bim-does this force the engineer to become the cad operator

huangyhg

bim-does this force the engineer to become the cad operator?
i know that the latest craze right now is building information modeling!
but what does that do to the engineer and/or the cad operator.  its seems to me that the engineer will be forced to become the cad guy.  if not, then how does the cad operator know what size beam or column to put where.  
or does that mean that the cad operator will have to know some fundamentals of engineering.
any thoughts?
from my understanding of bim,
it is similar to the models that engineers build in 3d modeling programs, etabs, ram, risa, etc. usually engineers do this and set all boundary conditions, fixity, design limits, etc. this can then be imported into a bim program, such as revit. i think some initial work has to be done in order to review the feasibility of a particular design, then from that i would think the initial model would be built.
we had an architect for a bigger firm in our area, come give a short presentation on revit, to our office and it was interesting because for them, they don't need to do too much work early on in the project, but for the engineer, 95% of his design needs to be done before the model can be useful to the architect (at least in my opinion) it is definitely going to cause issues with the old school engineers because of the seeming vulnerability of passing information like this so early in the project, which is needed. it seems to change the whole dynamic of the design process.
having never actually used it to draw, i think the cad guy can still do all your detailing, etc. but the initial model and layout stuff, would be done primarily by the engineer i think.
that's my opinion, i'm sure we'll see 100 others.
this is a good topic, because it is so relevant to everyone.
rc
all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
    edmund burke

interesting point, similar concerns have occurred to me. i have not been involved in bim yet but i feel that for some jobs it would actually be more work than doing it the old way.
thus making the engineer the cad operator in the initial phases of a project.
this could be the very reason that bim is so hard to swallow with most engineers. having to provide 95% percent of the design that quickly will be a major obstacle for the old and the new school engineers.
what about the cad operator?  what are they doing while the engineer is crushing the numbers and building the model?  is there any need for a cad operator once bim is in place?  
i guess i might have overstated with the 95%. it would probably be closer to a 60-75% set. no, the engineer is not the cad guy, because the idea of the bim is to exchange data between programs, as long as we build the model correctly for the design phase, we simply import into revit, then we can let the cad guy take over from there. the initial information needs to come from the engineer though from the model.
the cad guy is always going to have sections, details to draw and clean up. in theory it is supposed to save some time by skipping a few of the mark-up stages, but it i see the potential for less review going on in a design office when nothing is ever on paper.
the architects love it because it just gives them more fluff to show owners and get wows when something looks cool, but hasn't been reviewed by an engineer, but hey, revit let me build it!
rc
all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
    edmund burke

and doing the layout so early leaves no room for checking, rationalisation,e.t.c. before the architect is fixed in their expectations.
one plus i suppose is that the mechanical engineer has no excuse as they know exactly where the beams are.
haha, star for you csd72.
rc
all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
    edmund burke

so if thats your point csd72, then why do you think that bim is so hyped up?
i think it is because it will "save" owners time and money, contractors headaches, architects coordination time, and will royally screw the structural engineers!!
owners have all the $$ so they hype it to make it look like the "wave of the future".
it is going to cause a lot of small companies to go out of business or change their business model.
the one upside is that in 30 years, you'll be able to find a centralized file (bim file) of a building you would be doing renovations on. simple enough to review it for modifications then.
  
rc
all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
    edmund burke

we are in the process of constructing a building that used bim.  the project wasn't all that bad.  it also wasn't that large of a project.  3 weeks after we were awarded the job the architect asked us for framing plans.  i export the current model into autocad, cleaned up the drawings a little (about 15 min per floor) converted them to a pdf and sent them to the architect.  i did inform them that they were not complete and that things might change (although they never did).  they didn't seem to mind... after all they had plenty of other things to work on.  they did have some problems because they didn't have a 26k5 in their section database and didn't know what it was (or what the numbers meant).
the biggest problem i had was nailing the architect down on the details... specifically where interior masonry partitions were so i could locate them on the drawings.  they didn't dimension them on their drawings.  they told us to use their computer model to get the information required.  this made it impossible to check the drawings by hand.

my firm is starting to get into this now.  my understanding is that the geometry of the building (gridlines, floor to floor heights, etc.) will be imported into structural software (such as ram) from the architectural bim model.  the engineer would then go about framing out the building the same way he always would.