ASCON moves towards BIM relying on C3D kernel and A.Bausk

This step of ASCON is not a bombshell. See, for example, how the company CEO Maxim Bogdanov presented the key directions of ASCON’s immediate developments last May:

However, the news that came out on this Friday about ASCON, BIM, C3D kernel, and Alexander Bausk altogether was a kind of a sensation for the Russian CAD market. 

After his excellent simultaneous translation at isicad-COFES-Russia 2010, a series of analytical articles (such as "More or Less Optimistic Update on BIM"), participation in Arizona COFES 2012, moderating BIM-related round tables at AU Russia 2013 and COFES Russia 2013, Alexander Bausk, who has a PhD in structural analysis and is an expert in industrial (nuclear stations) AEC, became one of the most noticeable analysts on Russia & CIS market. To better understand what I mean, see for example @bauskas.

Now a prompt nano-interview with Alexander.        

Is it true that you are now a full-time employee at ASCON?

Yes, it is true. It happened three days ago.

What is your position and what is the main focus of your tasks?

I've got a position of a leading analyst in one of new ambitious ASCON projects that uses ASCON’s modeler C3D. Joining ASCON, I have not changed the key point of my personal interests and work: it is still AEC engineering. My plans to help advance BIM also have not changed and I get an enthusiastic support from my employer. I believe that together we will present some new remarkable AEC and BIM tools. 

As far as I know, until now, you have been living quite far away from St-Petersburg. Do you work with ASCON remotely, over the Internet? 

No. Now I am living in St Petersburg, and my family will move here as soon as the school year is over.

My comment

ASCON has sound competences in MCAD, PLM, AEC, and supporting technologies. All ASCON’s current solutions are very popular in the Russian market, and the company’s ecosystem is likely the most developed in comparison with other vendors operating in Russia. ASCON has very close and efficient links with the Russian industry and is aware of its specifics and everyday needs. It means that although developing and bringing a new BIM product to market is very risky, ASCON has good chances.

Anyway, I believe that an attempt to use C3D for BIM is a promising project for the geometric kernel since it might open some new (hopefully original or maybe innovative) directions of software development. Finally, I am sure that active entering into the BIM audience is, among other things, an effective marketing move to better promote the flagship ASCON solutions.

Extended version in Russian 

Direct Modeling, Horseradish Leafs, BIM, and Google Translation

Yesterday, in my Russian blog, I published post “The CAD company, which is guided mainly by the opinions of current customers, will not be needed by them tomorrow” which was inspired by some hot discussions at isicad.ru. One of the discussions was about BIM (see "BIM Discussion Gets Heated in Russia", upFront.eZine #692. The second debate which is currently actively evolves is about direct modeling and it was initiated by a recent article "New Armor for Rhino"  by Dmitry Ushakov .

One of the readers advised me to translate my post into English, at least in order to please the mentioned CAD vendors as well as Martyn Day and Francis Bernard whom I quoted. I am not able to do this because my Russian original text is rather artistic:).  Maybe Google can help? However note that the same reader draw my attention to the wonderful translation proposed by Google for two particular words related to my post. Google seems to properly  translate Russian words list hrena into horseradish leaf but if you ask to translate hrenovyi list it gives you something different. Some explanation and excuse for this is as follows. On the one hand, reversing list hrena into hrenovyi list just corresponds to transformation of leaf of  horseradish into horseradish leaf (so that hrenovyi becomes precisely an adjective which in Russian is explicitly indicated by the ending). On the other hand, a Russian word hrenovyi, for some (strange – or natural?) reasons also means rotten, lousy… . Seems Google loves this variant much more and thus translates hrenovyi list as  f*cking sheet :).

You may ask what does direct modeling and BIM  have to do with a horseradish leaf? Well, in the acknowledgement part of my post I thanked Vladimir Talapov, the author of a fresh Russian bestseller book “Introduction to BIM” (392 pp.) published with a support of isicad, who (Vladimir) presented me not only a copy of his book but also a very important supplement – a bottle of liqueur based on horseradish leafs… See here a picture of both the book and bottle in "What Do You Need to Understand BIM Better" . I can definitely confirm that Vladimir is not only a brilliant expert and promoter of BIM but also an excellent specialist in Siberian liqueurs. As for Google Translator, everyone can judge for himself: this is Google's English version   of my Russian post in question.

