Collaboration par excellence

Example: Hasselt City Hall, Belgium — The building of the new municipal administration center in Hasselt, Belgium, demonstrates how seamless collaboration in building projects can minimize risks and save costs from the design phase all the way to commissioning.
A joint project of several brands of the Nemetschek Group.
Nemetschek brands involved: Allplan, GRAPHISOFT, Solibri

Pioneering planning and project execution with Open BIM

“The end-to-end use of BIM solutions constitutes genuine added value for all stakeholders in the building process
because it enables seamless and efficient collboration”
Steven Hendrickx, Head Architect in Hasselt

Large-scale, highly complex building projects in particular require ongoing, reliable and efficient coodination between all stakeholders – both internal and external – across disciplines and between companies. Therefore, in association with other market players, the Nemetschek Group is promoting the Open BIM data standard. This is a universal, collaborative approach to designing, constructing and operating buildings based on open standards and workflows It makes it possible for project stakeholders to collaborate, even if the type of software varies from user to user. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) interface has established itself as an open standard and is therefore of central significance.

Sharing and evaluating data throughout the entire product life cycle saves time and money and improves quality. The administration of data is key to this digital transformation, for it is only possible to take full advantage of the potential if each stakeholder can access the data that he or she needs at any given time. This begins with a realistic BIM building model, which is an essential prerequisite for a genuine 5D workflo. This model is no longer limited to just 3D construction data; it also includes data concerning the dimensions of time and costs.

Seamless collaboration exemplified by the Hasselt City Hall

Under the management of the architect team comprising Jaspers-Eyers, MASS Architects and Michel Janssen, a new municipal administration center is being built in Hasselt. The complex, consisting of a renovated building section and a new building, provides approx. 17,000 m2 for the city administration and social services as well as offices. The architects and their most important partners are using Open BIM software solutions for the entire construction process. Three Nemetschek solutions are being implemented for this project: Archicad from Graphisoft for the design and planning of the architects, Allplan Engineering for civil engineering, and the Solibri Model Checker for the BIM quality control carried out by the construction company.

From the beginning, all information concerning the building project is contained in the digital building model – from the draft to implementation – including all design details, desired materials, fire protection requirements, acoustic properties, insulation and building structures, and administration. This constitutes considerable added value for all stakeholders compared to the old standard model, which was purely 3D. Thus, this improvement ensures more than just seamless collaboration between all those involved. The complex project can be turned over to the municipality – the proud building owner – with the required quality, on time and within the specified budget.

Hasselt City Hall is groundbreaking – in terms of design, planning and project implementation.

Independent and yet consistent

Steven Hendrickx, the head architect in Hasselt, recognized four decisive factors with Open BIM over the course of the successful project:

  • Individual partners design their model with their preferred BIM software, and with their own templates. Outstanding collaboration is ensured, though, thanks to a common, uniform standard which is specified in advance.
  • The division of labor is defined at the beginning of the project. Data on statics, for instance, have an essential impact on the architecture and structural design. Data on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, on the other hand, are also important but don’t generally flow directly into the architecture. These data, for example, can be sufficiently analyzed with the BIM solution for quality assurance from Solibri.
  • Design changes in one area don’t necessarily affect the plans of all the others involved in the project. The architecture and the building stage are inherently the most closely linked.
  • The expertise of the staff, i.e., extensive holistic knowledge of the various building disciplines, is also critical for the success of the project.

Two examples of the advantage of precise planning

In Hasselt, the construction company was commissioned with excavation, among other tasks. An assessment of the amount of sand that needed to be removed was done based on a cal culation using conventional 2D planning methods, which yielded a result of 800 cubic meters. The engineers used the Solibri Model Checker based on Open BIM and the data provided by the architects and arrived at a figue that was just half this amount, i.e., 400 cubic meters of sand. This shows how exact the work with Open BIM solutions can be.

The steel struts to be installed are another example: With the interface function IFC Exports from Allplan, it was possible to use the BIM model to automatically calculate which steel struts needed fieproofing. All it took was a mouse click to obtain precise results, right down to the running meter. In projects that don’t use Open BIM solutions, these calculations are made by manually entering the data from 2D drawings in Excel or some other software and then recalculating and evaluating the data for use in quotations and planning, a process that is susceptible to error and one that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. These errors often go undetected until the actual cost planning is already completed. In the case of the Hasselt City Hall,  it was possible to avoid such errors from the outset.

Converting to Open BIM pays off

As is the case with any change, it takes a certain amount of time for companies and employees to accept BIM as the norm. The best way, according to Steven Hendrickx, is to start out by planning smaller projects using BIM. The experience thereby gained will make it possible to complete successively larger BIM projects. The advantages of collaborating through Open BIM are obvious: The entire workflow is much simpler for all project stakeholders, and building projects are completed within time and cost budgets.

CONCLUSION

Consistent standards and open interfaces in par-ticular are essential for successful building projects. Stakeholders need solutions that can “work together” for all and any individual tasks being performed. Seamless collaboration between humans and machines: This is ensured with Open BIM, and backed by the brands of the Nemetschek Group.

