On February 7, Autodesk released Informed Design, a pair of add-ons to the company’s building information modeling and product design authoring tools aimed at better automating the product design process and the placement of mechanical assemblies and other complex products in 3D building and infrastructure models. .
Autodesk says Informed Design connects design and manufacturing workflows and will allow designers to specify products and assemblies that were created in Inventor, the company’s custom design tool, in Revit, its parametric BIM tool. This is functionality that Autodesk says architects and engineers have been asking for for a long time.
“Informed design improves certainty,” said Ryan McMahon, general manager of manufacturing/Informed Design at Autodesk during a press event announcing the product. “Productification is the key concept that makes this possible. Manufacturers and subcontractors will define their products including all the ways in which they can be varied but still be manufacturable. These products are then published for architects to discover and use during the design”.
From Inventor to Revit
The workflow uses Autodesk’s Construction Cloud collaboration platform as an intermediary for Inventor and Revit. McMahon said Autodesk has no plans to make a direct workflow available.
McMahon explained that Informed Design is a plug-in that allows Inventor to export fully formed Revit families as output. “One shortcoming of Inventor is that in the past it hasn’t produced outputs that had categories, last names, empty bodies, coordinate systems, things like that,” he said. While Informed Design will allow customers to use Inventor to create a Revit family, manually placing that Revit family within a Revit project will require Construction Cloud, which Autodesk uses to store templates and project data.
“The ability to define a template’s rules and enforce those rules requires using our solution to leverage the build and apply components.” McMahon said.
Informed Design for Inventor enables building product design engineers to automate the process of creating models of building products, such as mechanical equipment and assemblies for components such as unified curtain walls, and even building components such as escalators .
Informed Design for Revit enables architects, engineers, and virtual design and construction professionals to place these building products into their models. Because they can see how parametric building product objects fit into the overall project in 3D, users can perform basic crash detection and constructability assessments. Being able to confirm that specified building products meet project requirements and are compatible with other installed components and meet industry standards was another long-standing demand from Autodesk users in the design world.
A la carte prices
McMahon said that while users will need Revit, Inventor and Construction Cloud to use Informed Design, the add-on will be available at no upfront charge. Informed Design will be part of Autodesk’s Design and Make Platform environment.
“Ultimately, we will end up getting paid to generate output,” he said. “We don’t want to charge for creating products. We don’t want to charge for placing an instance of a product in a building project. But when you want to create a bill of materials, shop drawings, or other formats used to manufacture that, we believe that’s a point where we’ve created value for our customers. It feels like the right thing to monetize. And so we’re going to plan to have a token fee based on the results you create.”
Several Autodesk customers began testing Informed Design in the second half of 2023.
“Autodesk Informed Design has shown that there is a way to bring custom details, good aesthetics and quality engineering into a product that can be mass-produced,” said Benjamin Hall, senior product manager at Green Canopy NODE, a consultant of sustainability that works mainly with green house design. “Designing with constraints doesn’t hold back my creativity, it gives me options that I know will work.
International Data Corporation (IDC), a provider of market intelligence, advisory services and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets, has been testing its workflows with Informed Design.
“Through a connected, two-way digital thread and data sharing across AECO’s partner ecosystem, it’s easier to optimize supplier performance and deliver quality products and services that complement the overall design of ‘a building,’ said Jeffrey Hojlo, vice president of research. Future of industry ecosystems and energy knowledge at IDC.
Autodesk said both plugins will be available on February 7 for their respective authoring tools and through Construction Cloud. The company also released a 90-second explainer video for Informed Design.
