Using Revit to Generate CAM Files for Automated Precast Production

JORDAN WATKINS: We're going to go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. All right. Everybody having a good AU so far? Yeah? All right, we're going to have a lively crowd today. Awesome. So introduce myself to you guys. My name's Jordan Watkins. I'm the vice president of PTAC Consulting Engineers.

PTAC is a specialty engineering group out of Pensacola, Florida is our corporate headquarters. And we are obviously focused on the detailing of previous precast, prestressed concrete. We developed as we started developing or as we started working on previous projects in Revit, we quickly realized that the out of the box Revit platform wasn't exactly what we needed to detail our jobs day to day. So because of that, we actually created a solution called EDGE to optimize the production drawings, the full layout of everything in Revit from, kind of, cradle to grave approach.

So as we went through that process-- my clicker is not working. We're just going to go old school here. So as we went through that process, after we had kind of optimized our engineering workflow and gotten to the level where we had our detail fabrication drawings ready as we traditionally had with our CAD workflow, we really decided we had to start optimizing the upstream and downstream processes of our precast workflow.

So in this class-- well, before I do, introduce myself again. Jordan Watkins with PTAC Consulting Engineers. And Doug Turk's here with me as well. Doug was the developer that worked on our CAM export that you guys are going to see today. And he's also our manager of our software engineering department at PTAC. He graduated from UT Dallas, came to work for us about two years ago and just kind of was our Rookie of the Year. So he quickly went up to the management position of our software engineering staff. So we're glad to have Doug with us. And he's going to get into the nitty gritty details of our CAM export today.

Before we do that, just general overview. Recently, PTAC, with our relationship with Autodesk, was contracted to actually develop this CAM export for out of the box Revit. We call that our general CAM export. And furthermore, after we kind of created that for Autodesk, we decided that we were going to further customize it to our EDGE for Revit workflow to give our customers a little bit more refined workflow in our ecosystem of EDGE. So we're going to show both of those systems today-- our general CAM export as well as our EDGE specific export.

And again, we'll explain the differences in each one of those. So we're going to look at how we can actually leverage these CAM files for automation of precast processes. And we'll get into a lot of the use cases that a lot of our customers that are actually sitting in here today actually use on real world projects. So it's an exciting breakthrough for us, I think an exciting breakthrough for out of the box Revit, and we really look forward to getting our industry quite a bit more automated than what it is today, or at least our North American market quite a bit more automated than it is today.

If any of you guys are familiar-- how many precasters do we have in here? A good bit. So if any of you guys have looked at a lot of the European business models of precast concrete, they're very much in the automation workflow. They're kind of blowing our North American market out of the water with the automation side. But at the same time, we're really blowing a lot of the European workflows out of the water with the complexity of concrete that we're actually producing-- the complexity of pieces.

So we really wanted to use this CAM export to kind of marry those two worlds and have those two worlds collide. And I don't foresee our North American market going completely automated in the coming years or the coming year or so, ultimately because of the complexity of the pieces and the projects that we produce. However, we do believe that it's a great thing that we could actually cherry pick portions of this automation workflow that the European market has actually implemented into their workflow. And again, try and optimize at least portions of our industry and of our precast process.

So we're going to take a deep dive into a lot of those use cases and a lot of the ways we're going to satisfy those use cases. Also today, we want to talk with you guys about a lot of the limitations of the CAM export. And what you guys are going to see with out of the box Revit, if you get the general CAM export or if you're an EDGE customer, just kind of understanding the known limitations of these file formats. Ultimately, we as Autodesk or PTAC are kind of limited by the specification of these CAM export files that we can actually export to and suffice the machine needs.

So we're going to talk about a lot of that today. And it won't be all sunshine and rainbows, but we do want to make you guys fully aware of any issues that you may have to come up with a workaround in your own business workflows as well. So Doug's going to take over that part because we want him to be the gremlin. I'll be all that sunshine and rainbows today. So if any of you guys have looked-- been to any of my other classes this week, I've shown this slide in every single one of my classes. And I'm going to for everyone for the remainder of the week.

