20 Mile Threshold on Import

This is a follow up to my earlier post this week regarding the 20 mile threshold. A comment to that post mentioned that the governing extent is equivalent to a 10 mile radius sphere whose origin is at 0,0,0. In my own testing I've observed the threshold is more closely defined as a cube.

This image is a 10 mile radius sphere with a line segment that travels beyond the edges of the sphere but within the boundary that a cube would have.

You can see the highlighted square is the extent of the DWG file and line extends outside of the sphere at each end but is still inside the boundary of where a cube would lie instead.

This image is the same file but the line is altered to extend beyond the edge of the sphere/cube extent.

This is the message that appears when I reloaded the file after altering the line's extent.

The warning can be avoided if we ensure that the DWG file doesn't have any elements that extend beyond the 20 mile cube (10 mile radius). The cube can be quite far from the origin of the DWG file but nothing can be outside the cube's boundary.

BIM Blog Plug - Practical BIM

Just a quick post to plug another blogger's effort. Antony McPhee has been using Practical BIM to document his thinking on the subject of BIM; design and construction project planning. Apart from researching the various documents available today he's been trying to express what he thinks the process could or should look like based on his experience. Some of his recent posts include:

Collaboration or Coercion: The Design Collaboration Plan
Utilising Your Office BIM Manual: Participants BIM Plans
BIM for Owners - The BIM Project Brief
Single project BIM Execution Plan: A Good Idea?

Back in September he did a series of posts to review the "BIM in Practice" document from the Australian Institute of Architects.

If you and your firm are wrestling with BIM you ought to read through his posts and add them to your considerations. Worth a read even you aren't...

Autodesk Research

The beauty of an RSS feed is that new stuff gets added to a pile and I can sift the pile really fast instead of traveling to each and every blog I'm aware of. The time it takes just waiting for web pages to load even in this day and age of fairly ubiquitous and fast access would add up to serious time. I use Google's Reader, maybe not the best but it works for me either on the notebook PC or my phone. It isn't as rich an experience as actually visiting the blog itself but if there is some meat in a feed then it's a simple matter to go there for more.

Aaron at D|C|CADD's BLOG posted a bit about Project Dasher, an Autodesk Research project they are sharing some information and videos for now on their site. I heard about Dasher during a marketing session I attended on Monday at Autodesk University. It was pretty cool looking but the discussion was fairly brief so it slipped my mind since.

Here's their description for Project Dasher:
...snip
Project Dasher is a web-based application that helps to augment existing Autodesk® Revit® design models with real-time building submeter and sensor data on electricity and occupancy. Using meter and sensor data, Autodesk Project Dasher aims to demonstrate the value of integrating Building Information Modeling (BIM) and building instrumentation to provide building owners more insight into how existing buildings perform in real time and throughout the lifecycle of the building.
...snip

Here's what their site has to say about what Autodesk Research is:

...snip
Autodesk is working to help solve some of the world's most complex design problems, from pressing ecological challenges to the development of scalable smart infrastructure. Designers use Autodesk tools to not only create plans for buildings, for example, but also to simulate their impact on the environment and track their performance over time.

Autodesk Research is unique in that we are dedicated to innovation and discovery in this realm. Our interests range from methods to help users learn powerful digital prototyping tools, to visualization and simulation techniques which enable designers to achieve new levels of performance. Advancing the state of the art in human-computer interaction, computer graphics, and digital design technology, we collaborate openly with researchers at leading universities around the world.
...snip

My first thought after reading this was how does this connect to Autodesk Labs? It doesn't appear to literally connect and I didn't see any mention of a connection but I suspect Labs can get involved once research moves beyond academic research and can become a product focused concept? Enough conjecture on my part.

You can watch a Project Dasher VIDEO. I didn't see a way to embed it here because it isn't hosted at You Tube. There is a second VIDEO which is an interview titled "Extending BIM to Real-Time Energy Performance Monitoring".