Mstn was pioneering in providing solid modeling to the AEC market. But the Parasolids kernel has its origins in the MCAD world. Reporting volumes and areas is great, but in the AEC world, we need to be able to able to break things down further.
For example: for a wall or slab, its not very useful to report the total surface area of the wall or slab (6+ faces). In the AEC world, you need to be able to differentiate between top (most important for a slab), vertical face along the length of a linear element (most important for walls), linear meters or length of linear elements like walls or arrays.
You don't buy brick walls in terms of volume. You usually quantify them in terms of linear meters/feet of this height and type. The brickie will in turn buy the bricks in thousand brick lots.
This quantification smarts is sort of built into verts like Aecosim, which is based on the Triforma TF API. Something like it needs to incorporated into the new Parametric Solids. If the solids/surfaces produced by the PS tools are to be true participants in the BIM and IFC world, I don't think that something like can be avoided at platform level. PS Quantification API. Especially, since all those wonderful Parametric Solids will be included in all those Functional Cells distributed far and wide using Bentley Connect. It would not be very helpful if they can not be quantified properly without having to translating them to a third party apps and back again.
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Hello Dominic, Thank you for submitting your idea. Unfortunately, we will be implementing this in MicroStation, but we have forwarded your suggestion over to the OpenBuildings Designer team for consideration.
Reginald Wallace over 3 years ago
Hi Dominic,
This functionality actually already exist in our AECOSim Building Designer product while MicroStation is a discipline agnostic application without discipline specific tools.
Regards,
Regie
dominic SEAH over 3 years ago in reply to Reginald Wallace
Reginald,
Actually, it is the Aecosim users that want this most badly. What you are refering to are the TF Forms. But, what you will find is that a lot of the solids used in an Aecosim model are actually Mstn / platform Solids, Smartsolids and the new Parametric Solids. TF Forms are pretty long in the tooth and have not been updated for a while. Bentley seems to be promoting the new Parametric Solids and Function Components hosted by ProjWise / Component Centre. It is also supposed to be the foundation for any new tools by all the verticals. It would be a big mistake not to fix the problem as early as possible.
We need to be able to report areas for all types. Including on elements that come in via IFC, DWG and JT.