As precast concrete engineers-- that's our main business at PTAC, and I'm a structural engineer myself. We have a very, very obvious want for the precast industry to grow the market in general. So this slide right here is actually published by PCI at one of our committee day meetings. And it just shows the market share of the precast industry overall. I obviously may have a biased opinion, but I truly believe that precast is the product that can solve a lot of the problems that we're seeing in today's construction industry.

We've all heard about resiliency being an issue, we've all heard about sustainability being an issue, project schedules are always an issue. And precast is the perfect product to satisfy that. But for some reason, we're still 1% of the overall construction market. $600 billion and in construction overall, and precast is producing 6 billion of it. So that's a real problem. That really resonates with me.

So at PTAC, the reason we really wanted to get outside of our engineering bubble like we've traditionally done and get to these other processes and try to just grow the industry as a whole. Somebody said in the connect and construct keynote, if anybody was there, one of the speakers talked about how high tides raise all ships. And that's ultimately what we're trying to do here, is across the board increase our industry and hopefully increase the market share of everybody in this room for your particular business model.

So I just want to throw this out there and kind of explain to you guys why at PTAC, at least, we feel like we have a fiduciary responsibility to our customers and to our industry to at least make our engineering workflow and anything that we can extract out of the data, anything we can extract out of the model as efficient as possible to streamline those downstream processes.

So, key learning objectives today. We're going to export to two different file formats. And these are kind of the universal file formats that we've come across for computer-aided manufacturing. So the first we're going to talk about is PXML. That's a proprietary format for the Progress Group out of Brixen, Italy. Myself, Dan Pateklin, and a few other Autodesk folks actually went and visited the Progress plant in Brixen, Italy when we kicked off our development process to kind of get a better understanding of exactly what they needed and how they needed it.

So PXML stands for Progress XML. And it's, of the to file formats that we had today, it's probably the more robust and the more we can actually take advantage of because it gets down to a really three dimensional granular level of detail. So we'll dive into that. The next one is more of the generic one. The PXML file format is really focused on the progress provided machinery. Unitechnik is more of a generic file format that's used by a lot of other machine providers, like the Wakemens of the world, Lap Laser, a lot of the other precast automation machinery are typically accepting this Unitechnik file.

So we'll talk about the limitations of each one of those and the benefits of each one of those as well. Next, we're going to talk about just how to generate this-- our overall workflow, our overall user experience design that we have in our general CAM export and our EDGE for Revit CAM export as well. So when we get into that, especially, this will be something that's being released with the next version of the precast extension with Autodesk Revit. So I'd really like to get a lot of you all's feedback on just the overall design aspect of it.

You may not get a full in-depth understanding today of the technical capabilities of it, but you'll certainly see the user experience and how we designed that. So I'll be very interested to hear from you guys, how it could work for your particular business use cases, and then ultimately just the overall user experience and the user interface, if there's any improvements that you guys would like to see there.

And then finally, talk about how we can actually use these exports in the real world. It's great that we can take this out and extract it to something that you guys are going to see with UniCAD for Unitechnik and AViCAD for PXML. It's great that we can visualize that on a computer, but we really want to make these something that we can use in our downstream processes and really make it as advantageous for all of us in our industry to, at least like I said, maybe not automate our entire production workflow today, but certainly cherry pick a portion of that to automate a portion of our business, whether it be Rebar bending or whatever it may be.

So to talk about the general Cam export as a whole. So the user experience-- what we realized very early on was that we wanted to make this very granular in the way you actually export these files. So we allow you to do that on a piece level. So in an individual assembly created with the precast extension with out of the box Revit or with EDGE for Revit, simply selecting an assembly and exporting that out to the particular file format.

