Diving into the Deep End: Creating a Virtual Job Site

CONTESSA HAYTER: I'm Contessa Hayter, and I have Graham Sinclair and Kelly Orji with me today. And we are going to be talking about diving into the deep end-- creating a virtual job site. If you're in the wrong class, this is your last time to duck out.

We're going to use that Piedmont Project to show an example of what BIM team is, what collaboration for Revit or C4 are and how to utilize those and set those up. And then talk about how to use the models for preconstruction self-performed work and then how to utilize new innovations, like drones scans, to start to create a virtual job site. And then lastly, share with you all the lessons learned that we have from this process and how you can apply those to your workflow, whenever you try this process.

We're going to start just introducing ourselves and our companies. As I said, I'm Contessa Hayter. I work for Brasfield and Gorrie. We are a southeastern-based general contractor headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. We mainly work in the southeast, as you can see on the map, but the blue states show performed work.

So we follow a lot of our clients around the country for their jobs. And our biggest market vertical is our health care group. So we're ranked number one among the ENR Southeast Healthcare Contractors.

We've been in business over 53 years, and we do about $2 billion-- a little over 2 billion-- annually. At Brasfield and Gorrie, I'm a Senior VDC Coordinator. VDC stands for Virtual Design and Construction.

We are a multifaceted group that helps do multiple virtual platforms, like model-based quantity takeoff, laser scanning, virtual reality, drone scans, and 4D modeling, just to name a couple. And I think that we're able to do this because we have such a diverse and amazing group. Cheers, everybody in the audience that's part of our little group here.

We come from very different backgrounds. We have programmers, a pilot, an aerospace engineer. And I was a dance minor. So I'm just throwing that out there. I'm going to turn it over to Graham and Kelly to introduce themselves and talk about HKS.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: I'm Graham Sinclair. I'm architect for HKS, and I specialize in mostly health projects.

KELLY ORJI: And I'm Kelly Orji, and I also work for HKS, and I've been there about eight years and also health care. So we kind of realized this just recently. But if you'd like to download a QR scanner or there's actually one in your Autodesk app, we actually have in our handout some QR codes that will show you some of the CR renders that we created. But it's hard to scan something with a phone with a scanner. But anyway, if you'd like to get a scanner, you can do that.

CONTESSA HAYTER: Or make friends with your neighbor.

KELLY ORJI: Make friends with your neighbor-- yes. So Graham and I work for HKS, which is one of the largest architectural firms in the world. We have 24 offices worldwide with 1,400 plus employees. And we represent 12 main market sectors, but health care is one of our largest sectors. And we're the third largest health care design firm, with over 4,000 health care projects and 255 health care design awards.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So before we start to talk about some of the technology we use to collaborate on this project, I want to give a brief overview of the project. So this is the Piedmont Atlanta Hospital. We did a patient tower edition. So it's about 800,000 square feet that we're adding onto this existing campus. So this diagram should give you an idea of the program in there.

There's about 400 patient beds, 10 new ORs, 10 cath labs and EPA labs. And then at ground level, we have a lobby and retail space that opens up into a plaza to engage the street. And there's parking underneath for about 400 cars.

So a big project like this takes a big team. During the design process, there were about 30 firms involved in the design process. It was a semi-integrated project delivery approach, meaning the contractor and some of the subcontractors were involved in the design process.

The MEP subs were all on board in a design assist fashion, and then Brasfield was involved from the very beginning concept to help us with pricing and constructability. Here's a few more images from the project. The top left image here is the lobby with the grand stair connecting to the upper waiting area.

The image on the right is the approach to the drop off. The image I showed before had kind of the glassy curtain wall. That's the commercial face. But then the campus face, we want to relate back to the brick, so we used a terracotta panel to give it a more modern look but still tieback to that existing brick.

The patient rooms-- we really wanted to give them a great view because this has great views of the trees around the area. And so we did floor to ceiling glass and wall to wall glass, which was pretty unique for a patient room in a hospital. So I'm going to talk about how we use cloud for Revit. And this is a brief video to show you my experience with getting people excited about C4R.

CONTESSA HAYTER: This is an actual video of Graham at Bonnaroo last year.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: May or may not be true-- yeah. So see people start getting excited about it eventually. You just have to do an awkward dance for a little while. Then the whole team joins in. But now I'm sure-- what's that?

AUDIENCE: Who was playing?

