BIM on the Rocks

While I Was Out…

I’m back from maternity leave. Web conferences will no longer be handled by my proxy.

 

Baby Galileo is growing like a weed and working hard hitting his milestones so that he can discover the moons of Jupiter before his four month birthday. This should solidify his spot at the CERN preschool near our house. It will be close, but we have our fingers crossed.

As you can imagine, my plate is quite full with Autodesk University  class selection. I’m just about finished and avoided going analog. This is how I did the final selections last year:

I need to get back to finding the pony in this stable, but I wanted to let you know some things I discovered while I was out.

1. Words with Friends (iPhone, iPod Touch, Droid) helped me keep me entertained while feeding the baby. By accident we discovered that it is a great way to interact with friends and coworkers far away. It’s also great for building kids’ word skills. Panorama plays with her grandfather in Arizona, but unless he throws the game it might be awhile before she beats him. Also discovered Chess with Friends before I remembered I hate chess.
2. Autodesk Tinkerbox (iPhone, iPad) is a free app that is at least as entertaining as Angry Birds or Cut the Rope. Our monthly app budget is a paltry $6000 per month, so I am always looking for free stuff. Panorama plays daily, even when I don’t force her.
3. Bones. We don’t have TV at our house. I mean, we have a TV, but we don’t have cable or anything. While poking around on Hulu, I realized I had never seen a single episode of Bones, so I started watching this season and the old episodes. I love the mix of anthropology, graphics technology, funky clothes and social awkwardness. I’ve never seen such brilliantly rendered heads since the Matt Murphy playdough experiment.

Things I did not accomplish while I was out:

1. Finish David Copperfield
2. Clean out the craft closet
3. Write the Great American Novel

Oh, and yeah, I think we released some software or something. Check out What’s New with Civil 3D on our product center.

Friday Whetstone 4-23-2010: Thoughts on Earth Day

It’s been awhile since I wrote one of these, but the spirit moved me this morning. As James will be sure to tell you, the spirit usually moves me right about the same time I am staring down the barrel of an important deadline. My muse goes by the name of procrastination. Lucky for him, I’m not his problem anymore.

There is a song by Pink Martini about being trapped between two worlds called “Dosvedanya Mio Bombino”. It’s a tongue-in-cheek story of a man torn between his Russian and Italian homelands. It reminds me a bit of myself as a misfit caught between my somewhat conservative and practical civil engineering self, and the part of me that wants to make the world a better place.

Civil engineering is generally regulation driven. We do what we have to do to meet requirements and stay within budget. When I am surrounded by civil engineering colleagues who face that reality every single day, I often feel like a bit of an impractical tree hugger with my talk of green this and iterate that. For many engineers, it isn’t like they don’t want to do something innovative or green, it’s that they:

1. aren’t comfortable with how to design it
2. their regulators aren’t comfortable reviewing it
3. their clients aren’t asking for it

On the other hand, when I am interacting with people who specialize in environmental issues, like my colleague Autodesk’s Dawn Danby, I feel like an uncreative, uncaring stick-in-the-mud mired down in red tape and excuses. I feel like I might as well trade in my Miss-Piggy-Meets-Librarian wardrobe for some black suits and climb up into the balcony next to Statler and Waldorf. 

We’ve talked about this before (such as in 2008 with Five Simple Things You Can Do To Make Sustainable Design a Reality in Your Lifetime). The civil engineering part of doing better design is undeniably huge, but it can’t happen without:

1. Regulations with real mandates (think about how NPDES Phase II changed everything)
2. Incentives for owners/operators/developers to demand more innovative, lower impact designs- such as regulation, tax incentives, market demand, etc.
3. Education for our engineering students, regulators, contractors, owners, government workers and more so that they are comfortable with the science, design, maintenance and cost of doing things differently
4. Creative thinking and good old fashioned chutzpah in our design community to keep trying, keep digging, keep working to sell new ideas to help change regulations and drive demand.

Back 100 years ago when I lived in Edmonton, I attended the Banff Session of the Alberta Association of Architects. Two things stuck with me from that event.

