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:

Territory Studio Reprises Cinema 4D Workflow in "Avengers: Endgame"

Maxon Brand News News Company News

Marti Romances, Creative Director, on Meeting the 3D Screen Graphics Challenges in Epic Movie Conclusion

Friedrichsdorf, Germany (SPW) – The latest feature film from Marvel Studios, Avengers: Endgame, features more than 40 3D data screen graphics visualizations created by the Territory Studio creative team in San Francisco that appear throughout key scenes in the film.

Territory holds an impressive creative pedigree having contributed assets to a number of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe including Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy; all which made extensive use of Maxon’s acclaimed 3D content creation software, Cinema 4D.  

Maxon recently spoke with Marti Romances, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Territory Studio San Francisco, who outlined the 3D creative experience in producing animated content for Avengers: Endgame, Marvel’s highly anticipated sequel to Avengers: Infinity War and epic conclusion in the franchise.

Maxon: Tell us about the overall creative brief Territory received from Marvel for Avengers: Endgame?

Marti: Territory’s brief came initially during production of Avengers: Infinity War. Working with a group of artists at Territory and with Lyniel Dao as producer, we worked with the Marvel art department, led by Production Designer Charles Wood, to reimagine screens for Guardians of the Galaxy’s new Star Lord space ship.

A few months into the project we learned that there would be a second film, Avengers: Endgame, and received separate briefs to create assets and concept development to drive the story forward. This included outdated technology and malfunctioning screen graphics, visualizations for a futuristic Japanese Karaoke bar, tablet screens for Tony Stark/Iron Man as well as various animated assets for the Avengers Compound.

Cinema 4D is credited as a cornerstone digital content creation tool in the Territory production pipeline. What role did it play on Avengers: Endgame?

Marti: For Endgame, the MoGraph toolset in Cinema 4D was essential to successfully design and animate all of the core graphic concepts and screen graphics in the film. We used a very simple mix of cloners, tracers and wireframe passes in the software, which was enough for us to composite them onto different screens without having to rely on heavy and long render times.

The Karaoke scene in Endgame is among the many visually intensive sequences Territory crafted 3D screen graphics for to move the story ahead. Can you tell us more?

Marti: The most intense sequence for us on Endgame was to create a complete holographic Karaoke stage in CG. We presented six different character concepts to Charles and the Russo Brothers, the directors on the film.

Our team ended up designing a group of dancing robotic cats that we later modeled and animated following references provided by the Marvel art department. The power of Cinema 4D was the ability to import Alembic files for all our baked character animations so that we could apply textures and materials.

We also created the psychedelic background animations that were displayed on all the screens around the bar, and that we animated to music. GPU accelerated graphics were especially helpful in quickly visualizing the impact of lighting on material variations and colors, as well as being able to test different stage design concepts.

Endgame features a change in the way the technology screen graphics look in the context of the broader theme of the story. What 3D challenges did you face in realizing the design direction on the film?

Marti: Our work on the Avengers Compound, for example, was to conceptualize the look and feel of screen graphics on things such as the identification/verification systems in doors and access areas. These marked a progression in the organization’s technology due to new characters being introduced into the Endgame story from other MCU films such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther, which required them to share some of the same technology.

Relying heavily on the particle systems, noise displacements and shade effectors in Cinema 4D gave us the flexibility to create dynamic screen graphics that had a very organic look and feel useful in the Compound sequences as well as for those we provided for the Star Lord’s new space ship.

The creative team also explored how computer graphics screen technology would function and look on Tony Stark’s tablet screens when he is researching dimensions and alternate parallel universes. We dug into physics, magnetic fields research, and so forth, to get the right visual concept in front of the directors. The fact that Cinema 4D allows you to ‘play’ with formulas in 3D space was crucial in getting successful results quickly.

Click here to view example of the work (Graphic animation by Territory Studio, courtesy of Marvel Studios)

Territory Studio Avengers: Endgame Credit List:
Marti Romances – Creative Director
Lyniel Dao – Producer
Grace Centauro – Coordinator
Brandon Mata, Devin Earthman, Adam Conway and Nicolas Lopardo – Digital Artists

About Maxon
Headquartered in Germany, Maxon is the developer of Cinema 4D, recently recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Technical Achievement Award. Maxon software solutions are used by creative professionals worldwide to produce VFX for film, broadcast motion graphics, game cinematics, product designs, medical illustrations, architectural and industrial visualizations, and more. Maxon is part of the Nemetschek Group.

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