BIM Competition

AFran

Hey guys,

I am a construction Management Student at Colorado State University. I am also on the Building Information Modeling competition team. We have a competition in which we will be competing against other schools on the 11th. We are given 2D plans and we are to complete 3 stages of completeness (Level 100 through 300.)
So basically level 100 is a masssing of the structure that we are to draw as well as the structures surrounding. I am thinking that SketchUp will be a great tool for masssings and for planning. Google earth may be a great asset as well to output a fly in video etc... Sandbox may help as well.

Level 200 adds a bit more detail and this is when we will start using Revit to draft.

My responsibility on the team is to handle level 100 and I am looking for some advice on the workflow. There are several parts of SketchUp that I think will be valuable; sandbox, google earth integration, easy massings, sunlight simulation, and LEED strategies.

IES has a toolbar for SketchUp that I would like to get my hands on. I registered for the trial version of the toolbar and listed my email and such and they did not offer a download on the website after registering nor did they send me an email. Has anyone gotten the trial of the IES toolbar? How did you go about getting it?

Anyways I was looking for your input on how I could implement Sketchup, Earth, and possible LEED analysis and planning.

Thanks for your help guys,

adam

Rob D

Hey Adam

Good luck with the competition! If you PM me your email address I can send you the install file for the IES software, but I warn you it's 55Mb . I obtainined it from the IES website but maybe they don't give it out to student email addresses?

You can probably do everything you need in SketchUp without using Revit. In my opinion SU is now a BIM application since release 7. A couple of weeks ago I was at a Revit training day and I didn't see anything there that can't be done in SU. You will need to have a look around for plugins to allow you to output data however you need it (scheduling etc). You also need a 2d CAD application for level 400 such as Autocad Lt.

Kind regards
Rob D

AFran

Rob,

That is very interesting that you think that SketchUp is able to be a full-flown BIM program. I am aware that Synchro is able to provide the scheduling aspect, but what is available for estimating and producing QTOs? And how do you tell a component what it is, for example to tell a wall that is a CMU wall with certain insulation etc. Would you make a dynamic component out of it?

remus

I dont really know a lot about BIM modelling, but from the sounds of it you could do what you want with dynamic components.

Specifically, using the generate report function would probably be quite useful.