The first was just an overhead conversation at cocktail hour. A woman was talking about her recent Mediterranean cruise and spoke of villages built on the sides of mountains that were thousands of years old. They collected rain water in cisterns and still moved supplies with donkeys. They built with the material at hand, they ate what could be grown or raised. She said, in her opinion, that was sustainable design. If not sustainable, perhaps enduring. The formula developed in the past is still works today.

All of the talks at the session were excellent, but the speaker that still influences my feelings about design was James Wines. He used an ancient slide projector instead of powerpoint. He just got up talked. He talked about many of his projects, including a series of stores for BEST in the 1970s and 80s..

Do you remember BEST? It was just about the most boring store in the universe. I remember going with my mom as a kid and it made Kmart look like Anthropologie. He made a design statement, and often a “green” statement, with a series of big box stores. I figured if James Wines could figure out how to make a big box store a tourist attraction, I could figure out how to make a stormwater pond a beautiful thing in both form and function.

There are some videos on youtube that show old footage of the BEST stores. I’ve embedded Part I below, here are Part II and Part III.

There was a third thing that I remember. I took a wrong turn coming out of Banff on my way home and wound up facing a decision- did I take the road less traveled (which happened to have a sign that said “road travel currently not recommended”) that appeared to shortcut me to Sundre then back on highway 2, or do I take the boring, safe highway to Rocky Mountain House, or more annoying yet double back and add another 2 hours to my trip? I had a 4 wheel drive, dang it, I could handle it! (Note that I also was wearing a suit and 4 inch heels and had only similar in my suitcase. Also note I had zero bars on my phone.)

View Larger Map

I made the decision to take the dirt road. They weren’t lying about that not recommended thing, and I regretted the decision for every single white knuckled minute. And yet… I went slow enough to stay within my driving skill limits and learned a lot about driving in the mud on the side of a mountain. I called upon things I knew about driving in snow and used it in a new way.

The views were spectacular, the wildlife sightings were unprecedented and when I stopped at the Esso in Sundre for a much needed bag of cheetos, I felt rather proud of myself despite the seemingly obvious brazen blockheadishness of ignoring the sign.

It’s up to you which signs to read and which to consciously ignore. Sometimes the painful memories of designs that didn’t get approved, the calculations that were rejected, the public presentations that tanked and the horrible prom dress that we never should have worn are the memories we call upon the most.

The Three Snowball Paradigm

We had another big snow this weekend and schools were closed yesterday. The kids and I were out building a snowman and suddenly I felt very uncreative. Here I was rolling three snowballs. One big, one medium, one small. We stacked them up and embellished. The kids were delighted.

Coastal kids don’t mind some leaves and sticks in their snowmen.

But I kept thinking- how else can I build a snowman? Every snowman you see is three, boring, non-innovative snowballs stacked up and embellished. Why am I not doing it differently?

Over hot cocoa, I stewed on this longer and saw a new angle. What a persistent idea. It’s a formula that works. This is how children draw snowmen. Stack three cookies on top of each other and toddlers will identify the result as snowmen. Even kids who live in warm places can usually figure out how to build one because they are already familiar with the three snowball paradigm.

There is variation of course- the two snowball, the amorphous blob, the freeform, the free spirit, the snowdog, etc. The embellishments vary- not many of us have a corncob pipe and lumps of coal laying around anymore. But still, the idea is a part of us.

How can we make this apply to our work? How can we find some way to simplify the idea of a lower impact design, a better design, a better neighborhood? How can good design become iconic? A fundamental core, repeatable blueprint that you can adjust to your own needs without losing the integrity of the form?

It reminded me a lot of this TED talk about Chinese restaurants. Great quote from the talk goes something like- McDonald’s is like Microsoft while Chinese restaurants are like Linux. Without a formal directive, incredibly independent, yet all following a very similar, proven formula that spread without corporate initiative.

New Year’s Do-Over

Tomorrow is February 1, but I am going to start my year over. Taking a mulligan on the month of January. I am not sure how, but I completely missed the start of the New Year. I’m not just talking about the normal New Year that falls about a month ago, but the New Year of the CAD Calendar which begins the day after you get home from AU. (Let’s be honest- the Monday after you get home from AU.)