You can also do that across the board for all assemblies in a particular project. So you can really automate that process from the designer perspective as well too. We export to three different file form-- three versions of Unitechnik as of today. Export to the 5.2 version, 6.0 version, and the 7.0 version, which is what they call UXML or Unitechnik XML. Unitechnik-- there's a lot of design limitations, I'll say, that Doug will get into a little bit later with the Unitechnik file format.

But I will say, it is my understanding that Unitechnik is one of the people who are leading the forefront of the IFC4 council in Europe right now, kind of, across the board in creating an IFC format for CAM. So I believe this file format-- some of the limitations you may see here today, I truly believe they are working diligently to kind of enhance that. So both of these companies, I will say, Progress and Unitechnik both are very responsive. If you guys get into a situation that you hit a limitation, both of them, in our experience, have been very responsive to help you out in any way, shape or form to get these systems to work with your overall process.

One of the most common things that you guys are going to know-- and this is a limitation across the board-- is that the panels or the pieces have to be prismatic about the z-axis of the panels. That's one of the known limitations that you guys will see from the very beginning. Meaning that, if I've got a recess in my precast concrete, if I've got a reveal in the back face of my concrete, if I've got a double T section, anything that's not prismatic about the thickness of that panel, that CAM export, actually, or the Unitechnik file and the PXML file will not actually allow you to achieve that to our knowledge of the specification.

So because that, we've created a lot of workarounds to actually overcome that and still try and pull these assemblies out and make them usable and allow you guys to leverage that, even though we have that kind of limitation at this point in time. And then another one of the big things that we wanted to work on here that was a direct suggestion request from Autodesk was to give all of our users the ability to actually export Rebar selection groups only. The benefit of that is, obviously, it's not going to stay only in the precast workflow.

Now, if you're a cast in place contractor and you want to do-- want your Rebar bending to be automated, you want to Rebar detailing to be automated, you can do that now directly from our CAM export. You don't necessarily have to have that precast host. So whether it be cast in place or whether it be precast trying to simply pre-tie a cage or pre-bend the Rebar, you can ultimately achieve that here as well.

One thing to note that I've just made a comment on here. You'll see that, obviously, it's going to be extremely important. The local coordinate system of each one of those precast components when we export it out to one of our CAM exports. So for anything outside of a wall in Revit, we leverage the assembly coordinate system-- the assembly origin. So that's going to define your x, y, and z-axis of these individual CAM exports.

The wall is a little bit different in that we leverage the wall orientation much like the current precast extension in Autodesk. We leverage the wall orientation and, obviously, the up direction for our z-axis. The z-axis will be our wall orientation itself to be in the direction of the palette. So we don't necessarily need to leverage that assembly origin like you typically would with other categories in Revit it. With that said, also, we mentioned the Rebar selection group.

Rebar selection group, if it's not in an assembly, it's going to be based on the global coordinate system, which we'll talk about some limitations of that here shortly with CAM export files. But you do always have the workaround that if you need to export longitudinal cage to Unitechnik or to PXML, you can create an assembly out of that Rebar only group and ultimately get your cage to be able to tie it previously as well.

So just some of the general features of the CAM export. We all know that precast concrete, we're going to have the concrete itself, we're going to have some embeds, we're going to have some reinforcement, we're going to have mesh, we're going to have strand, we're going to have all of those different components. So this is the naming convention we have here, is what both Unitechnik and PXML break it down in. So we've got under our lots, we've got three different categories.

Layers are, basically, if you can imagine a double wall for the European workflow or an architectural precast wall for the North American workflow. Those are our different sections of a prismatic z shape of different materials. So if we've got an architectural face mix, we've got a structural [INAUDIBLE] mix, those had to be prismatic in their own accord, but those would be exported as separate layers. Then you're going to hear a lot about the words contours and cut outs.

