Monday, May 9, 2011

The 2 essential BIM gizmos: The Underdefined and the Welldefined (suggestions for BIM-tool developers)

The Underdefined and the Welldefined are two gizmos, the foundation of an ‘optimum’ building design-modelling toolset.
Not to be confused with the ‘ideal’ (utopistic, press-of-a-button) one, this solution could be the reality of BIM now, even though it may not exist.

To put it simply, this solution based on gizmos could (and should) be available off-the-shelf at present.
(with a little-bit of help from my developer friends).

I define these two gizmos as:

The Underdefined:
a totally generic, mouldable ‘thing’ – an amalgamation of the wall-beam-slab-roof tools that most modelling packages already have. A Boolean-enabled creature, also a cutter.
It works with the magic wand, has interactive nods and ability to assign spatial points the way meshes do.
It’s highly generic and infinitely customisable. Attributes are expandable and modifiable, parameters constrainable, but unlikely to be a fully free-style modeller (very few buildings need that anyway).

The Welldefined:
A rigid, predefined ‘thing’, very smart but almost unchangeable without good programming skills and getting under the bonnet. Provided by manufacturers and suppliers it needs no editing apart from selection and positioning.

The Underdefined gizmo is like a magic pencil that I can turn into anything I like and want, the Welldefined is the equivalent of a sticker, it is explicit and unambiguous.

Don’t dismiss this as fluff or wishful thinking, if it makes no sense, read it again!






















See also Stefan Boeykens comment on an earlier post

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