I did pretty well with my list from last year, and crossed off a few items that had carried over from 2008. I figured since the baby was turning two in 2009, it was probably pretty safe to stop gaining a pound a week like my doctor had recommended in 2007. I managed to lose about half of what I’d like to, and got into the habit of exercising. I passed the P.E. in October (after a bit of a false start in April.) It still feels a little strange writing Dana Probert, P.E., but I’m getting used to it.

I read a ton of books, listened to a ton of books, went camping, did crafts with the kids, threw endless tennis balls into the lake for my dogs and even turned off twitter now and again. I had some once in a lifetime opportunities to visit new places like Frankfurt, Prague, Australia and New Zealand. I took a short trip to Raleigh to see Hazen and Sawyer and came back with a full moleskine and a totally new view of BIM in the Civil and Wastewater space.

We managed to finally buy a bigger house- which means the tech bucket of stuff and stacks of obsolete laptops now have their own room instead of doubling as end tables. (Speaking of which, if you are looking for a place to live near Millsboro, Delaware, you can rent my old house Here’s a map. Your office could be in the very room where I wrote my parts of Mastering Civil 3D 2008, Mastering Civil 3D 2009, Introducing Civil 3D 2009 and the blog post that started all this hoopla. Think about it.)

Sometime around October, I developed a case of the “just get through”s. If I could just get through finding a house I can afford. If I can get through getting the banks to accept our short sale offer. If I can just get through another delayed closing… Thanksgiving… Autodesk University… One more trip to Manchester… Christmas… etc.. etc.. then things will calm down. Only then could I neatly tie 2009 with a pretty bow, stick it under the tree, open it up and enjoy it for the crazy roller coast ride that it was.

It didn’t quite work out that way. Everything that was in the air as I juggled what seemed like a million important things came together neatly, but right before Christmas we got some news that came from nowhere. Here I was thinking I had it all figured out, and really, I now wonder if I have ever really known anything. All of the drama of work, moving, preparation for holidays, and whatever else all suddenly seemed incredibly superficial and easy.

So after a few weeks on autopilot- working at making the new house a home, getting the old place adopted by a new family, enjoying the first winter I’ve had on the Eastern Shore where we could build not one, not two but THREE non-muddy snowmen, and gearing up for the Spring software frenzy, I am finally ready to embrace 2010.

Louisa’s resolution list the other day reminded me of all goals I want to accomplish this year from a career perspective.

So here goes…

1. Ask myself every week- Am I serving my personal mission? What can I do to stay on course?
2. Read as much as I can. And finish David Copperfield already!
3. Blog more (3 a week). Record more narrated demonstrations and tutorials to post to youtube (1 per week).
4. Under no circumstances will I allow myself to be talked into teaching more than one class at AU. Yeah right.
5. Spend time each day digging into subjects like stormwater management, flood analysis, wastewater collection
6. Attend as many industry conferences (like StormCon) and ULI local events as possible.
7. Work through one 3DS Max Design and/or Dynamite VSP tutorial per week.
8. Listen more, talk less.
9. More turtle, less hare.
10. Never forget my security badge when I go on a trip to an Autodesk office.

Here Be Dragons? Or Opportunities?

Yesterday, I noted that I was working on a mindmap for a land development workflow across disciplines. Almost immediately, the tweets came a twittering in from every direction with advice on what to include. The thing that struck me right away was that everyone had a different perception of what I was doing and what information I needed.

I was stepped way back to 100,000 feet looking at what happens from the moment someone decides that something needs to be built all the way through a mature project in maintenance mode. I was including things such as the legal process required to purchase land through installing plumbing inside any buildings and cleaning out gutters 5 years after final acceptance. That wasn’t how my twitter pals saw it.

The civil engineers assumed I was talking about the civil portion of the land development project.

There was even the suggestion that I put the old “Here Be Dragons” in the uncharted waters of architectural-civil coordination.

The urban planners were stepped back a bit further, but still heavily focused on the planning and zoning/land use portion. The architects were thinking about the development of the building. It reminded me of an Anais Nin quote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”. It’s quite cliche, but every once in awhile you think you are being totally clear and seeing the entire picture, and really, you aren’t.