BIM in Russia: Now About Modeling of an Ancient Church

Earlier,  in my blog I have several times presented the isicad.ru Big BIM Discussion. This time,  my task became much easier - thanks to a recent guest editorial by Alexander Bausk "BIM Discussion Gets Heated in Russia" published by Ralph Grabowski in his upFront.eZine #692.

Today isicad.ru presented the 15th isicad-BIM-article of Vladimir Talapoff, a professor of Novosibirsk Architecture University. This is something new: first, the paper is about modeling of an old Siberian wooden church, and, second, now Vladimir has a co-author, a nice girl - a post-graduate student who made all the modeling by means of Autodesk instruments - mainly by Revit and some minor use of AutoCAD. See a part of the model: 

The wooden church built in 18 century in Eastern Siberia: 

was in 1971 carefully moved to the open-air museum of Novosibirsk Scientific Center (where isicad.ru and LEDAS are operating):

The article states that although the BIM means available today are mostly oriented to design of new buildings and constructions, nevetherless a presented project practically proved that BIM can be applied for modeling of architectural monuments as well. The autors believe that effective information modeling of historic buildings should involve at least two different methods. One - "the traditional approach" can be used for brick and stone buildings while "discrete" method is natural for wooden and other dismountable / portable constructions. This article explains discrete approach which enables individual tracing of every element of a buiding.

I recommend you to take a look at the today's Russian publication for at least to see a lot of  pictures and examples of modeling.

A More or Less Optimistic Update on BIM

As promised in my previous post A Hot Discussion around BIM at isicad.ru, yesterday, isicad.net published in English a rather detailed summary of the isicad.ru-BIM-discussion. The English article was written by one of the active disputants - Alexander Bausk, a practical and qualified actor of the AEC-BIM market from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.

In his publication which contains several sections (A Doubt to Begin with, A Less Optimistic Definition of BIM, Update on BIM: the Complexity Challenge, Where do we go with BIM) Alexander not only gives an overview of seven related articles and many dozens of related comments but presents his own viewpoint on the subject.

I recommend to read A More or Less Optimistic Update on BIM by A.Bausk and invite English-language readers to join the isicad-BIM-discussion.

A Hot Discussion around BIM at isicad.ru

This discussion was initiated by the article Revolutions in Design published in late September. Alexander Yampolsky, a practical and experienced engineer from Tula, a city close to Moscow, argued that collaborative work at integrated 3D-model is something unpractical for real-life AEC or at least premature. By today, the article got 40+ comments - most of them substantial and profound. People explained that BIM is today already broadly applied, that one should not consider BIM as artificial intelligence, compared BIM with PLM, gave some examples of successful approaches and technologies from MCAD that is hardly a more simple domain than AEC.

The discussion promptly continued by a series of bright and very well illustrated articles by Vladimir Talapov, a professor of Novosibirsk AEC University who is known as a strong supporter and practical promoter of BIM:

What affects deployment of BIM in Russia

Deployment of BIM: Conservatism and Common Sense

BIM or not BIM: that is the question?

BIM is actually Based on Whale (related to Frank Gehry’s sculpture of whale constructed in 1992 in Barcelona).

These articles provoked a not less stream of comments (about 50) than that of the article of A.Yampolsky – mostly supporting BIM but not always and not completely. One of the discussion lines was whether and why people today often identify BIM with Revit and Autodesk.

The Talapov’s series was followed by an article of Alexander Bausk from Ukraine entitled A less Optimistic Viewpoint at BIM in which a somewhat balanced opinion is presented.

At last (but not finally) isicad.ru published an article of Vladimir Malukh How MCAD is Used in AEC. Vladimir gives illustrated examples of how CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, Inventor, and KOMPAS-3D are fruitfully used in some serious industrial AEC projects. I believe that far beyond such examples AEC could adopt a lot from both design project decomposition and collaborative integration that by today are well developed and became common in MCAD. I would not be surprised to know about a profound isomorphism between design phases in MCAD and similar design actions directly or indirectly are or should be applied in AEC. To say nothing about a more or less recognized correspondence between BIM and PLM.

Note also that most of the people that contributed into the BIM discussion are professionals working in the domain for a long time. Also, it is worth noting that according to Google Analytics most of the recent isicad articles on BIM attracted a record number of the web site visitors.

Those who can read Russian or trust automatic translations can take a look at the above mentioned links. On the other hand, Alexander Bausk who, above all, contributed the AEC-BIM working group at COFES-Russia by his synchronous translation, plans to write for isicad.net a summary of our BIM discussion in English.

