Welcome and Index

• A Word: --  Conversations and Signals
• Starter Course: --  Five Engaging Reads
• The Briefing: --  Top CAD Industry News Last Month
• emTech: -- Emerging Technologies -- Modular construction and resiliency; How-To: Selecting Optimal CPU for workstation; Workstation Chip News; AR, generative, computational design, and more...
• Special Feature: --  Tech Soft 3D Advances CAD Technologies — New Accelerations

Conversations and Signals

Graebert neXt and the future of DWG

We are keenly aware that the AEC/O industry is slowly marching through a multi-decades-long digital transformation. Phase one of that transformation has been signified by electronic drafting or computer-aided design (CAD) and that one particular technology—Autodesk's DWG technology—has shaped the AEC/O industry more than all others. Then came the virtual building or building information technology (BIM) revolution, a new technology arc that has roots nearly as old as CAD. 

Today CAD and BIM live side-by-side in AEC/O workflows. While CAD is more mature than BIM, the 2D-oriented CAD industry is still very strong (even growing in developing countries and economies). Germany's Graebert is one software company benefitting well from the longtail technical maturity of the DWG CAD industry. In early April, the German company will virtually host its annual event called Graebert neXt where a series of CAD industry veterans, experts, journalists, and analysts (including this author) will discuss the future of DWG technologies. 

The Top Five Reads

Biggest CAD Industry News Last Month

Curated content: Emerging Technologies and their potential impact on CAD-based industries.

One More Mention: Globalization and Resiliency in AEC/O -- Real Life Case Study due to Covid-19

In our last Xpresso issue, our Special Feature discussed globalization and resiliency at a topical level. No sooner than after that issue went out, I had a chance to discuss the unforeseen impacts of Covid-19 on the world of modular construction. 

In an interview with Randy Gerner, AIA, partner of New York City firm Gerner, Kronick + Valcarcel Architects (GKV), I learned that the world of modular construction has fallen pray to the shock event of Covid-19. In exactly the terms and inter-related conditions discussed in Xpresso No 35's special feature article, Gerner explained to me how brittle modular construction projects actually are to major shock events that can cause serious supply-chain issues. 

Gerner tells me, "In the past two years...modular construction companies have been going out of business left and right. It has a lot to say about the complexities of modular construction, more so the logistics than the design. And what we are finding is that perhaps supply chain issues were part of the problem." 

• Step 1: determine your estimated average multi-core to single-core (MC-SC) weekly workflow (see detailed notes below)
• Step 2: determine a range of CPU options that fit your budget (3-6 options is best)
• Step 3: obtain their Geekbench 5 multi-core (MC) and single-core (SC) scores
• Step 4: place those scores into a spreadsheet that can produce charts from the data
• Step 5: place SC and MC score data into separate columns with rows equal to the number of different chip options. 
• Step 6: assign the X-axis to SC scores and the Y-axis to MC scores
• Step 7: generate a chart from your spreadsheet program
• Step 8: edit chart values so they provide a 5 percent buffer around minimum and maximum MC-SC cores. (see image 2 below)
• Step 9: definite quarter and half-point vectors from the chart origin (see dashed lines in images below to break out regions on the chart that define MC or SC dominant regions on the chart. 

Step 1 Notes: Taking note of the amount of time you spend daily or weekly in your CAD or 3D software (disregarding the parts of your day where you check email, go to meetings, etc), determine to your best ability the weekly averages inside of various programs. Let's use an example: 

Mary is an architect with visualization skills. Her typical work week consists of some 3D modeling in SketchUp but most of her time is spent creating photorealistic renderings of these models. Her renderer software fully utilizes the CPU's multi-cores to accelerate renders. Upon closer inspection of her processes, Mary realizes that even in her rendering program there is much work that is not about rendering and is running through a single core. She estimates that her average multi-core to single-core weekly workflow is approximately 60 percent MC and 40 percent SC. Again, this disregards general computing needs. (see image above for more notes).