Here is what that mindmap looks like so far, by the way.

I’ve joked that sometimes my job is to join internal conference calls and attend external events just to yell

“Yoohoo! Over here! Don’t forget Civil Engineering!”

In between yelling my line, I listen. I do my best to absorb every point of view. I think as Civil Engineers we’ve mistakenly decided that we are our own industry. There is no Civil Engineering industry. We’re part of the building and construction industry. We’re a critical part of this process, but our work is sometimes not as visible as we think it should be, because when we look at a project- that’s all we see. We see curb and gutter, we see drainage, we see earthwork and grading. We can look at the most subtle of sidewalk slopes and know it’s 2%. We know roads are crowned and superelevated.

There are very few projects in this world that don’t include contributions from Civil Engineers. I was in a meeting the other day talking about wastewater workflows when someone said that there was no civil aspect to the particular project they were talking about.

Maybe from the perspective of the client they were working with there wasn’t civil in-house or immediately involved, and perhaps most of the work was being done inside one of the buildings, but there is almost always something civil. Some of the hidden civil tasks include- adjusting parking, grading around a building addition, creating a construction entrance, expanding a stormwater pond or adding new catch basins.

Anyone can look at building or a bridge and understand that something had to happen to get that structure built. Everyone has opened a window, turned on a light and flushed a toilet. But Civil Engineering, when well done, is subtle. The best grades are slight. The best ponds look like landscaping. The best parking lots fade into the background. Our work is often a well prepared canvas for someone else to come and paint a more striking picture.

I’ve come to realize that it isn’t that architects and other building professionals don’t think that we have a contribution, it’s that we haven’t done a good enough job of showing the world that our work is more than just a backdrop. That while you leverage passive solar design and natural light, use earth-friendly flooring and do all that good stuff to make a building “greener”, nothing makes a bigger impact than putting roads in the right place,choosing the right site, taking advantage of the natural terrain and demanding more from the civil engineers, designers, surveyors and landscape architects on the project.

Are you more likely to find the clients you need by fading into the background and complaining that nobody sees you? Or by taking a hard look at what you have to offer and finding new ways to make sure people take notice?

Good things happen to those who hustle. –Anais Nin

Friday Whetstone 10-2-2009

It’s October. How did that happen?

Its interesting that I have some work projects that are requiring me to dig into water resources hard because in a few weeks, I’ll be sitting for the PE. Then it will be AU. Then it will be Christmas. Then it will be forty years from now and I will wonder how the years went by so quickly.

Some things I’ve been working on:

I made the Official AutoCAD Civil 3D Facebook Fan Page. Accept no imitations! This is the real deal. Blogs aren’t great for getting the word out about things like webcasts, and twitter is far too fleeting. Become a fan today and get updates in your homepage feed. Also, it’s like one of those really cool ribbons or buttons for your AU badge, only your friends and family get to see it not just we fellow geeks.

I read the NRCS National Engineering Handbook Part 630 Hydrology from Chapter 1 through Chapter 10 and also Chapter 16. I plan on reading the balance over the next two weeks. I don’t know about you, but I never had a really formal stormwater management course. All of the training I had was on the job and very specific to the local jurisdiction I was working in. Reading about the NRCS/SCS method in theory, where things come from, why it is called “curve number” and how hydrographs are derived really cleared a lot of the mystery. There is still tons of mystery, though. Need to keep reading…

I’ve also been trying to find a new place to live. My family lives in a 1000 square foot house with very little yard. I bought it on a frugality bender in 2002 thinking that it would last us three years or so. Well, almost 8 years, two kids and three dogs later, we are still here. We’ve spent the past few months working through several options- we could build on our farm, we could build somewhere else, we could pick up something in the local “buyers market”. I still don’t have a ton of clarity, but I am pretty sure I could host my own HGTV show. Every Saturday morning is like an episode of House Hunters. I actually feel myself narrating the walk through as if there was a camera crew.

