Hello Buildings and Infrastructure Community!
This weekend the cloud upgrades to the R2022xFD02 release and I'm excited to share with you all the great new enhancements that have been delivered for buildings, civil infrastructure, and structures. As always, be sure to check out the wiki page for a detailed description.
Buildings
For buildings, we've released three new building features in the Building and Civil Structures Design application to improve productivity and expand your design and engineering capabilities.
- Levels
- Walls (and wall openings)
- Slabs (and slab openings)
The new levels feature automates the creation of a set of planes that represent building stories. Each level set is composed of 4 planes (top of slab, bottom of slab, finish floor and ceiling) and can be modified individually, as a story or as a complete set. They can be created by parameters, by existing planes, by importing an Excel table, or by selecting an existing building that has been imported from an IFC file.
The new wall and slab features are both based on volumetric geometry, similar to what you would find in the volume tab of the Building 3D Design application. The wall can take either a centerline or volume as input, then has a number of parameters available to position the wall. Take a look at the priority parameter - with this value you can control how the intersections of walls are managed at wall corners.
Another very powerful aspect of the new wall and slab feature is integration with Object Types and Component Based Design. As seen at the end of the video below, if an Object Type is present in the database, you can add the Object Type to the wall feature, if the Object Type contains an User Defined Feature, it will automatically instantiate the UDF and display it's parameters within the wall dialog box. The Change LOD command will then instantiate the Engineering Template if the Object Types contains one. There are a few rules to creating Object Types for walls and slabs, notably what inputs are required for the UDFs and Engineering Templates, we'll make a post in the future explaining how this needs to be done. Nevertheless, this is an extremely powerful way to link a concept design model with a detailed model for construction, especially when you consider this can be combined with IFC models imported "For Design."
Find these enhancements in the Building Designer and Building Design Engineer roles.
Civil Infrastructure
R2022xFD02 is a major release for linear infrastructure design with two major enhancements for the alignments user interface and cross section creation command.
New in this release, both the horizontal and vertical alignments can be displayed simultaneously within the same window, with graphic indicators within each window showing the current mouse position in the opposing alignment's window. The alignment dual view layout can be customized and repositioned to suit your preferences or project orientation.
Cross section creation has also been vastly improved in this release. There is a brand new UI to facilitate the cross section creation, define variable parameters within the cross section and simplify it's deployment within the model. This new functionality will greatly improve ergonomics of creating and managing road or rail projects with multiple cross sections along the alignment.
Finally, I'm pleased to announce a massive amount of new functionality to automate the creation of alignment drawings for a linear infrastructure project. The Multi-Discipline Drafting application has a number of new functionality to automate the drawing creation, dimensioning and annotation of linear infrastructure projects to create both vertical and horizontal alignment views, as well as stationing tables and annotations. This new capabilities will vastly improve the drawing generation experience and vastly simplify the drawing creation process in 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA for linear infrastructure projects.
Find these enhancements in the Civil Designer and Civil Engineer roles.
Structures
In the previous 3DEXPERIENCE CATIA release - R2022xFD01 - we delivered two new applications for structures design and engineering for the construction industry (well, one new application and one newly recombined application). This release we continue the trend to deliver new functionality for these two applications.
I'm very excited to announce that in R2022xFD02 the Building and Civil Structures Engineering application has been enhanced to include new functionality to model, catalog and instantiate steel connections. This new functionality will speed up the process to go from a concept structural model to a detailed model for fabrication, allowing companies to create catalogs of regularly used steel connections to be deployed across a project or series of projects.
Find these enhancements in the Building Design Engineer and Civil Engineer roles.
Find these enhancements in the Building Designer, Building Design Engineer, Civil Designer and Civil Engineer roles.
Computational Designer for Construction
Finally, I'm excited to announce that the xGenerative Design application supports an entirely new tab in R2022xFD02 dedicated the polyhedral modeling of meshes. This new functionality opens up the door to a new world of design possibilities. Now you can easily go from surface to mesh and back to surface modeling within the same model, taking advantage of all the great new operators that can only be available through mesh modeling.
Conclusion
R2022xFD02 is an exciting release where we see a great number of enhancement delivered across multiple applications for the construction industry. For a detailed look I encourage you to check out the wiki page linked above. Thank you to R&D for their tireless efforts to make CATIA the most powerful software to design, engineer and construct building and infrastructure projects! Enjoy this new release and be sure to share feedback in the community!