Peter is an architect who does not do visualization work but mostly utilizes a BIM program that does take some advantage of multi-cores in the CPU. He determines that his average multi-core to single-core weekly workflow is approximately 25 percent MC to 75 percent SC. (see image below for more notes). 

• AMD 3990X =  25,133 / 1,215  (MC/SC)
• AMD 5950X =  16,566 / 1,686
• Intel 12900K =  17,200 / 1,997
• Apple M1 Ultra = 24,055 / 1,702

Step 4-8 Notes: While in some cases simply listing chips and their industry benchmark scores like this may be enough to decide which chip to acquire, the next few steps help us be more certain of where we actually stand in blended MC-SC workflows. To get there I use Apple's Numbers spreadsheet and create a chart with both X and Y values for each entry on the chart. (see image below). 

When you create the chart from the table it puts zeros in the bottom left corner. And the blue dots which represent the contending CPU (chips) under consideration are bunched up closer to each other. (see the next image below). To fix this issue, we want to put in custom values for the ranges of the X and Y axes, adding about 5 percent on each side of the low and high numbers on each axis. The result is the image above, allowing us to use the 90-degrees between the X and Y axes to sub-divide the chart into regions and define blended MC-SC percentage target lines. (see dashed diagonal lines in the chart above and below). 

While the chart above has some utility it is less than when we modify the X and Y axis numbers and up with the chart version below. See the green dashed box—we blow that up in the image below. 

When the data of selected chip options are placed on such a chart, we can define three primary axes for blended MC-SC chip workflows. The middle axis is the 50-50 blended workflow. This workflow may become more common in architecture, despite the fact that modelers and CAD programs are notoriously difficult to optimize for multithreading. Today, most architects—unless they split their time with a substantial amount of rendering using CPU-based MC-exploitive renderers—will want to select the chip that falls along the lower blue dashed line shown in the image above. 

On the other hand, those doing primarily intensive rendering, simulation, optimization using programs that are highly multithreaded, will want to select chips closer to Y-axis with higher MC scores. Read the notes on Chart A2 for a further explanation. 

Closing Comments on M1 Ultra

Apple's latest M1 Ultra chip has an exceptional balance of MC and SC performance. Relative to the other leading performers charted out, the M1 Ultra is particularly strong in multi-core performance given it has just 4 more cores than the 16 core chips by AMD and Intel which compete with it appear more ideal for, say, Peter's workflow. 

If you have Peter's SC dominant workflow, it may be tempting to grab hold of the Apple M1 instead, due to its very strong MS score. But if you do three times more work using a frequency-bound SC application than an MC application the net result of using the chip that the chart tells you to use should suffice. But does it really? And how do we really know? 

One way to mathematically estimate this is to let Geekbench scores stand-in for your real-world apps and their performance. For example. Peter's day is spent 25 percent in an MC app and 75 percent in an SC app. Therefore, we want to use the Geekbench score marks and derive time savings. The way Geekbench functions is that a score of 2,000 in SC means that the chip is 2x faster than a chip that scores 1,000. Any doubling of Geekbench scores is a doubling of performance.

Therefore, as a proxy for real-world performance, we can say that the M1 Ultra is 39 percent faster at MC (multi-threaded workloads) than the Intel 12900K. And the 12900K is 17 percent faster at SC workloads. 

Now we can calculate the time savings for each chip. 25 percent of an 8-hour day is 120 minutes. So the M1's MC speed benefit saves 46.8 minutes per eight-hour day. (special note: this is a theoretical savings. As mentioned earlier, an architect does not spend 100 percent of their day inside a CAD industry tool. We are simply using 8 hours as a proxy for the time in the day at work. We will get down to specific types of calculations based on more real-world data in subsequent reports like this.)

.39 x 120 minutes = 46.8 minutes.

.17 x 360 minutes = 61.2 minutes.

