bye bye for CAD??

[Esoteric]

These are exciting times in the AEC technology industry. After decades of being dominated by 2D CAD technology that reduces building representations to dumb graphic entities, the industry is seriously considering 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology, which represents intelligent building objects that are aware of themselves and their relationship to other objects. While this technology in itself is not new-Graphisoft's 20-year-old solution, ArchiCAD, had building modeling capabilities from the start-what is new is the push to replace CAD with BIM as the de facto standard in the industry for integrating architecture, engineering, and construction. This article looks at how the recent BIM phenomenon raises the state of the art in AEC, and evaluates how solutions for different aspects of building design and construction tie into the BIM concept...

http://www.cadalyst.com/features/0803aec/index.htm

[enigma]

How is this any different that the various solid modeling packages which have been around for the last 10 - 15 years?

[russ_watters]

Spam? We'll see...

Anyway, yeah, 3d modeling has been around for a while. Some industries take a long time to adapt, but I think the real issue is the top-down view blueprint is a very useful thing. 3d would help with my job (mechanical building systems design) but I'm not sure buildings are complicated enough for architects to really need it for anything beyond visualization.