Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Estimating in BIM for Speed, Accuracy, and Flexibility. This webinar is sponsored by AllPlan. My name is Royce Covington, Manager of Member Services at PCI, and I'll be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter today, I have a few introductory items to note. Please note that all attendee lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane, where I'll be keeping track of them to read to the presenter during the Q&A period. Also, a pop-up survey will appear after the webinar ends. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI eLearning Center. Questions related to specific products or publications will be addressed at the end of the presentation. PCI is a registered provider of AIA CES, but today's presentation does not contain content that has been endorsed by AIA. Today's presentation is non-CEU. Our presenters for today are David Lockery, Business Development Manager at AllPlan. David has a master's degree in structural engineering with over five years of industry experience. As a practicing engineer in China, his work focused on fiber composites, FRP, and civil infrastructure, including bridges and power plants, before he transitioned into the AEC software industry upon returning to the United States. As an engineer, he's faced many of the same challenges which confront AllPlan's customers each day, an understanding which enhances his ability to help overcome them. Joining David is Frank Holtz, Senior Technical Consultant at AllPlan. Frank has a master's degree in civil engineering with over nine years of industry experience. Primarily focusing on precast, he has worked on a variety of infrastructure projects. As an industry expert, he helped to write and program precast software, as well as train other engineers on usage and best practices. I'll now hand the controls over so that we can begin our presentation. Thank you, Royce, for that introduction. As Royce mentioned, my name is David Lockery. I'm our Business Development Manager for Precast Buildings. I have with me Frank Holtz, our Senior Technical Consultant serving the same market. We are very pleased to be presenting a digital estimation workflow for precast building projects, one that we believe and have been told solves a great many of the challenges that precasters like yourselves are facing right now in the market. So first, I'd like to go over a bit on workflow, and I imagine I will be telling everyone things they already know. We've talked to a great many precasters about this, their current estimating workflow, and it looks something like this when we boil it down. You become aware of a project through a sales guy, through a request for proposal, and the first determination you make is whether or not you're actually going to bid on that project. How far away is it? Do you have the formwork, the equipment in-house to complete the project as is or with minimal additional investment? Once the decision has been made to put in a bid, the real work begins. Both the markup and quantity side of things from existing EOR documentation as well as a fairly extensive amount of calculations going on in Excel or just on a hand calculator to really convert that into costing data. At the same time, then also alternatives analysis. If you've been asked to mock up multiple different versions of a proposal or if you have multiple different versions that you'd like to submit, and then down the line into quality assurance, making sure that this is an accurate bid and proposal writing. The wrinkles come in in two ways, we're told. That changes to the actual RFP or the project or new information that you become aware of can at any point in this process take all the work that's been done and pretty much render it completely irrelevant in need of starting over. The other is that the estimators are one of the roles they have is to engage in kind of big thinking. That is to say, what about this project is different from things we've done in the past? What potential risks are there? How do we mitigate those and how should they be costed out? The problem, of course, is that the time crunch here is quite severe. How long does it take to go from we want to bid on this project to a complete and accurate estimate that can be used as the basis of a bid? And the answer we consistently hear is that just prepping a bid, an estimate for a typical precast building project is usually a man week or more worth of work. And as you add in alternatives, that becomes more complex. As you manage any potential changes, it becomes more complex still. That means that from the time you decide to put in a bid to actually being able to hand over a fully drafted proposal in which you have some confidence is a pretty long cycle. At the same time, these projects are quite complex and there can be considerable risk on them. So one of the goals that many of the folks we talk with have is how do I reduce this emphasis on my estimators engaging in mechanical, rote tasks and get them to focus on the big picture, figure out where this project might be different from the last one that looks outwardly similar? Where potential challenges are, how do we mitigate them? That's