Construction technology provider Autodesk promised more investment in artificial intelligence workflows and data sharing at its annual Autodesk University user conference in San Diego. The company also detailed a future where granular data will flow from Autodesk authoring applications such as Revit, AutoCAD and Civil3D to cloud platforms such as Autodesk Docs and Forma and also from partner companies such as the systems provider Esri geospatial information.
Autodesk announced on October 15 that Forma is now connected to Revit through Autodesk Docs via a translation plugin. Amy Bunszel, executive vice president of AEC at Autodesk, said Docs is shaping up to be the company’s AECO data repository where all project data can be connected, organized and protected in a proprietary hosted database in the cloud that can be accessed through Autodesk APIs and partner applications. He also said the company is now running a private beta for an API that gives access to Revit geometry, the actual parametric data of a design, without files. Bunszel said project members can access Revit model data through the API, without requiring a file exchange, such as an RVT or IFC file, in the beta.
Form takes form
CEO Andrew Anagnost said that Autodesk’s conceptual design tool Forma, which began its development life as Spacemaker.ai, is “a different paradigm” for design and that the overall advancement of large models of language has made users more comfortable with natural language prompts and chat that software like Forma will use in the future.
He added that Forma is where Autodesk sees design going in the future, answering big questions from the conceptual stage. While Anagnost said that Forma already has sustainability analysis at this initial level, Autodesk plans to dedicate it more to digital twin design and analysis functions as the platform matures.
“You’ll see it merged with geospatial data, that’s a natural thing to get a whole conceptual suite,” Anagnost said. “It’s going to start moving downstream into things that Revit does classically as well. It doesn’t mean that it has to swallow all of Revit, and you know that would take a long time, but it can certainly do things that Revit does today.”
Anagnost reiterated that Revit is not moving entirely to the cloud, nor will its design features disappear as a custom authoring tool. Rather, he said, their granular data, such as geometric data, is gaining the ability to flow to other platforms such as Forma and Docs. This has been a long-standing request from users, to have access to granular data, so they can break down geometry by selection and share only what is needed instead of full 3D model files. This followed the Revit Data Model API released in June.
“You’re just seeing the direction we’re taking Form, we’re just maturing it, and it’s a new paradigm, right? We’re not trying to do Revit in the cloud, which is not a good way to do it. world, especially in the world of AI,” says Anagnost. “You actually want to work in a way where AI, and Forma has been AI for a long time and started natively like that, I’d like to advance AI in a way that really improves the productivity of people who use these tools.”
A Civil Exchange
For civil engineers, the company announced granular data sharing through an expansion of its existing partnership with GIS data provider Esri. The integration brings Esri’s geospatial reference data from its flagship ArcGIS mapping technology into Forma for the early stages of design and planning. Micah Callough, Esri’s CTO for AEC and former Arcadis vice president, said the integration is already being tested by users and will be available in early 2025. The integration, in theory, would give users the ability to wear layers from Esri maps and attributes to Forma for early design decisions and, depending on how easy data transfer is, could eliminate the rework and restructuring of data that has fallen on engineers’ shoulders for years.
Earlier this year, Esri’s ArcGIS basemaps were integrated with Civil3D and AutoCAD, providing detailed geospatial data and mapping capabilities. The integration of ArcGIS data into Autodesk Forma works toward the two companies’ strategic alliance to unify GIS and BIM. The first product to come out of the alliance was ArcGIS GeoBIM, a translation tool that allowed users to visualize and move data between the two systems. Both companies later added plugins for InfraWorks.
Translating data from GIS to BIM and vice versa has long been a problem for civil engineers. The press release from Autodesk and Esri promised that it would allow users to quickly access GIS data in BIM and Esri’s ArcGIS basemaps, and that all ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World data layers would be included in the integration
Opening vs. intellectual property
Last week, Bentley Systems continued to promote its commitment to open project data sharing through applications such as the recent Cesium visualization acquisition. Autodesk has used similar language in the past, but took a different tone at this conference. While he continued to say that proprietary file formats are a thing of the past and that data must flow freely between AEC project stakeholders, Anagnost and other Autodesk executives established workflows in which data could flow to through Autodesk APIs, but also articulated how they would flow better. partner companies such as Esri and Microsoft and in the clouds that had integrations developed through strategic alliances. Cesium itself announced a Revit add-on on October 15th.
On the AI side, Autodesk’s investment in Project Bernini, an experiment to train an AI to create 3D content that can be used by professional engineers, is a long-term play to better understand how to train AI to create images of 3D geospatial design. both Anagnost and Bunszel said.
“The data used for training [Project Bernini] it’s just as important as the method you use to train it,” says Anagnost. “You have to teach the computer to speak a certain language. Why big language models fail at so many things is because it’s actually coded word by word and doesn’t necessarily understand the relationships between words. People run into this stuff all the time with big language models, we’re actually building training methods that understand 3D geometry in a deep way. They do not create images. They actually create real geometry, and these training methods are data-independent.”
Anagnost said that to create better AIs that can be used for construction and manufacturing, you need the methods, the data and the computing power, a tall order for any company looking to create better large language models.
“It’s a lot to be able to have at once, but we like to support the research community, because we want to make some of these problems, these hard problems, easier for everybody,” he says. Anagnost added that research is something Autodesk is committed to for the larger design community, but also for the innovations that could come from efforts like the Bernini Project. “That’s something we’d like to be a part of. And, yes, we also like to keep our secrets, we’re a commercial company. Who wouldn’t? Why would we produce something innovative and clever and not protect it?”
