This months marks the two year anniversary of Modelo’s first product Modelo DAM (Digital Asset Management), which was launched out of beta at the AIA convention in April 2017.
In just two years DAM has achieved record-high usage, as of this month, we have:
Thanks to our strategic partners, our users and our community members, Modelo DAM has achieved the following progress:
Let our users tell their story of using Modelo and how it has improved their communication and workflow efficiency:
In just two years time Modelo has grown from a single-product start-up to a SaaS company that provides tailored and data-centric solutions serving the entire building cycle from design, construction, to facility managment. Our customer base has expanded into all stake-holders in the building industry from investment, design, construction, to facility magement, and our products cover integrated design asset management, to BIM, BI and AI technologies. Here is Modelo’s current product roadmap.
How do you view a Revit file if you don’t have Revit installed on your computer? Or when you don’t have the correct version of Revit installed. Look no further, Modelo’s new support for Revit will save you thousands of dollars every year on maintaining Revit licenses.
Simply drag and drop your Revit files into Modelo’s upload window, you would be able to view the 3D design and all the 3D element’s BIM information right in your browser.
You can search families and types. The searched elements will be highlights to give you a quick count of the items.
There are many ways to download Revit schedules to excel but do you know the element properties can also be downloaded as an excel document? Having these properties downloaded into excel you can quickly make quantitative analysis that helps you make the right business decisions.
And the best part of this is – You don’t even need to maintain a Revit license to do it! Simply upload the file to Modelo, and we will convert the 3D file into a data sheet that can be downloaded with a simple click. No installation required, no Revit license required. You can save thousands of dollars on software licensing fees every year.
Step 1 – Drag and Drop your Revit file into Modelo, we support Revit 2015 to 2019.
Step 2 – Open Share Tool Bar and click to “Download BIM Data”.
Virtual reality visualizations allow AEC professionals to make informed design decisions on complex 3D designs quicker, allowing you and your firm to close more deals.
When you create VR tours of your 3D models, you essentially bring your design to life. No longer are you staring at a 2D drawing or even a 3D model on a computer screen. But you and your client are virtually walking through the front door, deciding which new kitchen counters to install, examining the specs of the bathroom, and truly immersing yourself in a realistic representation of the brand new charming house your client has dreamt of all her life. Plus, add a 360º image as the background of your 3D model and surround the house with the mountain flowers of Aspen, Colorado to give the full effect. After all, seeing is believing.
It’s not a mystery that designs go through many phases, and with those phases come lots of decisions. VR allows you and your client to come to design decisions quicker and it prevents misunderstandings or costly rework down the road. By using VR as a collaboration tool throughout the design review process, everyone can be on the same page, looking at the same model in VR. Modelo encourages thoughtful and beautiful design, but above all we encourage collaborative design.
When firms use Modelo’s VR tool, they upgrade their design capabilities and decision making to the next level. Learn how Modelo works perfectly with Google Cardboard, a less expensive but equally effective VR headset that’s easy to set-up. Further, pairing Modelo + Google Cardboard is especially easy for clients to use because there are no downloads required and it’s extremely intuitive for non-designers. When clients are immersed in the project along the way, they are more involved in the decision making, meaning that it’s easier to come to necessary conclusions. A client-centered approach means closing more deals and making your organization more money.
Besides client communication, VR is especially beneficial for internal collaboration. VR helps architects and designers understand their own designs better, thus allowing them to make design decisions quicker, be more productive and win more deals.
View complex 3D designs and make informed design decisions easier by using VR and Modelo throughout the design process. Sign up today for a free forever account.
As a former architectural designer myself, it’s common to always get attracted to these “we-don’t-know-what-to-call-them” style diagrams. One of the firms that produces such drawings is BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). Below is an example of how you can create BIG style drawings in Modelo:
Here is the diagram animated in Modelo
Part of the reason my Co-founder and I founded Modelo is that we wanted to save the time involved to generate these time-consuming renderings, drawings, and diagrams. I remember I used to spend hours back and forth between Rhino+Vray and Illustrator to achieve such visual effects. Thus, we started to rethink about what we can do to establish a standard visual style that’s appealing enough to be used in presentations and design reviews and easy enough so that we can focus on design, not overlay Make2D lines on top of a white Vray renderings in Illustrator. Introducing ArchitectEffect. (We’ve put together a Pinterest board for such drawings, if you are interested in contributing to this board, please contact us).
In this post, I will show you how to easily create BIG inspired diagrams in Modelo.
First, because I don’t have the model of this diagram, I created a simplified version of it. Below is how it looks in Rhino. I separated the four different components (site-4, building body-3, inner courtyard-2 and building envelope-1) and put each of them into a unique layer so that we can easily turn them on and off in Modelo.
Now if we upload this BIG inspired model to Modelo, it looks like this:
From here, you want to open up the setting panel, turn on the ArchitectEffect, adjust the Pen Detail which controls the amount of outline that gets rendered in the scene. Adjust the Ink Contrast so that all curves have a unified color. Then turn off the shadow (since there is no shadow in the example diagram, but you can keep them on depending upon your needs) and adjust the lighting direction. After all the adjustments, click Update to save this setting as the default.
Now if we take a look at this model, it gets the outlines and some ambient occlusion, but not as apparent as that in the example diagram.
The issue is I made this model based on my assumption of the scale of a museum, as you can see from above, the sites’s width is around 90 meters. However, because the model is oversimplified, it doesn’t have the same level of geometrical complexity as BIG’s model does. And since our ambient occlusion is calculated based on real units, this model is basically too big for the AO to show up nicely. So I scaled the model down by 90%. Here is the result:
You can tell the areas around the intersection of geometries are darker, and it’s pretty close to what the BIG diagram looks like. Note, the AO will look even nicer with a more detailed model. Here is a side by side comparison with BIG’s diagram, not bad, huh?
Now you know how to use Modelo’s ArchitectEffect to generate a BIG inspired diagram drawing. In addition, since everything in Modelo is interactive, we can explore further options. I went back to Rhino and created several more layers, like this:
These new layers have the identical geometries from layer 1, 2 and 3. But are located where the building components are supposed to be. Now with this setup, after I upload the model to Modelo, I will have more layer configuration options. So I did a quick four-step setup in Modelo:
Then I selected a right camera view of my model and under each setting, I added a new 3D view:
With all these set up, I can then simply use the present option to achieve an animated diagram by circling through these four comment cards.
Below is how it looks in Modelo, try spinning the model around or zooming in.