made worse by the fact that we're all suffering from a shortage of skilled employees. People who engage as estimators have to have the technical skills to do it, be able to use Bluebean, be able to use Excel, Adobe, even CAD in some instances. But they also have to have the industry understanding. A lot of the folks who spoke into their estimators are past project managers, for instance. That's not a skill set that's very, very common. The final challenge is really, OK, now that I've won this project a few months later, what can I do with all of this data that we worked up and all of the information that went into the proposal? Can it help my engineering and my detailing process any? And what we see in particular is that this complexity and risk and the production time are serious challenges, and they're almost inversely related to one another. The estimating process right now is so intensive in terms of the number of simple things that need to be done, the amount of counting, the amount of basic calculation that needs to be done, that it's very difficult for an estimator to really justify taking the time to look at the project in a holistic manner. You need to focus on that big picture thinking and try to figure out what potential pitfalls exist. Because again, we're talking about a man week of grunt work to get an estimate out the door. You can't exactly say, all right, well, let's let this marinate over the weekend. Let me think on it, come back in three more days, and spend another week thinking about, hey, what might be missing here? The way that our plan bar sales manager starts to attack this is to say, we bring a model-based estimating workflow into the picture. It's one that's very quick, intuitive. It allows what we call a trace-to-model workflow using existing EOR documentation. It's very, very 2D-based. Folks who have come out of Bluebeam, Adobe, let alone AutoCAD or MicroStation can see exactly how to do this. And what it does is it takes a lot of that grunt work and takes it out of people's hands. It removes that as a source of error. It also removes it as a time sink. We have automated quantities, element details, isometrics, weights, volumes, all the things that are necessary to generate good bids. But moreover, it's compressing the time cycle here. We take this project, this model, what now becomes a modeling task, from a week-long bit of work spent mostly in Excel and in 2D documentation to a day-long process that's spent mostly modeling. And once we've mocked up that model, it allows us to do some preliminary what we would call BDC. It allows me to visualize what this project is going to look like. It allows me to do some conflict checking. I can get to start to grapple with what my direction sequencing is going to look like. And what that means in practice is that we have a lot more time to focus on that big picture thinking, to mitigate risks that plan ahead on this project, and to reflect that in the writing of a proposal. We've heard from multiple people that they win jobs where they are not the lowest cost bid by taking into consideration the potential challenges of a project and being honest about them with a client. Clients have confidence that, yes, this is the person I trust to actually get this project right because they're already telling me the truth about it rather than just tossing out a low ball bid in hopes of winning. That is something that a model-based estimating workflow really acts in support of. And in the flip side, it allows you to avoid those projects where you are pretty confident that you're not going to be the low bid and you don't necessarily want to because you think your competitors are missing some of those big problems. So what does that workflow actually look like? Well, I'm going to turn the screen over to Frank who is going to walk us through the process of building one of these estimation models on a parking structure. Frank? Thank you, David. You should be able to see my screen now. Yes, I can hear. Great. So this is the garage we're going to be looking at today to show the demo workflow we've just described. We're going to cover all the common tasks and elements inside of a garage. Our columns, our beams, band rules, double Ts, we got some light walls with openings. We're going to do quite a bit of the stair tower including the risers, some of these shaped wall features that we have here. And once we're done creating this model, we're ready to do a number of things with it. The most important that we're focusing on today is generating that information to create your estimate. So the most important things are the basic dimensions and quantities and item types that you have and generating a complete list of those items in a way that's useful to you. So here I just have the most basic information, but this can be transferred into a much more complex spreadsheet. We can attach notes or any other kind of attribute information to it to show up in our report. So it's completely customizable. We have full control over what this looks like. I can send it out to Excel. I can send it out to a Word document, a PDF, what have you. And as we said, that information can be pumped right into another