So contours, the overall extent-- the exterior extent of the precast and a cut out is anything that lives completely within inside of that. So again, you'll hear those words thrown around quite a bit today. Just wanted to give you guys a little bit of a background on it. A mount part, that's basically an embed, and lifting device, anything that's not reinforcement, that's not concrete or reinforcement is going to ultimately be a mount part in our CAM exports.

And then we have reinforcement. We offer a number of different ways to generate that reinforcement with both the EDGE export and the general CAM export. You can either do your typical mesh custom fabric sheets, bent fabric sheets, area reinforcement sets. A number of different ways to generate that reinforcement. We ultimately also allow you to export a custom Rebar family as well. That's one of our common practices with our EDGE workflow, is a completely custom loadable Rebar family.

So we do support that as well too. So again, you guys will see a lot of these things as we go through our demonstration today. One thing I will say is that if you start to get-- and I would strongly suggest if you guys start to incorporate any of these CAM exports in any capacity in your business model, you really need to get intimately familiar with the specifications from Unitechnik and Progress with the PXML. They did a great job defining and really explicitly explaining what they intend with their exports, so it's a really good idea to just not blindly trust that, obviously, and really get intimately familiar with those exports.

And, actually, I don't think we have it on the slides, but if anybody's interested, we'll hand out cards and we'll be happy to send you guys over the specifications that we actually had to build our systems, our CAM export and general Revit and our EDGE export as well. But one thing worth mentioning, you'll see in the unit Unitechnik and PXML specifications that they describe are realistic in a schematic version of reinforcement. We had took on the idea that we should always model it to a realistic design.

So that basically means that all of our bends and our Rebar is always considered. We don't ever have just hard angles, it's always actually how we're going to construct it. So ultimately, really what we wanted to try and do there was make our CAM exports as realistic as possible, so when we get down to the concrete distribution, to automatically calculate the weights and volumes of the concrete-- all that kind of good stuff to really be truly what we were building rather than just a schematic version of it. That we'd also suffice if you needed to.

So this is just a few examples. And we're going to go through a live example, if we have some time at the end of this as well. But these are just a few examples of our exports here. So you can see the top image, really the intention here is to show you guys the radial contour and radio cut out. So that's what I was talking about with the contours. It's the extent of it. And the cut out of it is that red portion that's going to be concrete removed interior of the panel.

So again, anything that is radius, any complex precast shapes that you can create, ultimately would be supported with the CAM exports as well. One situation, if you create a curve that is actually a spline in Autodesk, which we ran across a few times, that's one limitation at this point in time with our exports that I believe we're going to diligently try and fix.

So the next one is just reinforcement and mount parts in this particular opening here. This is just complex Rebar only export that we have shown here. And then this is an export with actually mesh in it. So an area-- I'm sorry, a fabric sheet.

[INAUDIBLE] went too far.

And again, we've talked about this earlier. But simply, all of the reinforcement types and out of the box Revit are supported. So path reinforcement, area reinforcement, fabric sheets, bent and custom, and, two, we kind of implemented in the 11th hour of this development was freeform Rebar and Rebar with couplers. So really trying to give the ability to detail this, whether it be cast in place, precast, whatever it may be. Just kind of a holistic approach with a reinforcement standpoint that we could really leverage this to optimize our production processes.

And again, this is just a few examples of our complex reinforcement. The top one is actually our freeform Rebar, so it's following that contoured shape at the bottom. So that's the newly released freeform Rebar with 2018. The next one is actually a bent fabric sheet. So quite often, we've got some customers that are using fabric sheets or using mesh for ledge reinforcement or whatever it may be. So bent fabric sheets pretty common in our North American market.

The next is our path reinforcement that you guys can see a bent bar following certain paths. This is a little bit hard to see, but we've actually got couplers at the ends and the very midpoint of this particular bar. This one is actually a custom fabric sheet, which is one of the newer features of 2018 Revit-- or it's actually the precast extension, excuse me. Their custom fabric sheets. And the last one is our area reinforcement here.