CONTESSA HAYTER: [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So you guys have all probably experienced this. Since you're here, you're usually on the forefront of tech, trying to get people excited about something. And everyone else is kind of scared to use it. That's the experience I had with this.

Starting this project, I knew it was going be a big team. I knew even within HKS, we're going to have at least four offices working on it. So I started talking with our practice technology group.

What's the best place to host this Revit model to make sure we're all collaborating? And they introduced this C4R to me-- cloud for Revit. I had never heard of it.

So for those of you who don't know what it is, it's basically hosting the Revit models on the Autodesk cloud. And one thing that was really exciting about that, to me, was all our consultants, all our team members are hosting their own models in the same place. So there's no sending miles back and forth. All the latest up to date miles are all in the same place and where you can get the latest and greatest.

So I was really excited about this. The rest of our team was a little hesitant to try something new. Nobody wants to be the Guinea pig. I started working with people saying we can at least test it out for a month.

Our consultants were uneasy about using a new technology Brasfield was very excited about being able to download our models and see what we were doing anytime they wanted, but our lawyers were equally terrified of this aspect. So I had to talk with our legal team for a while, get them to draft up some documents that made them feel a little better, got our project manager comfortable with the expense of everything, and we said we're going to at least try it out for a month to see how it goes. But I was still having trouble getting them to actually purchase it.

So I did what anyone in this room would have done and just put 15 licenses on my credit card and crossed my fingers that they'd reimburse me. And they did reimburse me. So that worked out well. But for that first month, we had about eight architectural licenses. It was pretty early on.

The team was still small, and we had four for the structural team. So for the first month, we just hosted those two models in the cloud. And I gave one license apiece to our other consultants, just to test out uploading, downloading get kind of comfortable with the software, how it worked.

The learning curve is very easy for this. It's just like saving it anywhere else. It's just a location where you're saving something. And by the end of the month, the whole architecture team was sold, and the structural team was too because it made coordinating with them during the schematic design phase so much easier.

We could move a column over a phone call, instead of sending models back and forth over two weeks. So the rest of the consultants were still a little scared of it. But by the beginning of DD, we had them all on the cloud. And these are just a few of the models that we had stored on there-- the typical models that you would have for a project this size. And during our peak of CDs, we had about 30 models, I think, up on the cloud.

So this is the hub where all these models are stored. You can download and upload to here. One nice thing about this is you can give anyone you want permission to access this, and they don't have to have a license. They can come and download. They won't be able to work live on the cloud, but they can download any of your models.

So for some of our consultants that had less scope-- like our parking consultant, who was just doing the two levels of parking and our lighting consultant, who was just doing some specialty areas. It makes sense for their whole team to have licenses, but they could download our model from here. So instead of us sending them models, they could download our latest model whenever they wanted, which was a great perk.

And you can actually upload and download any kind of file to the hub. It's good for AutoCAD links, if they're linked into your Revit files. But then even you can see the very top folder here, we used to share all the images for this presentation.

So you could use it for JPEGs-- anything you want. So I talked a little bit about our struggles, and the startup process wasn't exactly ideal. We learned a lot through it. And so Kelly's going to talk a little bit about knowing what we know now, how do we set up for a project like this?

KELLY ORJI: OK, kind of the number one thing, especially with something that's a different way of doing it like this, you need to have a BIM plan. And it's very important in the beginning that everyone sits down talks about how things are going to be used, how the models are set up, how things are linked together. And it's all really about communication.

So at the very beginning of the project, all the BIM managers need to get together and really discuss all of this. And it's really, really important, especially with the cloud because there are no read-only setups for this. Pretty much anyone that's in the cloud can get into any model at any time and do anything they want to. So it's very, very important in such a trust environment to make sure that you clearly define what everyone is allowed to do and not.

And something that was really nice about the cloud is during the DD process, we actually got permission-- the architecture team got permission from the equipment team and the furniture team to move some of their families around just a little bit in order to better coordinate. And they had to stop doing that after DDs, but it saved us a lot of time. And it was a really positive thing.

That was a nice aspect of having the cloud. But that was anything that we did that was similar to that, it was something that they knew exactly what we were doing. There was clear boundaries about what you're allowed to do and not.

And also, it's very important you have a designated BIM manager. One thing that we used for this project-- and this isn't a unique thing. This is something we've set up and used before. But especially, with the cloud, it was very, very helpful-- the use of linked views.

