- Well, I spent the first half of the course
talking about all this cool 3D BIM stuff.
So it almost seems like going backwards
to stop and talk about simple 2D digital drawings.
But in reality, that's not true.
I said before that many projects
are still using BIM level zero or BIM level one,
and I've seen plenty of projects where a complex model
might exist, but it's never actually seen
by the field personnel who are building the project.
I also still see many, many projects
where paper construction drawings or blueprints,
as we used to call them,
are still the norm out in the field.
And if you've watched any of my other courses
where I talk about construction drawings,
you're probably anticipating that this is the point
where I'm going to say stop using paper drawings.
The tools for using digital drawings in the field are here,
they are readily available, they're affordable,
they're easy to learn.
Please just stop using paper drawings.
I won't take the time here to veer off into giving you
all of my reasons why we need to ditch
our paper drawings right now and switch to digital.
If you want to hear that,
go check out my other course called Construction Industry,
Going Digital in the Field, where I lay it all out
and give you examples of several
of the software applications
that you can go out and try right now.
For this course though, let's just look at
what you can do with digital drawings.
First and foremost, you can do everything
with digital drawings that you could do with paper drawings.
You can mark them up, you can highlight in cloud,
you can measure and do takeoffs,
but with digital drawings,
you can share all of this with anyone else on the team.
You can also manage plan revisions
from a single central source, and push all revisions out
to every single user at once at the click of a button,
addendum 11 just got issued.
Great, add it to the set of digital drawings
that everyone on the project is using
in the field on their smartphone or tablet.
It's instantly pushed to all of those users
so that they're never using an outdated set in the field.
A request for information or RFI was just submitted
by the formwork contractor with a response
that could also affect the reinforcing contractor,
the placement contractor,
and maybe even the opening locations
for the HPAC contractor.
No problem, because I can identify that RFI
right on the shared set of digital drawings
that everyone is using.
So they can see it in the field before the office
even figures out that there's a cost impact.
Now, some people won't like that,
they want that RFI to go through the office first
if there's a potential cost impact.
But let me tell you, here's the deal.
Cost impact or not, it is going to have to be built
in accordance with the new information that you received.
Build it wrong because the field didn't have the info,
and you're going to have to fix it,
it's a huge source of rework.
And if the owner or general contractor can show
that you built it wrong after you received
the new information, they are not going
to want to pay you for that rework.
This is the kind of thing that digital drawings
can fix for us immediately.
And we really need to do more in the industry
to replace paper drawings with digital.
And many of these tools can also leverage
the building information model to bring even more detail
and help out to us in the field.
In my opinion, this is another real game changer.
Until recently, there was not a lot of easy ways
to view a 3D building information model out in the field,
at least not out on the project site,
maybe in the construction office,
but not on the site.
In their native file formats, these are huge files
that take a lot of computer processing power to view.
Yes, you could do things like export a model
to a 3D PDF and then view it using software
like Bluebeam Revu, that's very common
in the construction industry.
But again, not really out in the field.
Now, our digital drawing and management applications
like PlanGrid have a Rivet plugin that allow you
to export a building information model created in Revit,
and bring it directly in to the Plan Grid application,
where it lives right alongside the 2D plan sheets.
In fact, you just click on a switch and tell it to go to 3D,
and the model pops up right there.
Or you can use Fieldwire with its latest feature
that allows you to import the 3D model
in that industry standard IFC format
that I mentioned earlier.
Do that, and now you'll have the model accessible,
and I can use it to view 3D assemblies
and all of the associated text data and information.
And I can do all of this using my digital drawings app
that I have installed on my smartphone
or my tablet that I have with me all the time
and out in the field.
Many trade contractors I speak with tell me
that they use digital drawing apps
when the general contractor mandates it,
but otherwise they just used paper plans
if that's what they're sent.
They're just letting the general contractor
set the pace of technology adoption.
Don't do this.
Trade contractors, you can realize the benefits
of digital drawings right now
by adopting one of the platforms out there
like PlanGrid or Fieldwire.
All you have to do is ask your client
to send you the drawings in a PDF format.
Look at some of the additional advantages
as a trade contractor.
Sometimes your crews get moved,
sometimes they arrive on site without the correct plans.
If you go digital, this never has to happen.
The worst case is that they would need
to find a wifi connection to download the latest versions.
And that's typically easy to find
often now right at the construction site.
These construction management apps that put a shared
of the traditional 2D drawings front and center
to communicate information are really, I think,
part of the future of construction.
The addition of 3D model viewing capability
in these apps really adds to their functionality
and makes them even more attractive
when trade contractors model their installation
and detailing drawings in 3D.