75 percent of an 8-hour day is 360 minutes. The Intel 12900K saves 61.2 minutes in SC workloads over the M1 Ultra. Therefore, the Intel Core i9 12900K saves a grand total of 14.4 minutes of computing time over the M1 Ultra for this particular blended workflow. 

Iconem and Advanced 3D Visualization

French AI startup was first mentioned in Xpresso back at issue No 3. Revisiting their website recently was astounding so see their completed projects, as well as ongoing ones. This company focuses on the digitization of endangered cultural heritage sites and uses sophisticated 3D technologies to achieve its goals. Their latest showreel is quite fascinating and provides a very good glimpse of what they do. 

 
Generative and Computational Design News

Finch3D has a new website and a sign-up waitlist. There is also now a Finch Web App and one can sign in to it. You will need an account. 

The image above is a screen capture from an action video of the app back in November of last year. This application feels similar to other generative design tools we have discussed before, including TestFit. 

The company was co-founded by Swedish architect Jesper Wallgren. 

Digital Blue Foam Update

We continue to be very impressed by Digital Blue Foam, another early design stage data-rich generative design tool. One thing we like about Digital Blue Form (DBF) is its focus on sustainability issues. 

Tech Soft 3D Advances CAD Technologies — New Accelerations

RECENTLY TECH SOFT 3D RELEASED HOOPS 2022 technologies to the larger CAD industry vis-a-vis its industry-leading SDK (software development kit) offerings. The Oregon-based software firm is a significant contributor to technical advancements in the larger AEC and MCAD software industries, but end-users don't have a direct relationship with it. Instead, leading major CAD technology software firms employ Tech Soft 3D's technologies to power their market solutions.
 

Architosh had a chance to speak with Ron Fritz, CEO, and Co-Founder of Tech Soft 3D, and Jonathan Girroir, Senior Manager, Developer Relations, Tech Soft 3D.
 

Growth in AEC
 

With the recent HOOPS 2022 product family release, Tech Soft 3D clearly showed accelerated market movement in this space. "We have supported IFC for years now," says Jonathan Girrior, "but now our support is taking on more advanced concepts—basically the data that sits on top of solids. We do a great job with the geometry today, but new capabilities involving the metadata associated with that geometry will help our developers in making more intelligent tools."




"As soon as developers were using our technologies for IFC and Revit they would say to us, 'you know what else we need? You need support for DGN and Navisworks.' "



 

In HOOPS 2022, there are new capabilities to address a paradigm in IFC known as "regions." Girrior explained that traversing those regions (technically known as "spatial relationships" in IFC parlance) for data can be helpful to developers for various reasons, like area take-offs functionalities to where a general contractor puts workers on the job site inside a construction (4D) planning app.

To better support AEC industry clients, Tech Soft 3D is working on supporting the DGN and Navisworks file formats as part of its HOOPS SDKs. It is currently under development. "As soon as developers were using our technologies for IFC and Revit they would say to us, 'you know what else we need? You need to support DGN and Navisworks,' " says Ron Fritz.

Fritz says Bentley isn't driving this support for DGN as a customer but by demand within the larger industry. "We started with IFC, DWG, and Revit as the most in-demand formats, and you work your way down through the next most demanded formats," says Fritz. Tech Soft 3D's high-growth market is currently the AEC market. "Of the probably ten verticals we serve, AEC is currently the fastest growing one," says Girrior.
 

The HOOPS 2022 Platforms improve support for DWG and Revit and now support Spatial Relationships that are part of the IFC model definition.
 

The cloud plays an essential factor in that acceleration because cloud tools help take data out of silos which have been the longstanding issue or barrier to accelerated productivity in AEC. Fritz noted a robust market of startups in AEC. "There are a lot of companies building cloud-based applications," he says. "Most of the companies we are working with that are building something new are building cloud-based products."