So this example here that you're seeing is actually a door coordination view, and we set up these views in our architectural models and basically color the doors based on which entity needed to coordinate with them. And we tag them with the hardware sets. And we also showed where the controls went. So the red doors that you're seeing need coordination with both low voltage and electrical. And then the blue doors is just electrical.

So this was nice because it was real time. So if something changed, I'd actually clouded within this view for them, and they'd be able to find it much easier. And this really, really helped our process. And we did a similar thing with linked views for structural edge of slab coordination.

So this isn't an Autodesk product, but we should definitely talk about it because it definitely was a big tool for us with collaboration and communication. And a lot of people are using this, but this was super helpful for this project-- Blue Beam Studio Sessions. So basically, blue beam-- and a lot of people are using this. But basically, Blue Beam is a PDF software, but they have something called studio sessions, where you can have multiple PDFs on there.

And anyone can get in there, and you can send invites to people to be in the PDF at the same time. You can make alerts. And if you send an alert to someone, it'll basically email them with a screenshot that shows whatever your markup is.

And you can basically have communication back and forth within the PDFs. So we invited even contractor was in there, a lot of the subs were in there. So people were marking stuff up back and forth and having conversation within our markups.

CONTESSA HAYTER: So just to mention again on what Graham and Kelly were saying. It's so important to get buy-in, and it's definitely like the first step and hardest step maybe for the beginning of a project. For us, again, we're talking about this in this project in the preconstruction phase.

And for us, we don't necessarily always have our project manager, superintendent involved on day one. They might be finishing another project. They're in a different state. They're not thinking about this project right now. But for us, we tried to get our superintendents, project managers, safety guys on board and into the software and into this environment as early as possible.

And in the long run, our VDC field team and the project managers and the superintendents and say you guys are going to be the end user. So we want to make sure they're as involved as they can be at the beginning. Now I'm not saying that's an easy task, or that they're going to want to do that at first. But you can definitely get them there. So that would definitely be step one as a contractor is just get your end users and your entire team around the table to talk about how you're going to use these models and show them to them.

And then the second thing that's key to making sure this process works is identifying the thing that your team needs them or as and making that perfect or as right as you can in the model, sharing it, training, and then making it a necessity. So for us at Brasfield and Gorrie, we still perform concrete work. So the concrete structure-- this being 44,000 plus cubic yard job-- obviously, we realized it was very important to get the concrete right.

So this is our workflow. This is the clean, beautiful version of the workflow. Definitely didn't start like this and this is just the evolved version and definitely not saying it's the end all be all, but this is what we found worked.

So at the beginning of the project, it was done in case this was the structural engineer. And HKS were hired. They started their modeling and design process and then the document share was given to us.

So we're taking that kind of as a moment of being introduced to the project, being hired, and being introduced to this platform. And automatically, we started to see that we were going to need to communicate, just like Kelly was mentioning. So that kind of took us to our collaboration conversation.

So HKS, Uzun and Case, and Brasfield and Gorrie all met in a room to talk about things that we wanted to make sure we were outlining, like who was going to be doing what kind of things in the model? Who had access to what? What items we were going to be able to add. And that kind of started us onto our outlining our best practices for this project. So between that outlining what we were going to be able to do and our first work session meeting, which is our first blue block here, we started our scrubbing process. And that's basically when we take the 2D drawings and the 3D model and make sure that we see what the discrepancies are between the two, start to write those down, and start to create our RFI logs.

So we had a model RFI log, as well as just a normal RFI log. Other things were like where we would like a cut section or items like that the design team had modeled the column from the very bottom parking, all the way through the top roof as one column. But for us, as a self-perform contractor, it's really important for us to have the columns broken by levels. So just mentioning to them things that they had modeled that we might need a different way. And that's what we went over in that work session.

And yeah, the list was kind of like a kid's Christmas list-- really long the first time-- the first workstation. There were a lot of things to go over, but it really was necessary to make this process work. So from there, we branch off into Uzun and Case kind of taking our lists and starting to help identify and model the geometry sections.

So they started to break the columns per level. Or if we found a wall that maybe didn't meet up to the bottom of the next floor, they were editing that information. And simultaneously, they allowed us to be inside of their model.

So us, as a GC, we were inside the structural engineers model adding construction parameters to the model. So these were things like PSI that varied through the building or pour and lift information, 40 scheduling information. Basically, things that our field team were asking for and needed in the long run, that's what we started putting into these construction parameters and also things that our estimating team was asking for. So we're back to a document share.