The picture above was originally drawn by children from a Russian orphanage, then was reconstructed in a Revit model, 3D-printed in Moscow by Consistent Software Distribution, and at last presented to the children who made the picture. NB: besides Revit, it obviously could be modelled in many other systems!:).

Round tables and their moderators at COFES-Russia / isicad-2010

Several days ago, I presented those who confirmed their participation in COFES-Russia / isicad-2010. Now – about the moderators of the working groups (WG). WG is a round-table which is intended not only to discuss an important topic but also to formulate results of the discussion and present them to the final joint round table combined with a press-conference. See the event’s agenda with the links to the detailed description of WGs.

I hope those who know Oleg Shilovitsky and Deelip Menezes will not be surprised to see them at the Moscow event not only as bloggers but also as moderators and speakers.

Oleg has over ten years successfully been working as the CTO at (ENOVIA) SmarTeam, and I believe that today he uniquely combines a very rich practical experience with corporate independence and striving for profound analysis on what’s next in PLM and around?

Deelip’s company SYCODE makes plug-ins for practically all CADs, so he must know everything. On the other hand, if you look through Deelip’s blog (for example try to search direct modeling) you can see that he thoroughly and meticulously studies the most fresh, trendy and actively developing methods for direct modeling, synchronous technology, ... and all that stuff which we codified in the name of Working Group 2: "Intelligent methods of 3D modeling”. People from at least SpaceClaim and LEDAS who are practically working in this domain will actively participate in WG-2 but Deelip is universally informative and independent...

Elena Konvisar has been in marketing for many years, today she manages this direction in a respectable integrator company NEOLANT, and is well known as an experienced moderator of round tables with participation of many CAD vendors of the Russian market: see for example, "CAD vendors without ties: a full transcript" (in Russian) . Elena asked Oleg Shilovitsky to help her: this time Oleg is involved as an active connoisseur and promoter of modern means of work in social networks.

Vladimir Talapov is for a long time productively working with students in Novosibirsk Architectural University. Vladimir has a Ph.D. in mathematics and combines the talents of a practical teacher, uninhibited brilliant orator and polemicist (see for example the article "Modern design industry is a world of greedy predators” – in Russian), as well - a connoisseur and promoter of advanced industrial technologies. The isicad-2010 exhibition presents many projects made by Vladimir’s students.

Topics related to the free platform, open source, etc., not accidentally fell into the hands of Nanosoft: see The upFront.eZine Tour of Russia. Part VI: Nanosoft. Anyone who looks at the "Who's Who" section on the company’s web site, understands that Dmitri Popov is the best candidate for being a moderator: he is from Siberia, he holds a Ph.D., and he is the author of a textbook, he was working for Xerox, he wrote a system of parametric design and he is a fan of summer skiing in the Alps ...

In the hardware working group we plan to consider several new products. Similar to the new software (WG-2), it was decided that discussion will be hold by an independent expert - Vladimir Malukh who, with his broad competence, can play a role of a customer presenting the entire field of engineering software. Vladimir is also known as an experienced moderator of round tables.

Autodesk is one of the apparent leaders in the field of AEC, in particular, in the solutions that extend design to the full cycle of integrated modeling of buildings. Pavel Hanzhenkov is the head of AEC sector at the Russian office of Autodesk with a previous experience in a similar position at Honeywell: his practical expertise has been evidently expressed in the vital topics that Pavel proposes for the discussion at WG-7.

Detailed description of all working groups is available here.

One More Section at COFES-Russia, Now on AEC/BIM

After a preliminary program of COFES-Russia was announced, some people and companies reproached the organizers for the Seminar's focus on (M)CAD and lack of AEC/BIM. There is a dozen of obviously important actors in the Russian market that consider AEC or AEC+BIM as an important if not the key part of their business.

Therefore we added one more Working Group (WG-7) which is characterized as follows.

Perspectives of Building Information Modeling and its impact on AEC market

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a process of generation and management of building/construction data during its lifecycle. BIM uses AEC CAD tools for creating common information model of a building/construction that is shared for collaborative development by several teams of architects and engineers. The building information model consists of the description of geometry, spatial relations, geographic data, material properties, etc. Participants of this workgroup will discuss new tools and technologies for creating and managing BIM data.

Topics:
- Parametric building modeling
- 4D technology
- Green design
- Computer-aided engineering for AEC
- Collaborative development
- AEC design data standards
- Employment of new technologies in the Russian AEC market
- PLM and BIM: twins?

The latest version of the agenda can be found here.

I will appreciate any proposals to improve a summary of the domain and the list of potential topics for discussion.
.