Fritz noted that two different things are driving the pace of innovation in the AEC field. "Number one is that building an application in the cloud and getting that application out there has a lower barrier to entry than developing a piece of desktop software with a VAR channel and enterprise sales team."




"And the second thing is the world in AEC is converging on IFC and Revit. People feel strongly about these two common file formats. "



 

"And the second thing is the world in AEC is converging on IFC and Revit. People feel strongly about these two common file formats," he says. "And once there is a feeling of consensus about that, that is one more barrier that is lowered, and I think that is part of what we are seeing too," says Fritz.

Finally, Jonathan Girrior added that the value in management software has really proven its value in AEC. "We have demonstrated the return on investment that if your software helps optimize the way in which you are building or organizing how you are building—especially for large or complex projects—it's been shown there is a lot of opportunities for developers to optimize that AEC space."

A leading example would be the developer SYNCHRO. This startup company began literally in a renovated barn in the UK - a unique take on the legendary HP garage! They have utilized HOOPS technology from essentially the beginning, and Tech Soft 3D has been an invaluable partner. Acquired by Bentley a few years ago, this small software company accelerated at exponential levels once supported by a much larger developer with a global enterprise sales channel.

SYNCHRO is now vastly involved in helping large and complex AEC projects find productivity gains and lower risks associated with the building industry. "To the extent that we can make it cheaper or faster for a company like SYNCHRO to improve their products or get them out the door faster, they, in turn, can keep the prices of their solution low," says Fritz.

Apple Silicon

HOOPS 2022 technology SDKs now support developers who need Apple Silicon. In other words, those developers who are shipping products that run on Apple Mac computer systems. The resurgence in Apple computers in enterprise markets has been a slow but constant growth curve going back nearly two decades now since Steve Jobs's tenure as Apple CEO.




"The Mac is still one of the premier desktop platforms that we support."

 

Apple's chip design leadership in the mobile space, along with ARM architecture advancement in general, has led Apple to the place where it can leave Intel and X86 chip architecture on Macs and provide best-in-class performance per watt leadership in the desktop and laptop computer market.


Apple Silicon support is a big part of HOOPS 2022 SDK technologies. Apple's own in-house ARM-architecture chip designs are providing world-leading performance per watt metrics. 
 

Known as "Apple Silicon," Apple's first M1 chip temporarily held absolute performance leadership in single-core processing over Intel. Now the enterprise CAD industry must contend with not two main chip rivals in AMD and Intel, but Apple and more to come, including Qualcomm and MediaTek, all on custom ARM architectures.

Those developers looking to make sure their solutions can run everywhere are turning to Tech Soft 3D. "The Mac is still one of the premier desktop platforms we support," says Fritz. "It's necessary for us to keep up with what is happening in the industry on all the operating systems and hardware platforms and end devices."

Ron Fritz noted that his company has long supported iOS, which runs on ARM chips powering the iPad. "We supply technologies to companies like Shapr3D," he adds. "They are a great example of a really nice application for mobile. Interestingly, there have not been many truly mobile applications like Shapr3D. I think many companies have decided their mobile strategy is their cloud strategy. Mobile devices have browsers."

OpenGL and the Graphics APIs

Tech Soft 3D's Apple Silicon support brings up questions about Apple Metal, Vulkan, and DirectX technologies. Jonathan Girroir noted that underlying graphics technology is non-trivial and can represent a huge investment on their end.

"We know and are aware of Apple's divergence from OpenGL and deprecation of it," says Girrior, "so in our 2022 HOOPS release, we have released graphics on Metal support in beta for now. So we do have a pipeline for Metal. In our next release in March, we will be out of beta and into official support for Apple Metal," he adds.




"There was the urgency with Metal because of Apple's push, and we will get there with Vulkan, but interestingly, engineering software companies are not fast about these things."