Again, this is just when-- obviously, we're all sharing 24 hours a day. But this is when the design team saying here's your SD drawing set, and we're taking that set. And the lesson learned for us-- especially from our risk management team-- was to make sure that we are timestamping a model that best represents the drawing section. So make sure if you write one thing down out of the workflow, that's, as a contractor, that you write that down-- that's a huge step because we're contractually obligated for the pricing of what's on the drawings. So it's really important that we have a model that's as close to representing of that.

And so then we start to move back to the scrubbing process but for a different reason this time. We are going to continue to generate RFIs, but we're also using the model to generate model-based quantity take off and to do constructability reviews. And I'll talk a little bit about some of the things we found from the constructability review in just a moment. But as far as the software we use for the takeoff, we use a symbol.

It's a web-based software for the quantity takeoff. And then the whole process just starts back over again-- so each design iteration this was happening. But it's important. Again, we're in preconstruction, and we started this in SD.

So this is a video this is Navisworks software. We have all of the models from the teams overlaid inside of the software. And one of the things that we really had to get right at the very beginning was the foundation package. We had to make sure that we had our GMP completed, and that our foundations were right.

So one of the estimators asked if there's any way to model the geotechnical report and overlay that with the structure so that we could confirm that we think that the design of the foundations was what it needed to be. So that's what you're seeing here. The burgundy layer is actually our generated rock topography on our site. And as you can see, we had some issues we had to work out.

So again, this is in SD. We had not really had as many chances to have such great design team models and such input into the design model and be able to model other things and have these kind of discussions with the design team this early on the job. But we were able to talk with them to end up changing some of these spread foundations into peers instead. Because it made more sense with blasting and all of our constructability that we had to think about for the foundation package.

This is an example of what you would see in a symbol for the model quantity takeoff. So you'll have a model tree on the left. It's basically all the models that you have for your project that you've uploaded into a symbol. And then you'll have your grouping by whatever it is that you want to group by.

You can group by PSI, if that's the parameter that you put in. You can group by pour or lift information, and then you have a representation of your model. And this is something you can share with pretty much anybody on your team. And we went from about a 5% discrepancy in our concrete quantities the first round to a less than 1% discrepancy at the CD level of foundation packages.

So that just gives you a little bit of insight on how much we worked hand in hand with this team and how accurate this model was. So at first, it was, honey, I don't want to. But now it's I want it all, and I want it now. So once you get your team seeing these things, they started to brainstorm on other ideas, and that's great. And that's how you end up getting to your virtual job site.

So we've got our buy-in. We've identified our most important thing, and we want to virtually represent what physically is going to be built as best as possible. And our next step was our drone flight.

So we fly a drone in-house we flew the drone over the Piedmont site. That's what you're seeing here. We are FAA part 107 remote pilot certified-- just in case anybody needs to write that down. It's very important to make sure that you're FAA certified to fly these drones for commercial use.

And then once our team saw the models, they really got really excited-- oh, I'm sorry, the point cloud models. They got really excited and started asking what can we do with these drone scans. So as you can see, I started to layer the vegetation on one level. I had the existing site to stay and the roadways on a level. And then had the existing Sheffield building that we were demoing on a separate level.

And we're able to bring these into Navisworks so we can overlay them with the design team models or any models that we have from our in-house team, and that's what you're seeing here. So that is basically what we started with from the drone scan. And then it kind of moved into also being a site safety opportunity. So as you can see from overhead, we can see the roadways. We can see and think about pedestrian pathways and start to plan our safety for this site.

And it is an existing site. So it's really important for us to consider what patients might be seeing or how they're getting to the spot they need to be in and what they're going to see. So this allows us to really start doing that process as early as possible.

And like I was mentioning, you have to find out what's important for your team. And for Brasfield and Gorrie, we sell perform concrete. And we also have a B&G supply, which is our crane company. We had our B&G supply representative, project managers, estimators, superintendent all weigh in using our in-house parametric crane models.

So Jesse on our team made these crane parametric models that we're able to change their height. We can change the radius of them. And you can start to kind of place those, talk about tie back to the building, and really have full conversations about your crane planning. So that was our next step. And then we moved into more of an underground standpoint.

So like I was talking about earlier, the foundation package was early. We were already talking about the rock. One other thing we started to talk about was the shoring system.

