• New BIM (Building Information Modeling) features being rolled out in ARES Commander 2020 with the ambition to build the best-in-class solution to create DWG drawings of your BIM projects.

• The BIM features of the ARES Commander will also become available for vertical application developers.

Graebert is a pioneer in developing high-performance Computer-Aided Design (CAD) solutions across desktop, mobile, and cloud, announced today BIM features for its flagship product ARES Commander. The version 2020 to be released end of January will represent the first step of a multi-year roadmap aiming at building the best-in-class DWG-based CAD platform for documenting BIM projects.

Cédric Desbordes, Business Development & Marketing Director from Graebert commented: “BIM has been around for more than twenty years now but less than 20% of the users in the Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) industry have transitioned from CAD to BIM. There is a strong expectation in the market around BIM because it represents a smarter way to collaborate around construction projects. But the numbers reflect also a much stronger resistance than for the transition to PLM software that we have seen for the mechanical industry.”

Graebert has 35+ years of expertise in DWG-Editing CAD Software and also vast experience with BIM after the release in 2013 of SiteMaster BIM, the 3D version of its SiteMaster class of solutions for Building Surveys. The survey department of Graebert has surveyed millions of square meters of buildings and can leverage from the SiteMaster BIM solutions to generate the 3D geometry of existing buildings and export it to IFC format.

Before shaping its BIM strategy, Graebert conducted a survey among BIM users and experts. One of the key findings has been that the organizations adopting BIM software keep massively producing DWG drawings to document their projects. Some reasons for that include the necessity to produce 2D drawings with a higher level of details and the reluctance to share BIM files with external companies because of Intellectual Property reasons. Another key reason is that the files shared with customers and provided represent a liability and responsibility that is more difficult to assess with 3D BIM files than with highly detailed 2D drawings. For that reason, there are 3 to 10 CAD users behind each BIM user in these organizations.

A second key finding has been that when organizations adopted BIM software they noticed a significant decrease in quality for the drawings they are extracting from BIM models to document their projects. As a result, such organizations face now the problem to have two groups of users that cannot properly work together. A considerable amount of time and resources are lost in fixing drawings and collaboration issues.

“ This is an area where we feel Graebert can create significant value for its users and by extension for all the developers that want to use the ARES OEM technology to build vertical applications for the AEC market ” continued Cédric Desbordes.

Best-in-class DWG drawings for BIM

During its Annual Meeting, Graebert demonstrated some of the BIM capabilities of the upcoming ARES Commander 2020 (release date end of January 2020):

• IFC & RVT import (+IFC export): Interoperability with the most widely used BIM formats
• BIM Navigator: Explore the imported BIM projects, potentially several of them simultaneously, and filter out entities by discipline, by level, by class, by type or by the object. The filtering of elements is essential to isolate only the relevant information for each drawing. For example, one may isolate only the walls and openings of a specific floor.
• BIM Properties: Read the BIM properties of selected entities which might for example lead
  to specific technical choices in the drawing.
• Data Extraction: Export the information of the filtered objects into tables or .csv files which may be for example used for quantity takeoffs.
• Sections and views: Create 2D drawings from the filtered selections in order to continue to document them after with the CAD tools of ARES Commander.

A BIM-oriented CAD platform for developers of vertical applications

In parallel, Graebert announced the availability of the BIMflow Pack for ARES Commander OEM. The ARES CAD platform is used by a multitude of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to build vertical applications on top of the ARES engine. The OEM versions of ARES are customized and rebranded as per the needs of the ISVs that can leverage from the CAD features of ARES to concentrate their efforts on industry-specific features to be added on top.

All the BIM features to be released in ARES Commander 2020 will be available for developers under the optional BIMflow pack.

Additionally, the BIM export feature will be customizable via API to enable the export of 3D geometry created in ARES Commander into BIM objects with specific BIM properties. This enables developers to seamlessly empower their existing DWG-based CAD solutions with BIM capabilities.

Simultaneously, Graebert announced the CLOUDify Pack including all the features of ARES Commander powered by Grabert’s innovative cloud technology ARES Kudo. With the combination of its BIM, Mobile, and Cloud features Graebert aims at offering an unrivaled set of features for developers that want to adopt disruptive strategies and differentiate strongly from their competition.

Click below to download the whitepaper about Graebert fixing broken workflows between CAD and BIM: