Avant-garde Office Skyscrapers

Automations and high volume shop drawings at LOD 400 for onsite construction.

Three years ago, our customer, a global construction company, was in charge of building two avant-garde office skyscrapers and their adjacent commercial area.

To meet tight deadlines and oversee an efficient onsite construction process of the skyscrapers, our customer had to supply its teams and subcontractors with a large volume of highly detailed shop drawings within a very short period of time. Modelical was selected to undertake this challenging work package of the project.

From Revit automations, BIM modelling and coordination to shop drawing at LOD 400

For a year, three Modelical’s experts got fully involved in this project, providing a sharp combination of services:

• Revit add-ins Development: we developed custom Revit add-ins to automate the generation of block wall geometry and documentation models at LOD 400 in accordance with BIM Forum specification.
• Block work geometry modelling: for more than 130 levels across two skyscrapers and for 5 levels of their surrounding buildings
• LOD 400 shop drawings of all the block work plan views and elevations, including openings, MEP fixtures, reinforcements to enable onsite construction.

Family setup strategy and automation to overcome Revit limitations

All the construction works were performed under the BIM methodology and the modelling software was Revit. However, Revit’s limitations in representing concrete masonry unit (CMU) walls did not allow us to achieve the expected level of precision for onsite construction shop drawings. We overcame this difficulty by combining a family setup strategy and a set of automations.

We first created specific Revit families for CMU blocks and curtain walls.

Then, we developed a set of Revit automations to accelerate:

• The creation or modification of block work geometries
• The generation of plan views, elevations and the annotation items at 1:25 scale.

This approach allowed us to automate about 80% of the block work section and elevation modelling and shop drawing generation tasks.

Highly detailed shop drawings for construction

Once we had the Revit automations, we could shift our focus on highly detailed modelling at LOD 400. The modelling work included block work elevations and sections and for each of the related doors and MEP openings, the anchor channels, the steel lintels, the reinforcements and lift reinforcements.

Project metrics

In one year, we modelled more than 130 levels of the two skyscrapers, 4 basement of the site and the 5 levels of their surrounding buildings. We produced more than 5000 drawings at LOD 400 and automated about 80 % of the block work modelling and drawing generation tasks.