So we actually ended up 3D modeling the shoring system with our subcontractor and utilizing that to have discussions about the underground work. We're on an existing campus. We need to make sure we don't have any kind of potential utility strike, and we need to just be able to plan with new utilities coming in and how our shoring systems are set up.

And all of this was started and is continuing to go with Michael. I think he's in the room. He's our MEP coordinator on this job now in the construction phase.

This is just another image of a newer drone flight where you can see some of the demo had happened with overlay of the cranes in the structure. And then this is one of the earlier videos that we created to share with the owner in the preconstruction phase. So again, just being able to show your client your cranes, how you've laid out the building, on information about safety, and just in a visual way that's easy to understand.

Our clients aren't necessarily always used to seeing site safety specific planning. So this just gives them a really good idea of what's going on and how their existing site going to continue. You can't tell because the drones scan and models are so amaze here, but there is a model under there. Another thing they loved, and we were on the front curtain wall edge is to see just the size of what building they had and what they were about to be moving into. So it really got the team excited.

KELLY ORJI: So in a similar way to where Brasfield used virtual reality as a way of communicating, we used virtual reality in a lot of our user meetings in the beginning in design. So a lot of times, users-- it's nurses and doctors for us, when we're in health care. And they're not used to looking at a plan and knowing what that is in actual real space. So it's really useful to either build mock-ups or have some sort of virtual reality or 3D view to give them more information and get feedback from them.

So something that we did with Brasfield is we actually built real-life mock-ups of some of the key rooms, and Brasfield actually built for us a lot of the equipment out of cardboard. And then in addition to that, as an added layer, we did some VR renders with the Render in Cloud button within Revit for the stereo panoramic views that you can do with Google Cardboard. So we set those up in the room. So you could stand in the room in physical space and see the cardboard equipment and how the room would lay out. But you can also turn on the VR glasses and look around and see what it would look like in virtual reality as well.

And that really helped us. We did this way back in like SD. So we were planning the rooms and making sure the rooms were correctly sized before even finishing the whole planning of the hospital. And the QR codes that are in your handout lead you to these VR views.

This one here is the packing area, and this was a very sensitive area for them. The nursing staff was very, very concerned about being able to see all the stretchers within the area. And we told them the walls are low. It's very open.

But until we finally created the VR for them and let them see it, they weren't ever comfortable with it. But as soon as we showed this to them, it's like the light bulb went off. So it's really a powerful tool to be able to use that. This is one of the patient rooms as well, which we actually did a full mockup of.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So we also create a virtual reality walk-through with Enscape, using the HTC Vive. And we use that kind of for two reasons. One was to be able to walk in spaces like this from a design perspective, see how does this space feel size wise-- everything. And then we also used it kind of as an in-person class protection. So there was one crazy transfer stair where the tower can levers out. So we were able to walk that stair and look for pipes sticking through, or beams that might be head knockers. So it was a really great tool for us design-wise.

KELLY ORJI: And it's funny. Everything in here-- basically, it's set up that you can't go through anything that's a physical barrier. You can walk through doors, but you can't walk through like this railing, for instance.

So at one point, we were walking around the building, looking for clashes, and I somehow got stuck in the ceiling like between the ceiling and the structure, which was kind of fun. But we had to like shut it down to get out. So that was interesting.

And we also saw our exterior team had modeled a mock-up, an exterior mock-up, way out in space somewhere. So if you went outside, you could actually look and jump to the mock-up like way out. I don't know. It was pretty fun.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: I saw Kelly scream one time falling from the ceiling too.

CONTESSA HAYTER: It happens. It happens.

KELLY ORJI: Thanks, Graham.

CONTESSA HAYTER: And this is a video of our superintendent in our Vive, walking around the structural model. Sound is on. As you can see, the VR can be for more than just pretty pictures. It can be for constructionability reviews.

We were walking through, during our DD pricing round this time, talking about how the structural team had depressed the patient bathrooms, and I didn't realize the sound was on. Sorry, if you hear profanity. We're a little upset about that. But yeah, so if you get your superintendents to merge enough, this is what your result is. It's great.

But until then, this might be actual footage of your team the first time that you're going to tell them that they're going to do this work process. Y'all, it is. It's freaky. Like everybody is everybody's model.

What's going on? Yeah, take this in. You're going to see it.

