What you should do before getting into BIM.

Before you study BIM you should study a bit of parametric modelling, and architectural design and construction. Having a modicum of understanding of logic and database management is also helpful.

It’ll also help if you’re familiar with typical architectural (I’m including structural, civil, & MEP here) document conventions and practices. That in mind, forget how you do it in CAD, you’re learning a new tool. You didn’t bring your protractor and T-square along to your CAD workstation, don’t assume that a familiar CAD workflow is practical.

A crash course in something like Inventor (even Autodesk’s self-guided tutorials if they haven’t nerfed them) that teaches you to think about simple constraints, how they interact, and what you can do with them will make it much easier to think about how those constraints get much more complex when driving multiple assemblies.

If you don’t grok how footings, foundations, walls, trusses, etc all work together, and actually get assembled, you’re not going to be actually modelling the building, you’ll be just getting close. No, you probably shouldn’t be modelling means and methods, but you DO need to understand how you’re going to clean up the edge condition between a couple of walls.

Having some *very* basic programming background (or even just time playing with some and/or/nor gate games would be helpful) will help you understand more of how and why parametric constraints both help and harm depending on how you use them. Understanding database keys and how information works across tables will help you understand what the BIM software is doing and see how elements such as families and materials relate to each other.

Thinking of problems related to learning BIM I’ve seen in almost 15 years of working with BIM and training folks in it, they all come down to these issues:

·         “we’ve always done it that way” - trying to do CAD workflows in BIM

·         not understanding how buildings are actually built in 4D (or not thinking about it) — yes, 4 : time is a dimension, even if you don’t model the footing before the foundation

·         adding unnecessary complexity by not thinking about how relationships work within the model.

People have other issues and bad habits, and there are myriad technical things that can go wrong but those are practices and tricks you can learn, and these are issues that hold people back from utilizing BIM effectively and are foundation elements for BIM.

You CAN be a perfectly good BIM draughtsperson picking up redlines without understanding what you’re doing, what it impacts and how, but all you’ll ever be, is a fancy stenographer (which is fine). If you want to learn to use a tool well and hopefully ponder mastering it, you need to understand it’s fundamentals and BIM is at its heart, a parametric database with a GUI, tailored to the AEC industry.

This book will really help to get into grips with everything 

If you need any help: email us : biminfo@agkdesign.co.uk