design, estimating, and construction teams and workflows; worked on amazing projects such as the SaRang Global Ministry center in Seoul as a designer, and Renzo Piano’s addition to the Louis Kahn Kimbell Art Museum as a contractor; and have had the privilege of growing and leading one of the most talented VDC & Process Innovation teams in the industry.

Those experiences have taught me there is a better way to create our built environment, and I want to make that way become a reality. As a first step in that journey, I have joined ClearEdge3D to help them develop the tools necessary for design and construction firms to get the most out of reality capture within the AEC industry, with the goal of closing the gap between the virtual and real world.

Motivation

Our education system so often holds up individuals as heroes of design or industry. Piano, Gehry, Calatrava, Gates, Musk, etc… In reality, the changes these people are credited with took hundreds or even thousands of people working towards a similar vision. And a lot of the effort wasn’t people working for those luminaries, it was people in adjacent companies or even industries that made their own impacts that made it easier for those luminaries to succeed. It was all the people on similar paths that lent legitimacy to their efforts. The individuals we hear about are those with the best timing, the most successful, the most well-known, but they are not the titular super-hero entrepreneur that single-handedly changed the world…

That is why programs like this are so important. If you want to change a profession, or an industry, you need to start a revolution. Revolutions happen on the backs of thousands of small but important decisions, and most often happen when new people enter a profession with a passion for how that profession should be. So, by empowering new architects, engineers, builders, and fabricators with the knowledge and the tools to enact the changes our industry needs – each of us can have an outsized impact on pushing change forward. And while none of us may be that person that becomes famous for re-inventing how buildings are made, at least we’ll have played a critical part in making it possible.

KEY LEARNING OBJECTIVES

01-Gain a practical understanding of reality capture and scan-to-BIM technologies

Reality capture: various tools rapidly becoming standard in the AEC industry, and Scan-to-BIM: an emerging technology which bridges one of the most challenging gaps in the industry. The mentors will digest the state-of-the-art for you by putting current trends and technologies into easy to understand terms. Past experience and example projects will be used to convey this KLO.

02-Learn to effectively use semi-automated scan-to-BIM software (Edgewise 3D)

In this lab, we will be getting our hands dirty with various pieces of software such as Autodesk ReCap and Edgewise 3D. We will work on a recently scanned project and participants will get simple instructions from the experts on how to best utilize the strengths of scan-to-BIM software. 

03-Become familiar with benefits and the limitations of such software.

Semi-automated scan-to-BIM software is unquestionably the epitome of bleeding-edge technology, and thus, limitations to the capabilities persist. We will explain what these are and how best to select tools and commands to get the best results from the software. 

QnA

  1. Where do you see the (real) benefits of reality capture in the AECO industry?
    There is a massive gap in the industry in getting survey/scan data into usable formats for designers engineers and constructors. This is scan-to-BIM. it’s not perfect and certainly not applicable to every project (due to cost, scalability, organic shapes etc.). It is almost always the case that larger organizations will make the best use of such technology so its use seems to be most concentrated in industrial and energy projects (with lots and lots of pipes and structure). I believe that such functionality will eventually become a standard output of reality computer technology. 
  2. As we know, there are multiple technical methods for the creation of point clouds, such as pictures or scans. Regarding your experience in the real world practice, which one of these methods is mostly used and why?
    Creating point clouds from pictures (photogrammetry) and from laser scans (LiDAR) are both perfectly good methods and have their individual advantages and drawbacks. Photogrammetry can be quick and dirty, with generally far lower resolution, while LiDAR can be super accurate but tends to come in at a cost often numerous times that of the alternative. Sorry to say, but it depends. In my opinion, we are moving more towards; cheap, automated as far as possible, and sufficient technology use. One can obtain sufficient results from a scanner at a 10th of the cost of having excellent quality. Probably awareness of the levels of resolution and their related costs will become more widely known in the industry and general public.  
  3. To what extent do you consider scan-to-BIM processes to be integrated into real-world projects and where could they be improved in the future, taking into account the latest technological developments in the digitalization of heritage buildings.
    Well as far as heritage and how well is it integrated there, I’d have to say very very minimally. I think that probably not much more than research projects are using this technology in built heritage with some exceptions (Kelly can probably point you to some). How they could be improved? Have the technology taken up and developed as a public good. We need this type of technology to advance so that we can effectively document our built heritage and assist in its maintenance while it’s still here. As always, if we leave it in corporate hands, it will move towards profit, which is inevitably in massive-scale projects and never in heritage. 
  4. How do you see the scan-to-BIM technology in the future usage of digital replicas, so-called digital twins, of real-estate (buildings) or infrastructure assets? 
    Simply as a part of the process to develop these digital twins. 
  5. What is the most important message you want to give to the students after attending your workshop?
    My message would be mostly on the networking and participation side. I think it’s great that they all come here. Participating in such events is the key to effective early professional development and keeps things fun at the same time while continuously learning. Another message might be ‘learn how to learn technology’. Things are moving so fast now that you cannot expect your university to give you the tools you will need 5 or 10 years later. Become a life long learner.