So with that said, I'm going to pass it over to Doug to tell you guys kind of the overall-- how to actually implement the workflow and a lot of the known limitations of the workflows as well.

DOUG TURK: OK. Thank you, Jordan. So what I want to talk about now are the key differences and the key processes involved in the different format families that we do. First, I'm going to kind of go over what the differences are between those formats, some of the challenges that we ran into working with those formats, and then I'll kind of get into the details of some of the limitations we ran into and some things that you should be aware of if you ever intend to use any of these tools.

So first off, I want to talk about PXML. PXML is kind of a newcomer to this scene. It's not used in nearly as many plants as Unitechnik is at this point. However, it's shown a lot of promise. Looking at the specification of it, it has a lot more versatility and accepts a lot more complicated forms and has a lot of features that we haven't necessarily seen in some of the more antiquated Unitechnik formats.

So one of the key differences that we will really see here in just a moment, because I'm going to talk about, is just exactly how it handles Rebar. Some of the Unitechnik processes for Rebar are very simplistic and they don't support all of the 3D more freely flexion cases that you might see in some of our EDGE loadable families, especially. So I want to real quickly go into a challenge that I think was interesting that we came across when we were working on this that might shine a little bit more light on why this feature is something that really could be a valuable tool, and what exactly that value is and what it adds to Revit.

So I want to talk about the way that 3D Rebar is represented in a PXML file. Whereas in Revit, you might be able to take a bar of out of the box Rebar, call a certain function in the API and get that bar as a series of contiguous line segments, PXML treats it a little bit differently. Instead, it's almost like it treats it as bearings as a path to be followed rather than these chopped up segments. And I want to walk you through a very simple example of what I'm talking about here and how we tackled this problem.

So this is a pretty simple form. Just a bar lying in the xy plane, just a 90 degree bend. Very, very simple to imagine in the Revit format of line segment, line segment. However, when we get to the progress XML treatment of this bar, things get complicated. So the first step when we grab that geometry, when we have those two segments, is we need to take the starting point of this path. And that is some arbitrary point in our assemblies coordinate system.

One thing that I want you to pay attention to as we proceed through these steps is how we treat the coordinate system of this bar because, really, the trick and the cornerstone to this process is always treating the current segments direction as your x-axis and following the path using that mechanic. So first things first. As we note here, from that first point, we need to define the initial direction of our first segment.

And the way that we're going to do that is by establishing some rotation off of x along the z-axis. In this case, because we're going in the y direction, that's going to be a 90 degree rotation. So we'll apply that as our z rotation, and then apply a length. And that gives us our first segment. Now, note that the coordinate system has been altered by that rotation. Once again, we keep x always in the direction of the segment we're considering.

So for the next step, in order to get us back into the correct plane, we have to do something kind of odd. We need to rotate along our x-axis to bring our z to the correct position. And more accurately, we need to bring our y-axis into the correct position as a segment is defined as an x rotation an and a y rotation. So by bringing y into the page we're able to actually create that 90 degree bend to get our bar to where we want.

And as you can see, that's a very trivial angle to calculate. And this is a bit of an aside, I guess, to what the exporter's doing. But I wanted to include this example to point out just how much we're able to do behind the scenes with this tool and just how many calculations an engineer might have had to do without this tool in order to convert something like a piece of Revit Rebar into a CAM format. And I just think that that was an interesting challenge to shine some light on that aspect of it.

So that pretty much covers Progress XML. There's not a whole lot else to say about it. A lot of the features that we designed were designed with PXML in mind, simply due to the fact that it included a lot of cutting edge features that Unitechnik did not necessarily support. But because Unitechnik is so widely used and it's essentially the gold standard for CAM formats at this point, we definitely from day one were certain that we needed to support Unitechnik.