 

Metal's support brings up Vulkan, a competing low-level (less abstraction) cross-platform graphics API from the Khronos Group. "Because Metal shares a lot of architecture in terms of how we had to redo our pipelines, Vulkan will probably be the next target for us," says Girrior.

Both Fritz and Girroir reiterated that Metal is something they had to do because of Apple's planned elimination of OpenGL support. This puts DirectX 12 and Vulkan in a different light. "There was the urgency with Metal because of Apple's push, and we will get there with Vulkan," says Fritz, "but interestingly, engineering software companies are not fast about these things. Game companies are much more sensitive to being right there with the latest hardware advantages."

Fritz noted that one of the advantages of adopting these newer graphics APIs like Metal and Vulkan is the quality and visual fidelity. There are also new standards for visually representing data like physically-based rendering (PBR) and glTF format support, included in HOOPS 2022.

MCAD Growth

HOOPS 2022 includes many new features aimed at the manufacturing CAD industries. "We have added new measurement tools functionality in our SDKs," adds Girrior. "This may be important for doing measurements that are not baked into the geometry data."

"What is interesting is we bridge this world between MCAD and AEC, and the way that data is represented and interacted with is really different," he notes, adding that in the MCAD world, data isn't as loose as it is in the AEC world. "In MCAD, you have this idea of boundary representation, Brep data—it's very accurate," he says.


Data will play a larger role in the MCAD space as new types of workflows demand more metadata about components and geometry in models. HOOPS 2022 also has a new Animation Manager with a set of classes for scripting animations. 
 

Data in AEC can be faceted, triangles, faces of a wall. "To be able to take that and do measurements is a different workflow," he says, "so we have come out with a set of tools that allow developers and their end-users the ability to add measurement capability to AEC data quickly."

HOOPS 2022 also features a new Animation Manager, essentially a new set of classes that allow the scripting of animations. "The set of classes allow scripting of keyframes on a timeline that interpolates between camera location, changes of color, transparency, and objection location," adds Girrior.




"So our business is just 100 percent focused on making it intuitive and frictionless for developers to create impactful engineering applications."

 

But Fritz says the significant new values to MCAD in HOOPS technology center around all the data that sits on top of the geometry. "There has been a real drive in manufacturing intelligence."

"We have done a great job reading and visualizing geometry from a large variety of systems," says Fritz, "now it's about bringing the plethora of metadata and related information together, mining its relevance, and serving it in intelligent ways. We are at the stage where accurate geometry is table stakes."

Today's most advanced MCAD applications need to add intelligence levels that add value at multiple points in the process. "The more metadata, the more information, the smarter stuff your application can do," adds Fritz.

Understanding what is in the CAD file helps applications to make decisions. This adds key values to manufacturing as a service (MaaS).

Future

"So our business is just 100 percent focused on making it intuitive and frictionless for developers to create impactful engineering applications," says Fritz.

"And what that means for us is that when we sit down with a software developer and they say 'here is what we are trying to build and here is what we need,' we want to be able to say, 'we can help you with that' no matter what they say."

HOOPS Exchange 2022 now supports the export of glTF and GLB file formats, which support 3D models with PBR materials.
 

This push to be a complete source for CAD development support led Tech Soft 3D to acquire analysis and simulation companies Ceetron AS and Visual Kinematics. "There were pieces of the puzzle we were missing," adds Fritz. "Very often applications do analysis and simulation and require meshing analysis, solvers, and post-processing visualization—tools used in the CAE market."

In addition to these evolving directions for Tech Soft 3D, Fritz noted that VR and AR developers are flocking to Tech Soft 3D because they now need to support CAD formats natively in their VR and AR applications. "This has been a real boom for us, and they want to use our tools to do that. There's even a buzzword for that called the metaverse."

With some of the biggest industrial CAD giants as their customers and partners, new capacities to serve the CAE markets, and VR and AR developers rushing to get real CAD file formats merged into their game-engine and game-like software environments, Tech Soft 3D is set for growth across several vectors.