spreadsheet that you have already completed, ready to go, and just pump that necessary information into it. You also get additional decimal places if you want it. There's a little bit extra information that you can get out of these cells too when you create an Excel spreadsheet. All right. So the first item we're going to be looking at are some columns. And we can see we just have quite a few columns to place here, some interior, exterior columns, you know, three foot wide, two foot wide, two by threes, what have you. So I'm going to go ahead and clear all that out. And first we're going to go over to our wizard. This is like a drawing off to the side for people unfamiliar with PlanBar. Like I said, you could just place anything here as if it is a drawing off to the side and then have access to it. Anything inside AllPlan, you can double right click on that object, get the tool specific to this object. So could I just as well went to the column button over here, loaded my column tool, and then adapted the properties from an object in my model or from my wizard. And you can see that it's going to set, you know, some basic dimension, some height properties for us, all of which can be overridden. And we'll see how once we place these. Before we place one though, we're going to turn on our underlay. You can bring in PDFs, DWGs, DXFs, DGNs, all kinds of 2D, 3D data. If it's a PDF and it's vector, we'll actually be able to get the line work that we have here and snap to it, see it, use it in all the ways that we need to. All right, and this is really the heart of the estimation workflow is the ability to have this information right at my fingertips and use it to mock up a model. There's very little 3D work going on here as you're going to see. Yeah, place one corner, then another. And these are just like CAD objects in AllPlan. Everything in AllPlan you can work on just as if it's a CAD object. So if I want three copies of this, all I have to do is copy it three times. And now I have those in the right spot. I'll do the same for my other column here. We can see in real time, it's all from a single source of truth, even though I'm working in 2D. And that is another great selling point of AllPlan. Things that people really like is that 2D to 3D workflow. All the work I'm going to do is in my 2D views and section, and I get a lot of the results in 3D for free. So I'll just mirror those over to the other side. So we can see we've placed quite a few of these already. And once we have these columns, of course, we can generate that report immediately, start checking what's coming out of it, see the different column shapes and sizes we have. Another thing we can do is we can automatically place labels on this. So if I select all my columns here and I choose a predefined label that we can easily set and customize, hit go, it's actually going to find every column in my drawing file and place that label down in plan for us or in any viewer section that we may have. So we can see it's telling us exactly what the size of the column is, the length of it, the height that it goes to and from. And we can interact with these in a few ways. The first is changing architectural properties, so I can easily come in here and then just define a new height. So if I wanted to move the bottom of this column up to zero, it's as simple as doing that. Now we can see the adjustment to it and adjust it in real time in our labels here as well. Another thing we can do, which is a big theme of today, is estimodeling, tracing over it. So in this case, if I have a nice view or section placed in here, I can actually just come and stretch my columns down right in my elevation here and get those with the exact height that I need. So now that we have our columns placed, we're going to go ahead and work on some spandrel beams. And we have these on all four walls. We only have one wall with a slope, so we're going to do that one today. And it has some straight to show off how that is done exactly. So now I have my north elevation turned on. This is just brought in from a PDF and then simply placed in a vertical position that's convenient for us. And so now I'm going to open up a saved view arrangement for my north wall. And so it's just a convenient way to look at it and place things in the right Y position, right? We have to address that third dimension. So any work that I do on this work plane is going to come in at that exact position in the Y position for me. All right, so I'll double click on my spandrel here and then I'll just begin to draw from the corner. And I can see that it's doing it to the face. I'm just going to change the side here. We can do all kinds of reference points and anchor points. Notice I can have it automatically make the end of my beam straight to add a batter to that automatically, which is crucial for, you know, these slanted beams with a vertical edge here. We can also have it be squared off on the end if you want to do that as well. So you have all kinds of options, tools specific to these kinds of elements that let you place that in the way that you need to. And the net effect of all these tools is that I'm doing something that looks very much like measuring an area in