But just to recap on training and resistance, resistance is inevitable. It's going to happen-- just face it. But if you can take some of these key items that we shared with you guys that we learned the hard way, hopefully, it can help you guys on your next job with this platform.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So to give you an idea of the timeline for this project. We started it January 2016, and then we submitted our first CD package, underground package this January, or Korn shell package in June. And then in August, we finally submitted the interior build-out. So when we got to that point, Kelly and I loved the cloud. We were big fans of it.

We decided we should check with the rest of our team and see what they thought. So we sent out kind of an informal survey just to get feedback. So these are a few quotes that we got from that. So Jeff Milheizler is one of the structural engineers with Uzun and Case. He's a big fan now.

So Kelly brought up the linked news earlier. We used that with them for coordinating all the edges of slab. So we had edge of slab used in our architectural model with a bright red line where we had outlined stuff.

And that's not something new that you can only do with the cloud, but it makes it so much easier when I can say, hey, I moved this wall or this curb or something two inches. I just synced. Can you update your model? And he can do it in sync, and it's fixed over a phone call.

Michael, I think, it's in the crowd here, actually. But he's with Brasfield and has been coordinating a lot of MEP stuff. And having these live models in the cloud made it really easy for him during their design assist phase, where they were coordinating stuff before we had issued documents, help them understand our design intent, and where things were going.

And then Jason Hawkins is one of our project architects in Chicago, who was leading the exterior detailing effort, and he's a huge fan now. It helped him tremendously coordinating things like louvers with mechanical or steel with the structural team. He was able to have them move things quickly, instead of waiting two weeks to trade models back and forth-- have that updated over a phone call again.

And it's funny talking to him now because he's going through a lot of the same stuff I am. He's trying to convince everyone in Chicago to switch to this. And so when I actually asked him for a comment, he sent me this graphic. It says that everyone is just too busy to be helped. And so I'm sure everyone here gets this at some point.

KELLY ORJI: So it's something that we did sort of towards the end of this is a retrospective, which is basically a lean tool, where you sit down and analyze like what the positives, negatives, and then wish list is for a process. So we did that for C4R. And just kind of to review some of the things we liked about using C4R was the ability to access all the models any time, ability to add parameters in the model, and then linked views were very, very helpful, as we've talked about. Some of the things that we wish-- especially the MEP engineers, they're not used to having a model that moves around on them. And that was kind of something they were really concerned about.

So something they'd really like is if there was a way to kind of track changes. Like if you could color everything that's changed in the last week or something like that. I think they'd be a lot more comfortable with it. I mean, they're still fans of the cloud, but that's a thing that would be really nice.

Some of the pitfalls-- during this project, HKS actually owned and managed all the licenses, just to keep it as one entity. We ended up being a bottleneck. So a lot of times, consultants would want to add another member, team member, for a big push or something. And it would take basically a day for us between them requesting and then us getting them set up.

So I think in the future, it's better if each firm owns their own licenses and distributes to their own team. And at this point, this is basically the end of our talk. So if anyone has any questions about any of this, we can open it up to questions.

AUDIENCE: So I just got one comment. You mentioned about tracking changes [INAUDIBLE] C4R will do that.

KELLY ORJI: Oh really?

AUDIENCE: Use that.

KELLY ORJI: No.

AUDIENCE: We tried to implement it. And sometimes, technology is tough because so many people are using so much technology. Even a good tool sometimes [INAUDIBLE]. We were publishing weekly, anyways. And there's a tool within C4R where you can take and review one model to a previous model and will color code all the changes.

KELLY ORJI: That's great. We should talk about where that tool is.

CONTESSA HAYTER: So when we first started, just to mention this process. It was all called A360. And so now that we're still in this process, it's changed like 1,000 things. So I'm not sure if that was available in the first version of A360, but that's awesome to know now. Thank you

KELLY ORJI: You?

AUDIENCE: How would you compare your virtual [INAUDIBLE] to the conceptual [INAUDIBLE]? What would be the [INAUDIBLE]?

CONTESSA HAYTER: OK, yeah. So the question was, how do you compare 2D site logistics and safety logistics versus your virtual job site? Basically, benefits of that-- practicality of that. So I just showed one thing that you can do with the drone footage.

We use a DJOI Phantom Pro 4 drone to fly the site. That information goes to a software called DroneDeploy, which has so many tools. It's a web-based-- I wouldn't talk about it.

It's not an Autodesk product. But you can go onto your sites. Let me back up.