Reference projects on this topic:

Maxon Cinema 4D Fires Up Workflow in Beeple Short Film, “Manifest Destiny”

Maxon Brand News News Company News

Legendary Motion Designer’s Visual Masterpiece Uses Creative 3D Toolset to Address Income Disparity; Soundtrack by Run the Jewels

Friedrichsdorf, Germany, December 3, 2019 – Maxon, a leading developer of professional 3D modeling, animation, painting and rendering solutions, is pleased to announce internationally acclaimed 3D artist, motion designer and filmmaker Mike Winkelmann, known professionally as Beeple, has deployed the company’s Cinema 4D software toolset in his most ambitious short film to date, “Manifest Destiny.” The film is available on You Tube and Vimeo, and features the soundtrack ”Legend Has It” by Run the Jewels (RTJ).

Beeple, who is revered for elevating the craft of 3D storytelling, began work on “Manifest Destiny” four years ago (the title loosely inspired by the 19th century doctrine of the same name). The film’s over-arching theme centers on an explosive, dramatized vision of the future that explores income inequality and the U.S. national debt.

“Money and the rise in income inequality are pervasive aspects in our culture that drive the decisions on how things get made in the world,” Beeple says. “People in the U.S. don’t realize how much money they have and think they’re getting ripped off by other countries that are in fact much poorer.”

Using visual symbolism created in Cinema 4D, the film is set amidst a fiery, bleak dystopian landscape where naked, oversized and distorted armed infants, children and adults are at war with one another – greed gone wild, infrastructure in flames, false idols and money at the heart of it.

Throughout the piece Beeple juxtaposes flashes of material symbols and greed such as dollar bills, melting coins, slithering snakes and a giant golden calf with overlays of 3D text imagery with hard-hitting statistics and quotes from news sites and financial celebrities such as Warren Buffett describing the disparity in the distribution of income between the world’s wealthiest nations and those at the very bottom. The hard driving music score by rap artists RTJ adds an underlying dimension of rage and defiance that propels the narrative forward.

Demanding Creation Process

Working entirely independently on the nearly three-minute short feature, Beeple tackled the demanding content creation process for “Manifest Destiny” relying almost exclusively on Cinema 4D, without the need for compositing. Final color passes were done in Adobe After Effects while editing was done in Adobe Premiere. Lighting and rendering were completed in OTOY Octane.

“Cinema 4D is a tool that allows you to touch various aspects of the creative process without needing to know a lot about the tools and production values to get a great result,” Beeple adds. “I find the short film format allows for experimental freedom and using the 3D software gave me complete flexibility to artistically explore the debt crisis and offer the audience various viewpoints so they can come to their own conclusions.”

During the creative process Beeple first blocked shots and set up scenes using no formal storyboards. Animated 3D characters were created using Mixamo. The Instances and Cloner features in Cinema 4D’s MoGraph toolset allowed him to efficiently manage and populate his animations with objects to better choreograph crowd scenes of warrior characters fighting over money. Beeple also relied on the rigid and soft body Dynamics tools in the software to lend dynamic behavior in creating realistic motion.

For the creatures and landscapes, Beeple used 3D models from Turbo Squid that he would alter and make his own by attaching animations and other geometric elements. The backdrop of burning buildings, for example, made extensive use of the Voroni Fracture tools in Cinema 4D letting him shatter and control the distribution of elements while the dynamics feature provided parameters such as bounce, gravity and friction.

Music plays a key role in the film. “From the moment I conceived of “Manifest Destiny”, I knew I wanted to use RTJ’s “Legend Has It”. After contacting RTJ who was familiar with Beeple’s earlier work, he was given permission to use the song which he edited into the film following the completion of production.

In addition to his visual effects work, Beeple is one the originators of the “everyday” movement. For the past 11 years he has created a new motion graphics design every day from start to finish using Cinema 4D as his central 3D design tool which he shares daily with the global creative community via social media.

Beeple’s boundary-pushing body of award-winning short films dynamically challenge viewers on social issues ranging from the apocalyptic takeover of robots, cyberwarfare, computer transparency and privacy to the subprime crisis, and have screened at Miami Art Basel, onedotzero, Prix Ars Electronica, the Sydney Biennale, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and many others. After he began releasing a set of widely used Creative Commons VJ loops he continues to provide concert visuals for the world’s top musical artists: Ariana Grande, Childish Gambino, Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5, and many others.

Additional information on the Beeple workflow in “Manifest Destiny” is available on the Maxon.net website here.

Image Links
“Manifest Destiny” still images reflecting the Maxon Cinema 4D workflow are available here.

Credit List
Directed by: Beeple
Audio: Run the Jewels

About Maxon
Headquartered in Friedrichsdorf, Germany, Maxon is a developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation and rendering solutions. Its award-winning Cinema 4D and Redshift 3D software products have been used extensively to help create and render everything from stunning visual effects in top feature films, TV shows and commercials, cutting-edge game cinematics for AAA games, as well as for medical illustration, architectural and industrial design applications. Maxon has offices in Germany, USA, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Japan and Singapore. Maxon products are available directly from the website and its worldwide distribution network. Maxon is part of the Nemetschek Group.

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