And again, because of that fact that it's almost a staple of this industry and the fact that there's all kinds of different machines, especially across the European market that might be running different versions of this file format, we from day one we're going to support all three of our legacy versions. And another thing that's definitely worth noting especially with Unitechnik here is that all of our screenshots and all of our development was done using the UniCAD viewer.

This was provided by Unitechnik as their official solution for viewing these files. And I'm going to note when we get to the limitations of our exporter that that viewer has some very key issues that I know that we've been in close talks with Unitechnik on fixing some of these issues, but they definitely provided hurdles in our development of the feature.

So first and foremost, and probably the most noticeable limitation of the Unitechnik file format is its treatment of Rebar, which you can see here in this shot. And we're going to go a little bit more into that in just a moment, and I'll talk about what exactly it does with that Rebar. But I think that that's the first thing that needs to be pointed out when we talk about the Unitechnik file format limitation. Because truthfully, almost any bent bar is going to come through as a mounting part, which as we described before just represents the bounding box of the extents of that bar.

And furthermore, it represents the bounding box of the center line of that bar, which has caused some problems in the past. But that we'll get to in just a little bit more here in a second. I also want to talk about the fact that some of the older Unitechnik file versions-- 5.2 and 6-- have actual digit limitations on certain fields. For example, the thickness of the concrete slab can only go up to three digits. This inherently provided a massive roadblock to our development because you could easily have a thickness of a meter or more, which would immediately cause a problem.

To solve this, we compromised by saying that we will export the truncated value at three digits. An engineer looking at that file should be able to quickly identify that problem. And we will warn that users saying exactly which piece has this issue. And really, the idea behind that is to provide full transparency to the user to understand exactly what's going on behind the scenes. And that's why, as Jordan mentioned before, that it would be very advantageous for anybody who intends to use this tool to become intimate with that specification to understand exactly what fields have these issues and how to look out for those problems from the start.

Additionally, another thing to note is that Unitechnik-- older Unitechnik versions have a lot of sign restrictions, things that sometimes are reasonable such as not allowing pieces to go below the pallet as that wouldn't really be portable. But there's also some things that are less reasonable such as anything-- you can't have an iron projection to the left of the project origin, for example, which quickly poses a problem in certain situations.

Another thing that I want to mention that I don't really have anything on the slides for, but going back to that UniCAD problem I was talking about. I don't know for a fact that these problems will still exist by the time this gets into your hands. But for example, UniCAD has some issues, such as fabric sheets don't always appear in Unitechnik 7, curved contours sometimes appear incorrectly in Unitechnik 6. And this is just another example of why you really want to become intimately familiar with these tools and their limitations.

In our experience, Unitechnik, especially, has been very responsive about these issues and very agile in solving these problems as they arise.

JORDAN WATKINS: Yeah. And one thing worth mentioning also, what Doug was kind of saying, there is less about the actual file format itself in the data that you can leverage for downstream process, but more with the validation tool of their viewers for UniCAD and AViCAD for PXML and Unitechnik. So just a lot of the limitations we're going to talk about today are viewer specific rather than actual data and process specific. Keep that in mind.

DOUG TURK: Exactly. And all these things that I talk about with the viewer, we have validated with Autodesk and with Unitechnik, that we are exporting the correct information but we can also confirm that it is not appearing correctly in that viewer. So we're hoping that they fix those problems before it reaches market.

So real quickly, to demonstrate what I was talking about with the Rebar issues. So with Rebar in Unitechnik, there are some very specific cases where we can actually export bent bars. So what I said was a little bit of a misnomer. But the criteria are so specific that it's almost meaningless until they get these limitations sorted out. But for your edification and for your understanding going into this thing when it reaches market, we support this very specific case.

A Unitechnik bar, in order to be considered a rod stock, which is their name for a Rebar reinforcement, all segments of the bar must be straight. The first or last segment must lie in the exports xy plane, and all segments must lie on the same vertical plane. For whatever reason, the specification outlines all of this, but that is the one case that we are able to export proper rod stock information for a bent bar in Unitechnik.

