No BIM files? No problem: how to build a BIM strategy from zero
Learn how to launch a BIM strategy from zero with expert tips from BIMobject’s Senior BIM Specialist Maher Oueslati.
Alucobond was introduced to Polantis in 2013, and its BIM (Building Information Modelling) approach was special because it was exceptional as it was developed in two phases.
A decision was made to create a model for the manufacturer’s panels, by first developing shaders or textures. The objective was to enable users to view the aesthetic qualities of the Alucobond products in the work that they were designing at the time.
In 2016, with many shaders produced and with Alucobond better understanding of designers’ interest, the teams opted for the creation of three facade panels.
What’s the advantage of downloading a complete Alucobond system? It lies in the ability to integrate a panel into a digital model and combine a texture with it in order to:
Throughout the modeling process, Polantis found in Alucobond’s German teams an attentive interlocutor that was careful to respond to the expectations of the user.
In 2013, the chief architect of the Alucobond project at Polantis visited the Alucobond factory in Singen to learn about the history of the manufacturer, its manfacturing processes, and the attention paid to the quality of the designs created for facades.
Once production began, back-and-forth communication between Alucobond and Polantis were necessary for adjusting the level of realism and specificity of the colors in order to achieve a perfect rendering. The shader modeling was created thanks to the catalog of refererences and the samples scanned which were provided to the architecture team by the manufacturer.
In 2016, Alucobond asked Polantis to develop a range of textures first created for Revit for the ArchiCAD software.
The team dedicated to the Archicad program then took on the project. It was necessary to go back practically to the starting point to recreate each of the 94 textures: it was possible to retrieve the elements since they were RAL, the scale of the textures, and the dimensions of the designs.
Modelling the most elaborate textures was done from the Archicad rendering engine: the CineRender. In the same way as Revit, the level of difficulty varied according to the complexity of the texture: metallic aspects, fresnel effects, reliefs, etc.
The advantage of ArchiCAD is that CineRender is a very high-performance rendering engine, so the user can stay within the software and observe the aesthetic qualities of the product, without having to open up a third-party software program, so it’s easier to view the textures.
Upon its involvment in the second phase, the team in charge of modeling in ArchiCad suggested to Alucobond to allow users a download by packs: several shades of the same line could be downloaded in one go.
This simpler operation was adopted by the modelling team for Revit.
Three years later, with the textures modeled, Alucobond asked Polantis architects to work on the "background", or rather, "backstage". How many panels, how many slabs were behind a texture applied onto a given surface? What was going on behind the texture?
Modeled facades are a real time-saver for designers, who can try out several possibilities in the drafting phase, with the use of an automatic tile layout calculation and the chance to visualize the applied colors.
First, the team examined the level of desired details, and it was agreed that three would be developed:
Four layers can be distinguished by modelling the panel with the highest level of detail:
In order to offer its BIM solution to a maximum number of users, in 2016, Alucobond also chose to offer a range of its systems to ArchiCAD.
The architects in charge of the project therefore produced:
It is interesting to note that in ArchiCad, the BIM’d product is considered a parametric object while in Revit, it is considered a system object.
The two software programs do not at all have the same functions at all, therefore it was impossible for the Polantis teams to think about the modelling of Alucobond products in the same way. The two teams worked independently from one another. Far from harming the production, these reflexions allowed the teams to obtain a global view of the project, and to innovate in order to underpin the Alucobond BIM approach.
Over the past months, on Polantis, downloads in BIM formats are distributed between formats as follows:
Revit totaled 47.3% of the downloads, so it is common for manufacturers to start their BIM approach by having their product modeled on that software. However, modelling in ArchiCad is more and more commonly requested by manufacturers.
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