OK, once you get your flight done, it creates hundreds of high-resolution images that then get put into a 3D point cloud by use of photogrammetry. So it's very highly accurate 3D content that the drone creates. Inside of DroneDeploy, you can take square footages or volumes of certain areas. You can share that drone model to overlay with images like we have. So it's not like a one and done with the drone flights.

There's just so many things you can do with that. That section, I just covered one small thing. So the site logistics-- one of the bigger things too from like a safety standpoint was just being able to actually either put the safety people in the Vive, let them walk around, and think about constructability and safety problems that may arise and start to address those earlier on that you and may not necessarily think about when you're just seeing something in a 2D format.

Also, the ability-- like I was saying-- to share with the client and have something that is easy to understand. We're in a busy intersection in Atlanta. I mean, you can see that without being in 3D. But just being able to visually show your owner what you're trying to convey in a 2D format, I think's, easier in the 3D format. How'd that work?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CONTESSA HAYTER: You mean like if you do something from Google Maps or something? We do that on jobs when we can't fly the drone. The images are not as good of images. And with the DroneDeploy platform, you're able to do all those other items like taking off square footage of something or understanding how much fencing you might need or understanding a problem that you don't see necessarily on the Google Maps. Plus, Google Maps is from a specific time point versus your drone flight is from that day.

So if something has changed near you, then you're getting that information through the drone flight. Also, we don't just fly the drone one time, and then that's it. It's done continuously over the project. So you can also end up using that as your photos of the site.

So it can help him like litigation. It could help any kind of documentation that you're trying to do of the site. We fly this continuously.

It's not like a just one time, and then that's it. So I don't know. I think those are some of the bonuses of having the drone fly. I think the blue shirt-- I think you're first raising your hand.

AUDIENCE: You guys said you had a bunch of challenges trying [INAUDIBLE] cost or whatever it may be selling [INAUDIBLE] all that stuff. How did you sell it? Because [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So actually, Brasfield was very instrumental in helping sell it because they were so excited about it. They convinced the owner that it was going to save the project enough money that the owner ended up absorbing the cost. It's going to be, I think, a different challenge on every project.

But actually, within HKS, we've seen it being so beneficial. We just built the cloud into our overhead budget now, and we'll do it on any project at no cost basically now. Just because we think it saves us enough time to make it worth it.

CONTESSA HAYTER: I think our owner too It's like a tool for innovative things.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yeah, we had a really collaborative, innovative team. Like I said, it was almost IPD like. So we were all sitting around a table talking about how great this was going to be for the whole team.

And everyone was really on board. It was really our own team internally that was scared. But the whole actual construction team was super excited about it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So for this project, they were using our licenses, but the owner was paying for everything. Going forward, we pay for our own licenses, and the consultants have to figure their own stuff out.

AUDIENCE: Everybody [INAUDIBLE] on board, then [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yes. Yep.

CONTESSA HAYTER: I mean, they can upload it.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yeah, so I think I mentioned this. They can upload to the cloud and download from the cloud, but they won't be able to work on the cloud. But to your point, if they're not working in the cloud, it kind of negates the benefits of it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

CONTESSA HAYTER: I think they've got the drone service.

AUDIENCE: Where'd the owner end up landing and using video [INAUDIBLE] same deal where we're trying to push them into VR. They still want you to [INAUDIBLE] where did they end up? And how did you get [INAUDIBLE] some of that stuff?

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: No, we still built it all.

KELLY ORJI: I think it's still beneficial to have real-world physical stuff, and we used cardboard too, even for the walls. And it wasn't [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yeah, we basically use the VR in those rooms to kind of show finishes because a doctor would come in there and be like it's all cardboard. No, this is what it's really going to look like. So yeah, we weren't able to sell them on VR being

KELLY ORJI: The only thing.

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: The only thing. And I don't know that I'm even convinced of that yet.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I'm just curious because we're usually the worst at adopting technology, I would say, especially [INAUDIBLE] How do you get them to [INAUDIBLE] What kind of data [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yeah, that part was still traditional. It was still CAD files, and we would use that. We actually built a site model from their CAD files and had that hosted on the cloud.

AUDIENCE: So they weren't [INAUDIBLE]

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: Yep. That would be great.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] How long was the design [INAUDIBLE] was all; of that done in the cloud?

GRAHAM SINCLAIR: So we started very conceptual design January last year. We moved into the cloud probably in April, so pretty early on.