Bluebeam or Adobe. Right, you can see I'm just working in the view as I always had. Sometimes you're doing this with, you know, colored pencils on a piece of paper. Sometimes you're working right inside of Adobe drawing rectangles there. So it's the same workflow. Even if your estimators don't have that CAD background, they, you know, come from PM and do other things, maybe never got involved in CAD. This lets them work in a way that is, you know, quite familiar if they're just working in a, you know, on-screen takeoff or a PDF tool. Just again, real quick, run those. We can see that we're getting our lengths, our quantities, our sizes in real time as well for these objects. All right, so now that I've done some fan rule, and now we're going to work on some walls and beams for our interior space here. So I'm just going to flip over to my interior wall and I'll go to a work plan for that. Going back to my wizard, this time I'm going to get an IT beam. So it's the inverted T. It's going to actually use the same structural framing tool that we used before, but instead of using a rectangular cross section, we're actually going to pull in a section from disk. We can see it's all pulled from our library. We can save these, store these. We actually have all the AISC shapes, lots of basic shapes that you want already included in all plans. So it's just a matter of selecting those. So if I had a slope or something more complex to call it, follow, it could easily do that. Like I said, I can batter the ends, make them straight if I need to. Second verse, same as the first. When I want to come in here, it's really easy to just make a couple copies of this, just crack and trace straight down. And I could mirror that over to the other side or I'll draw some fresh ones here. I don't always have to go back to my wizard either. I can right click something on the screen if it's convenient and then bring up the tool and the settings used to create that specific element again. One of the cool features here is that these wizards are pretty intelligent. So I can very quickly go in and say, well, my inverted T is not the dimensions that I thought it was going to be. I can tweak that very quickly. These can be stored on a project basis. They can be stored on a user basis or on a company-wide basis if you have some really standardized parts coming out. Great. I just placed a window, or sorry, I just placed a wall. Now I'm going to place a window. Again, just using our wizard to pull up that tool, get some settings specific for this project here. And now it's just a matter of, again, placing it in your view. Once you get one set, you can go ahead and copy that up to the next one. Oops, I just want to copy my window up here on the same wall. And then I can stretch this in a couple of ways. I can use my handles if it's convenient. I can use my regular stretch tool if it's convenient. Now I'll go ahead and copy these walls. And I want eight copies of these. And then I know that last one needs to be shortened up by a couple of bits. I could use my stretch, but I might accidentally grab there, so another chance to use our handles. Super convenient. Now that I have my first set of walls done, I'm going to go ahead and copy this up to the second level. We don't need our windows here. We'll get rid of those. Our windows on this level need to be adjusted slightly, so we're just going to use our move command and stretch those down a little bit. And finally, our top of wall here just needs to come straight down and meet up with this portion according to the 2D rendering that we got from the architect. Looking at a couple more interesting tidbits here. If we look at this wall and pull up some properties for it, we'll get a percent solid, so it's automatically calculating what kind of openings we have, how many openings we have. We can run specialized reports that give us the total square footage of walls, total square footage of windows, counts of windows, counts of doors, stuff like that. It's useful for other things besides the architects. We can use that for calculating formwork requirements, perhaps. So there's a lot of information that can be derived from these very intelligent objects. The wall I also wanted to show, this is the same wall tool that we use everywhere in AllPlan for architecture or more complex precast elements, so it's easy to enter your number of layers in here. If I want to do a sandwich wall, the double wall, what have you, I can choose whether I want to draw on the edge or in the middle like I did here. So all of this is very high powered setup to give you all the different types of walls that you need for all the situations that you'll come across. All right, now that we have our walls done, our columns, and our beams, we're going to go look at a stair tower. So I'm going to flip over to another convenient view here looking at my stair tower from the south, and I'm going to turn off the walls and beams I just created. I'm going to turn on a stair elevation that I have that's nice, and we can see here in plan as well. So again, this is the stair tower elevation section from the PDFs from architects. Just placed it in, and now we're going to trace over it. And this