And another viewer limitation that's worth pointing out is that these bars will actually appear as one long straight bar from the initial direction. But again, we validated that the information we're exporting is correct for these. That's just another quirk of the viewer.

So real quickly, I want to show what I was talking about when I say that these bars will come through as mount parts. For example, this here is a Revit file that we exported to Unitechnik 7, I believe. And you can see that these green boxes represent those extents to the center lines of these bars. And this is something that, if you have a lot of bent Rebar that you're exporting to Unitechnik, you're going to see a lot. In fact, if you're using the current precast extension, you'll already have seen some of this. But it's definitely something to take note of.

So in addition to some of these file format limitations, there are just some broad limitations that I'd like to bring your attention to. Again, and Jordan explained this very well, that pieces must be prismatic in the z direction. This is an inherent limitation of these formats. And for EDGE for CAM, we've actually come up with some workarounds for that I will get to you in just a moment. Additionally, our pieces must be assemblies with some very specific exceptions.

And beyond that, pieces must be assemblies that contain some structural element, such as a wall or a slab or some kind of loadable family that can work as a valid concrete piece. The exceptions to this, obviously, are Rebar selection groups can be exported as non-assemblies in the global coordinate system or you can create an assembly of just reinforcement, and that will adapt to the assembly coordinate system that has been grandfathered in through the origin.

Another thing that Jordan also mentioned that I'll reiterate is the actual orientation of that coordinate system. Again, that is built around the assembly workflow. That assembly origin determines all of that for 9 out of 10 cases. The exceptions being walls where wall orientation represents our z-axis, and Rebar selection groups where we have no choice but to use the global coordinate system.

Another big limitation that really falls under the category of z prismaticness, if you will, is multilayered wrapping. Inherently, a piece that is wrapped across multiple layers, i.e. some layer lies fully encapsulated within another, that is inherently a non-z prismatic shape and, therefore, cannot be supported with the current tool, with the caveat that EDGE for Revit has the workaround that we will get to.

And finally, spiral Rebar is also always exported as a mount part in Progress XML or Unitechnik XML due to limits of the Rebar data structure. It's not capable of supporting that type of shape. So now that we've talked about some of the limitations and some of the details of the general CAM solution, I really want to get into some of the things that we're trying to do with EDGE for CAM. And the idea behind EDGE for CAM is to take these tools that we've designed for the out of the box Revit workflow and really tailor those to some of the features that we've introduced with EDGE for Revit.

First and foremost is, as I keep mentioning, we've determined that a lot of EDGE loadable families break this z prismatic rule. So we had to address that first and foremost. And our approach to doing this was to take the overall contour of the shape. In other words, any xy coordinate that has concrete under it will come through as concrete. And what I mean by that is in order for a cut out to be represented in the export, that cut out must go all the way through the piece. Otherwise, it will be seen as concrete.

And this, we thought, was a valid approach. Of course, this will simplify out things like reveals or partial cuts or any kind of change of elevation. But we had to make some kind of compromise to allow these exports even if it's not 100% on the dot. Another big feature that we conceived early on in the development of our EDGE for Revit is the idea that sometimes a user might not want to export an entire assembly. They might want to hide a certain category such as lifting, or they might want to hide embeds.

So they might want to do some particular stage in the production sequence. And we have implemented that by allowing users to actually open up an assembly in an assembly view and hide the elements that they do not want to export. And it will send out exactly what that user expects to see in their final export. And I'll have a short video demonstrating that right after this.

But last and certainly not least, we want to point out that as of the current local build of EDGE CAM, we are able to support all local edge Rebar families. So real quickly, I want to show what I was talking about with the visible in view only export, if you will. And I will show that right now. So as you can see, a user can go and disable visibility on these certain categories and then actually activate the edge for CNC command.

