Architectural Technologist – Vectorworks & Neatworkz

by scays on 21/07/2009

neatworkz screen capture
Image by Scays via Flickr

About 3 months back Jon Pickup from Archoncad, told me of a program he had seen called Neatworkz, reason being I was doing some film work for a client and was asking his opinion, but he sent me the link and a video of his conversation with Conrad Preen of Neatworkz, and I was totaly taken aback, what Conrad has done with Vectorworks is almost beyond description, its just best to go to his site neatworkz.tv and watch the 3 videos he has there.

I can honestly say this is truly wonderful to watch. As a Technologist we don’t get involved in TV centre setup, tending  to leave it to others, we just make sure theres enought holes and cable ducts, but the concept is the important thing, its Vectorworks on pills, and big ones at that. As you will see from the movies, the vectorworks screen layout is there, but the tool set has been added to with a neatworks pallet, together with a new menu comand drop downs,  adding components and linking them by cables, is just a breeze, but run a simple spread sheet, and it tells you the length of the cable the connection type, what feed is going down the cable, and a whole lot of stuff that’s way beyond me, but the main thing to consider here is that Conrad has used Vectorworks as the base, and if it can be done for something so complex as cable and distribution systems for a TV station, oh he dropped it in that it was used to set up the Olympic Beijing TV system, then what about something more akin to us, electric or pipe runs, or what !! I think this opens up a whole new concept to BIM.

But what about Nemetschek, were I anything to do with marketing, I would be shouting this all over the net, yet …. so quite. I would be brain storming this concept to death, just where can we take this, certain companies seem to be leading us, the power house of the profession into taking there concept of BIM, and here is a system that can blow that apart. If Conrad can make a cable know what its connecting to and likewise for the component that its connected to, whats the difference between that and building materials, granted we can do that to some extent know but this is a different level.

CPD aplenty here, from just keeping up with Vectorworks to BIM in general.

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Tagged as: Architectural Technologist, Architectural Technology, Architecture, BIAT, CIAT, Collaborative Professional Development, construction, Continuing professional development, CPD, Design, MSAAT, Technologist, technology, vectorworks

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