is already going a long way towards helping me visualize, hey, what's this thing actually going to look like when I'm finished modeling it? That's the whole point of this workflow is to make that modeling workflow accessible by making it easy. So I placed the basic wall there. I'm going to now do some of our extrusion tools on this. This is our regular Parasolid modeling engine, but used on our wall features here, so I'm just going to crop out a rectangle of this shape, do it as a negative, and we can see that we've shaped that wall the way we need to. Now I'm going to go ahead and copy this up to the next level, and we can see that this second story only needs to go from one story to the next, so we'll stretch that up. And then finally, we'll make a couple copies of this to go up the rest of our wall. And lastly, we'll stretch this down because of the top, we're going to place a slab on it, so I'm just going to take this point, stretch it down. Now we have one of our three walls in this direction. We're not going to do all of them, but in this case, we are able to copy it down since it's the same as the wall below it, or just the south of it. Now we have it set up for our elevator shaft. We're going to do some work on our stair tower, our stair shaft now. So I'm going to come over to my stairs Python part, or apps as we call them. You've seen some of these in our other, covered more in depth in some of our other webinars. These are automated Python parts. They do a lot of stuff for you. You can help you do all this geometry via parametrics. We can even add reinforcement for you as well. But since we're just doing estimating here today, we're only worried about the basic shape, the basic dimensions of it. So I'm going to go ahead and we can see that it's not in the right place necessarily, so I'm going to go ahead and make a small adjustment five feet over. So now that when I place it in my view, it's going to be at that right Y location for it. All right, I'll just snap on to this point here. We can see that it's real easy to adjust these stair towers to simply make them match the profile of what we have. We can enter all this stuff via parametrics, of course. Only certain dimensions are coming in here and all of this can be loaded and saved as a favorite so that exact stair tower with those exact tread width and height settings can be loaded in and then used on your next project as well. All right, so now that I have one stair riser, I'm going to do a copy and rotate of this to bring it around to the other side. I'm going to position this vertically into place here. And once we have the two of them, we're going to make a few copies. Now for this last one, we don't need our final landing here, so I'm just going to zero this out and then move it back into position based on this reference point. With that, we have our risers in there. This is only reporting the thickness of the riser, the width of it, the length of it, but any of that attribute information that we're putting in there can absolutely be pulled out and put into the report as well. So, if you want the count of the treads or something like that, that information is accessible through attributes, through properties, and can be compiled into a report or added as a label if you'd like. And just to clarify, the reports are those are configuration work. They're not something that someone has to generate a custom report every time they're using it. Once I've generated that report format, something that our implementation helps with, then I can access it at the click of a button. Excellent point. All right. At this point, we can see that we have quite a bit of stuff in here, and it's overlaid on top of our underlay from our PDF. And if we turn it on off, it gives us a nice visual check to make sure that we got those things in the right position. The colors flip from white, which is a reference color, to whatever color I've created here for my color scheme. All right. So, now I'm going to add another saved wall. Flip this over to this side. And this has a few features in it that we'll cut out. So, again, I'll use my extrude tool, and I'm just going to cut out the large opening here, do a subtraction, and then likewise for the window and the stairs, I'll go ahead and cut that out. So, now we can see the basic shape for our first level. Now, again, I'm ready to copy this up one floor, make any adjustments I need to for this second level here. And, again, this is reminding me of doing the same exact work in Adobe. Very similar to the workflow now. Copies. And, finally, delete that extra one, and then lower this guy. We're about to add some slabs now, so we just need to make a little bit of room for that. All right. Now, we're going to do a slab. Slabs, we can draw in a number of different ways. I'm actually going to draw it in plan, and then specify an elevation that I want to place that. So, I'm going to use one of our handy measuring tools here. We have our measure coordinates. So, I'm just going to find the top of where this first slab goes. Looks like it's 34 foot 6 inches. I can actually hit this copy button, select the value, and now it's copied it into my clipboard for me. So, when I open up