I need to give special thanks to Tracy Peoples at Jack Lingo Realtor in Millsboro, DE who is my buyers agent. If you have worked with me, you know what she is going through right now. Let’s just say I send her a daily spreadsheet tracking selling prices, square footage and mortgage balances that includes a special formula I invented to rank each house based on those parameters plus a constant that adjusts for the “look of desperation” in a seller’s eyes…. She hasn’t run of screaming yet, and she chases every lead we find without batting an eyelash. So until I actually close a deal, I will pay her the only way I can- by telling the world how she has gone way beyond the extra mile for us.

Finally, you know how I feel about storytelling in engineering and I’ve found another winner. MoDOT has a youtube channel much like WSDOT. MoDOT includes things like the MoDOT Minute, a news show that runs through current projects, awards and other things of public interest. I really like their short orientation to their Engineering Policy. Sharing information this way makes government agencies seem far more human.

And when the public wants to know “Why do we need to replace this highway?” they can go watch this video: the Life Cycle of a Highway.

Friday Whetstone 7-10-2009

I still have 3DS Max Design on the brain. In fact, there is so much running through my head right now I can barely take a moment to think of what I could even write that would sound reasonably intelligent or coherent. 

The past few weeks I have been knee deep in building datasets in Max, Impression, Civil 3d and Navisworks that show some of what they can do for environmental engineering projects- especially water resources.

Stream in Impression:

Dam in Navisworks:

I anticipate that next week I will be building some demonstrations surrounding rivers and stormwater, and I am looking forward to switching gears back into some more hard core Civil 3D uses and workflows, which will give me more things to write about.

One of the things I've been preparing for is a webcast coming up next Tuesday, July 15, 2009 at 10AM PDT. It's called: Design Vis Series: Visualization for Transportation: Using Autodesk 3ds Max Design for Design Visualization and Collaboration. I'll be talking about why visualization is useful and important for civil projects, and demonstrating how to get data from Civil 3D into 3DS Max Design. I'll be showing how Dynamite VSP can help with that process as well.

I've uploaded a short clip to youtube that shows the dataset that I will be using. The first segment of the clip shows a very simple drive through that is created very quickly from Civil 3D data using Dynamite VSP. The "helicopter" fly over portions of the video have been supplemented with buildings, landscape, and mountains using some simple 3DS Max tools. (Special thanks to Jack and Marion for their work on this dataset and workflow.)

A few resources I have called upon in the past few weeks that have helped:

• Dynamite VSP Community- Tutorials, videos and more
• AU Class: From 3D to 4D: Using Autodesk® 3ds Max® and NavisWorks® to Take America's Largest Infrastructure Project into the Fourth Dimension
• AU Class: The Natural Look: Kinder and Gentler Rendering with Autodesk® Impression
• AU Class: Signature Styles and Entourage for Autodesk® Impression
• AU Class: Interactive 3D Visualization of a River Renaturation Measure

To learn about watching recorded AU classes, read this post:

Can anyone get classes at AU Online?

Friday Whetstone 6-19-2009

So last week I talked about conceptual design for Civil Engineers. I'm on a personal quest to figure out how we might get started.

This week, I got a little bit closer. I've been doing some work in 3ds Max Design to prepare for a webcast I am delivering in July about visualization for transportation projects. While working through the dataset, I discovered a few tools that made me start thinking.

Keeping in mind that I am still a 3ds Max newbie, let's look at what I tried.

I had a pretty flat Civil 3D surface that has a river running through it. I exploded the surface then imported the .dwg into 3ds Max design.

The exploded 3D faces seem to know they belong together in max, even though they were individual elements in Civil 3D. This is interesting. It comes in as an editable mesh. I add an Edit Poly modifier and use the Paint Deformation tool to add some hills.

I then exported from Max to a .dwg, and inserted it into my original drawing. It comes back as an AutoCAD mesh object, which as I noted last week can be exploded and used to build a surface as 3D faces.

This was just an experiment (an ugly one at that), but I was very excited about how easy it was to mash things around. I also played around with some of the Graphite Modeling Tools to add tessellations for smaller triangles, extruding faces, and other tools that I don't quite understand yet.

