Avatech released an earth connector for Autocad back in January which allowed a model to be exported into the Google Earth file format (KMZ) and placed in "earth-space" using GIS coordinate data held in the model. Now they have done the same for Revit - which is Autodesk's main BIM solution in the mechanical and electrical space.

Revit also has support for the BuildingSmart IFC standard, as was confirmed to me when I put the question to Paul Stefan of Autodesk after he gave an end-of-day presentation about Revit BIM to the IT Construction Forum annual conference back in May. I know Paul from 2000 when we were colleagues at Citadon. He confirmed that Revit had "been on-board with standards since the beginning".

technorati tags:BIM, REVIT, GoogleEarth, Avatech

Posted by ndoughty at 3:04 PM | Comments (0)

Just saw the news about the newest version of Google Earth (version 4) being released in Beta. You can download the beta and have a play from the Google Blog.

"Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway — that about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution."

There is also a bit of commentary from a user's perspective on this blog.

Posted by ndoughty at 3:09 PM | Comments (0)