this slab tool here, I can go to my height, specify an elevation for the top of it, just hit paste. And now, in my plan, I'm able to draw exactly where I want that at. So, that's how you address that third dimension when it comes to slabs. I'll just draw this directly. See that it's appeared there. Now, these are just like the two below it. So, I'll make a couple of copies for that one as well. You can see your slabs there. And then, I can use my handy dandy right double right click right on the tool that's closest to my view. Now, I'm going to measure this coordinates again. I can see that it's 46 feet. So, I'll enter that for my elevation on my slab here. And this one's going to go from the edge over to about the center here. We can see one half of our roof on. Now, I'm going to copy this guy over to the other side. And then, I can use my stretch or my handles. Just pulling the handles. It's nice because you can see no matter where I am vertically, it knows that it's just stretching that one edge of it. So, I can snap to any place on there that's not vertical. So, I'm going to do that. It's convenient to get it right and flush with that other slab that is meeting up here. All right. With that, we can see we have quite a bit of our stair tower already completed. Not much effort to get those risers and the faith walls in here at all. Now, we're going to look at doing some double Ts. So, I'll turn off my stair tower. Go ahead and actually turn on the rest of my structure minus my double Ts. We're going to see the first one we'll place in here is this slope section. And it's got a couple of interesting things going on. So, if I turn off my existing double Ts and turn on the DT plan, this was given to us by the architect. We can tell that we need to have a couple of shorter ones over here, have it line up exactly with our stair tower, another few short ones to take us to where our ramp begins. And then, we'll do a regular 12-foot width double T along the ramp. And then, as soon as we get to this final bay, we'll go ahead and make five equally spaced ones. All right. So, I'll go back to my wizard, double right click on my double T tool. This is our placement tool. I'm going to enter where I want my top level for the basic portion of it. We'll see how we want to do that. When we do the ramp, we can control every point, every corner of it. But, I'm going to set up a base elevation now. And we'll just do this as our first level. And in AltPlan, it's real simple. All you have to do is basically trace around where you want your double Ts to span. You don't have to worry about cutting around the columns. It's actually going to automatically cut around columns and other objects automatically, as we'll see. I do want to place one point here because that's where my ramp is going to start ramping up. And then, another point here where my ramp is completed. And then, just take this finally to the end over here. So, that's our first placing line. We'll do the same operation for our second placing line. We're going to have it follow the ledge of our inverted T beam. Just come over to this column. It's convenient. It's actually, like I said, going to cut around the column for me. But, it's just super convenient to go right to the edge there instead of doing extra clicks. All right. Using my witness lines, I can easily find this position here. And then, do my final point at this edge. Now, I can specify the span direction I want. And it's going to place some of those preliminary double Ts we can see in here. It looks like I entered the wrong value. I want to do absolute height. So, that'll move it down. All right. It looks like it's exactly where we want it to be. So, the first thing we want to do is get these DT placements correct. So, all I need to do is specify that I want a joint at this point. So, I can just click this little box here. It's going to add a joint for me. And I'm going to say I want it to split to the second double T. Now, I'll go over to my placement tab. And I'll say I want to cut these on both sides. So, we can cut our flange on the left, the right, or in this case, cut them equally in order to get that perfect 9 foot 8 double T or 9 foot 7 and 8 with the joint that we have there. Now, I'll do it for the next one at the beginning of my ramp. Choose this point. And I want to do three beams for this area. So, I'll just count 1, 2, 3 beams. There's going to be my split. And I'm going to adjust on both sides again, cut the flange equally. So, now we can see that it lines up perfectly where our ramp is beginning. Now, I want to do the same thing over here. We're going to want to take it to the very end for a placement starting at the end of our ramp. And finally, I just do adjust on both sides. And now, we're going to have five equally spaced double Ts for that final bay here. And this is one of those spots at which we start to see error reduction and risk mitigation coming into play is that this forces the estimator to grapple with, okay, exactly what is this double T layout actually going to look like in practice? How is it going to differ from anything that we do on other projects? How does it differ from our last couple of projects? This is one of