I'll spend some more time on it this coming week and would love to hear your thoughts. What does conceptual design mean to you? Is it about site planning/land planning? Do you immediately start in Civil 3D with polylines, alignments, blocks, etc.? Do you sketch on paper? Do you ever conceptualize grading, or is it more like "pond here" with a rough 2D polyline shape?

Related Links and Resources:

Design Vis Series Webcast with Eddie Perlberg featuring Dana Probert (me!): Visualization for Transportation. July 15, 2009

More AEC Oriented Visualization Webcasts (and Archives)

Autodesk Assistance Program: I read the FAQ today, and it looks like 3ds Max is included as one of the programs that displaced workers can get training on. Take advantage of this opportunity! While you are at it, dig into Navisworks and Ecotect, too.

Friday Whetstone 6-12-2009

I'm just like you. I sit at the big road shows, keynotes and main stages events and think- wow. That conceptual design stuff is amazing. And wow. That visualization stuff is so real. Look how flexible that is. Look how easily they can move things around. Isn't that cool! They build buildings and motorcycles, gadgets, gears and whole conceptual cities.

But it's not for me. I don't work like that. For a second (a short one), I wish I was an architect.

What do we do next? We gather our bags, turn around and walk out of the auditorium.

At AU this past year, I stopped walking and asked the people I was with:

"Why don't we (civil engineers) think this applies to us?"

Nobody had an answer outside of the usual "Whatever, Dana" eyeroll to which I have become accustomed.

Seriously though- why don't we? Why don't we throw things in, mix them around, stretch/push/pull and shape? What about massing in the buildings on the site and figuring out where shadows will fall? Why not create hills and bumps and ponds in concept form? Maybe we use the AutoCAD free form design tools. Maybe we use Civil 3D objects. Maybe we use 3DS Max. I don't know exactly, but I want to find out.

So far, I've managed to convert a Google Earth mesh into an AutoCAD mesh and do some very fun (but not very productive) free form modeling. (Read this post before trying to import a Google Earth Mesh)

And I found that if I explode the mesh, I can use the 3D faces to build a Civil 3D surface.

If you've tried anything like this, I'd love to hear about it.

For inspiration:

AU Design Slam Winners 2008

To learn the AutoCAD 2010 Free Form tools:

What a Mesh blog

Friday Whetstone 6-5-2009

It's been forever since I made it a priority to expand my mind a bit. Well, I've been learning more about the wastewater industry and that sort of thing, but not much that pushes the boundaries. I'm in need of some mental cross training.

MindManager- I've been a fan of mind mapping for about ten years now. They used to laugh at my colored markered spoke-and-wheel diagrams on the back of cast away plan sheets... but it really helped me organize my thoughts. When I taught a project management class at the local college, I made my students make them. I wonder if any of them still do.

Awhile back I started using MindManager and it has been pretty cool, here is a shot of one I used to plan some project work a few weeks ago.

 

It's very easy to use, I just haven't taken any time to dig deeper, and I wind up using paper more often than I should. To help get more ideas, I've subscribed to the Mindjet blog, and signed up for a few of their free webcasts.

More Presentation and Visual Communication Skills- I won't be able to sign up for these for a little while, but I am incredibly excited to see that the Slide:olgy folks have created a webinar series of their presentation design classes. Broken into small chunks for a reasonable price, you can tune in to classes like "Story and Structure", "Design Thinking" and "Visual Storytelling". Maybe later this summer I can duck into a session or two.

Things to watch now that LOST is over- Granted, the Closer starts on Monday, but that still leaves some of my lunch hours, naptime on Sunday and a few scattered moments throughout the week where I'd like to just sit quietly for a moment and watch something. I've been checking out some of the videos and stories on Blueprint America, a PBS website reporting on the American infrastructure crisis, including the Road to the Future documentary. The Road to the Future is all about development, infrastructure and population growth in NYC, Denver, Portland and DC. There is a ton of other neat stuff- in addition to learning a bit, I've also gained a bit of insight into storytelling. Like the "Discovery Channel" genre of engineering shows, these documentaries and video clips have to break things down to be appealing and understood by average people who don't look out their car windows and notice catch basins, or draw contour maps of their backyard when putting in a flower bed.

That should keep us busy.