In this case, the user selected to send it to PXML.

JORDAN WATKINS: In the big use case we're trying to support here is something like laser projection that you need to simply export all embeds that are located down as cast onto the bed palette itself or maybe the inverse of that, you just wanted to export a laser file with simply top as cast embeds or something of that nature. So we wanted to provide a workflow that was basically limitless in the flexibility to allow our user to really tailor those exports to whatever their use case was downstream.

DOUG TURK: Yeah. So as you can see in this particular instance, we've narrowed everything down to reinforcement, and that is all we've got in our export. So that's just one of the big features that we're trying to push in this conversion to the EDGE workflow, if you will. So last and certainly not least, I want to hand it back to Jordan to discuss some of the actual real world use cases of EDGE for CAM and general CAM that we already are seeing some application for in the field and hope to see a lot more in the future.

JORDAN WATKINS: All right. So like Doug mentioned, we talked a lot about the technical capabilities and the technical limitations of these exports. But just to talk about some of the real world use cases that we're seeing with lot of our customers today, just kind of wanted to show how you could use this practically in your overall workflow. So I mentioned previously laser projection. Laser projection is probably a good point of contention in the precast industry. Whether or not it's a good idea, some love it, some hate it.

But ultimately, laser projection is something that is supported directly from our CAM exports. The brands, like I was talking about with lap laser, UniLaser directly from Unitechnik, a lot of those different laser providers are now supported directly out of the box Revit with our general Cam export, as well as the EDGE for Revit custom export as well. So I gave the demonstration earlier about actually projecting only things bottom as cast, only things top as cast, or even just incrementally going up that z direction with the applications directly provided by a lot of the laser projection providers.

So like we said, ultimately, that's something that Unitechnik has done a great job in really working with a lot of these product or vendors for these different machine items to actually be able to service the workflows. One thing you'll notice with laser projection as well as some of the other stuff, it really works perfectly with the whole idea we called it a known limitation, but the idea of a mount part only exporting the extent of that mount part. Meaning that, if I've simply got a plate with tail bars on it, we want to show a bounding box of that plate with tail bars, rather than projecting the tail bars in great detail.

That actually lends itself perfectly to these laser projection workflows. And it could almost be looked at as a feature rather than a limitation. Next one is water soluble bed plotter. We've got some customers in here actually that are using that today. This is very common, and we've got one customer up in Minnesota that's not here today that's using it on the pallet type workflow, like in Europe.

Very common on the pallet workflow, where it's almost a Ford assembly line. It's going from position to position and doing different processes of the workflow. But actually, Kerkstra Precast and Spancrete are the two only ones that I know of that are using this on some format of a long line. Kerkstra is doing this on-- the only one that I know of-- on a wet cast long line for double Ts, plotting it on the bed. And Spancrete is using it on a plank line. Right, Jennie?

AUDIENCE: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]

JORDAN WATKINS: OK. Very cool.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JORDAN WATKINS: Very cool, very cool. So yeah, this is another one that's kind of-- I guess you can consider it a direct competitor of laser projection because it's ultimately doing the same effect as lasers. The benefit that I've heard from a lot of our customers that are using the water soluble bed blotters is that it doesn't require the calibration, obviously, that lasers do. But ultimately, it gets away from that really intensive detailing that we've typically had to do with our shop drawings in our engineering workflows and simply taking that model data and plotting it or projecting it right onto the bed itself.

But really cool use case. Kerkstra, I believe, and some other folks also are actually looking at plotting on the top as cast face, I guess more for a QC type deal after the mud has been poured. So again, just some really cool use cases with a water soluble bed plotting as well. Next one is the obvious one, automated Rebar bending. This is actually showing the Progress Group's automatic bender. But having closed the bars and actually bending that automatically directly from our Revit database is ultimately what can be achieved by a lot of workflows, but the CAM workflow certainly lends itself to that as well too.