the many ways in which we start to do that using the model as a tool. Right. This is, you know, we give you the ability to enter the double T information, the way that it's given to you, the way that it makes sense. So, there's really no excuse to do it the right, not to do it the right way. We give you everything you need to do it quickly, efficiently, and as you can see, place it accurately. All right. So, now, we're going to adjust the geometry here. We're going to create a ramp. So, basically, I can see that I have each of these points that I placed are numbered. So, I can see I have a place in line 1.5, place in line 1.6. Down here, we have 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6. So, with our level, I'm just going to, and it says lowering here. That's because this is a dual duty feature. This is used not only for creating ramps, but also creating lowering points for drainage. It even goes so far as to automatically mark arrows pointing to the drainage slope and everything else for you as well. Obviously, we're just doing estimating here, so it doesn't come into play. Tick these up. On one side, we can already see it's, you know, trying to warp these double T's for us, because that's what this is intended to do, is actually warp the double T's later on when you take this to design intent, construction intent, beyond the estimation. We're actually doing quite a bit of stuff in here. Warping them, we're actually going to unwarp them so that we can create the casted shape for you automatically, populate it with reinforcement. Not to get too much into the details, but we handle washes, connections, all kinds of fixtures for liftings. We can add cords. We can do daps, of course, and add additional reinforcement in the stem or in other places as well. So, it's a very high-powered tool, and we're just using a few of the buttons here, which will work really well for what we're doing today. And once we place that, we can see it's exactly where we want it to be. If we zoom in to some of these columns, we can see that's automatically cut around here. Not super useful for our estimate. It's going to obviously ignore that, but as it's coming around and cutting these, it knows that these beams are just a bit shorter than those beams, so it's going to get that accurate length in there for you as well. And once we have one in place, it's as simple as copying it. So, I just select my double Ts wherever it's convenient, and then I'll make a copy up. And of course, doing it for the small one or maybe down here, I would just not have the ramp, so I'd do a new placement for that. All right, let's go ahead and turn on the rest. Now that we have our model, we have the reports that we can generate. We can create all the labels off of it automatically for checking, right? It's not just good enough to do this project. Somebody needs to come back and check it, and so that's what all those labels and everything else create is a situation where somebody can go in and quickly ascertain if the situation, you know, is correct or not. That's part of the color coding too, so we can quickly identify what these are placed as. You can use any color here. Typically, I see interior, exterior beams colored differently so that we know we have those marked right in a report, but you do have full control over it. You do 250 some odd colors, attach whatever attribute data you want, and as David had mentioned, these reports are fully customizable. So, if I open it up again real quick and just open up. I was just going to comment that wireframe view with the color coding is usually the one that prompts an oh crap, I forgot a column moment. Right, yeah, that's a good visual indicator as well, but just looking at the report very briefly, we can see that we have our, this is just a simple report editor. It's great if you want to change some formatting, a number of decimal places, stuff like that. We have a much more complex one that lets you do a whole lot more with it, and if you want to take it all the way, you can actually download Microsoft Visual Studio. This is based on Microsoft Reports. It's been around for 25 years, highly customizable. We have architects who are very particular about the way these reports look, and we can make them very happy with all the features that we have to change those. All right, one of the last things we're going to look at is some other stuff we can do. So, it's great that we're getting all the information we need for the design office, but the sales guys, there's some other tools that are available. You can actually export this 3D model to a number of different applications. One of those is Google Earth, and so you can actually place it right in situ. Inside of all plan, let me go back to here real quick. If we look at the surroundings tool, we actually enter a latitude, longitude. We can set the day of the year, the time of the day. If we want to, you know, maybe do a little bit of a sun study for our customer, you can create virtual ground planes and customize what this visualization looks like, and that actually can be rendered. We have Maxon Cinema 4D technology in here. It's an assistive brand of AllPlan, also owned by Nemechek, so we have that very powerful engine. Not as many buttons and switches as in the main program, but all that horsepower under the hood is available here in AllPlan. You can absolutely render it to very high resolutions if you want. Digressing back to Google Earth, once you establish the position of it in space, x, y location or northeasting, you can adjust its vertical location. You can also make any adjustments right in here, so if you didn't get the x, y or the northeast exactly right, you can find out what it needs to be based on Google Earth and then send this information right back to AllPlan, so that'll be put in the right spot the next time. As you can see here, you can do final adjustments on rotation or maybe even the altitude if you want, if it's not sitting off the ground in the right kind of way. All right, with that, that concludes our presentation. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll pass it back over to you, David. Thank you, Frank. I think we're going to pass it back over to Royce and open the floor up to questions at this point, so please, if anyone has any questions, feel free to chime in. If there's anything you're interested in doing a little bit more of a deep dive on, we're more than happy to reply by email as well. Royce? Thanks, David and Frank, for a great and informative presentation. We'll start our Q&A right now. The first question is, how much of the model can be used in detailing for production? Royce, I'll field that one. This is David. So, the model that exists at the end of this process is accurate, but it's not complete. So, what we typically see is that if you, after a couple of months, you've won the bid, this model gets brought up by the engineer and the detailer, dust it off, and they start adding detail. We go in and we figure out exactly how double T's are going to be worked. We confirm all of the element layouts. We lay down bar, mesh, connection embeds, add any architectural flourish or features that are going on the outside of the spandrel beams. And from there, we can use those elements to then develop erection drawings and shop tickets and those detailed bills of materials at the click of a button. So, I suppose the short answer is all of it. Okay. We have two questions that are very similar, so I'll just read the shorter one. Can this software be loaded into Revit? So, we can take a Revit model. We're not a Revit add-on. We're our own software platform, but we can take in a Revit model and do everything that Frank just showed, as well as taking this into detailing down the line. And it can be used for estimations, correct? Yes. So, the entire workflow that Frank just showed, we can take the model, refine it, push out an initial estimation, stick it on the shelf until we find we want a project, come back, and start doing the actual full detailing tasks, and then use it to produce shop tickets at the very end. The only caveat is that model needs to be accurate to begin with. Awesome. Thank you. I have another question here. Can we use custom or non-standard element shapes and templates? Yes, absolutely. The wizard that Frank kept going back to, that's something that we've been using for a long time, is the wizard that Frank kept going back to. Yes, absolutely. The wizard that Frank kept going back to, that's something that we customize for every user. Again, those can be defined for a company-wide basis. They can be defined project to project. People have the ability to go back and very quickly whip up a new section and plunk it down in there if you have a new product or if you have a specific layout for a given project. The entire thing is very customizable. Awesome. Thank you. A follow-up question here. Does the Revit model get loaded in and traced, or can the Revit elements themselves be used? If you're getting 2D documentation from Revit, we follow the tracing workflow that we just laid out. That could be AutoCAD documents. That could be PDF documents as a starting point. If you actually have the 3D Revit model, we can read the model directly, and we can dispense with most of the tracing and just do some basic information processing. Okay. Right now, that's all the questions we have. If anyone has any more questions, please send them in right now. Otherwise, we will end the presentation. We have some positive feedback, a few people saying great presentation. I think that's all the questions that we have. On behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank you and Frank for your great presentation. If anyone has any further questions about today's webinar after we end, please email them to marketing at pci.org. We will forward those as well as your contact information to both David and Frank. Thank you again. Have a great day, and please stay safe. Royce, thank you as well. We're happy to have been able to present something folks find of value, and hopefully we look forward to putting it out there more broadly in the world so it can solve some of these issues. You're welcome. Have a great day.

digital estimation workflow

precast building projects

challenges for estimators

model-based approach

automating quantities

risk assessment

model-based estimating workflow

detailed reports