Autodesk Forge Bogota Accelerator 2020 Report
Last week we had the Forge Bogota Accelerator, hosted by our friends of Amarilo. First, I want to express my gratitude to the following key players for making this event a success. And specially to our hosts of the week Amarilo for the amazing facilities in Bogota, You guys helped us make this event a total success. Thank you, Luis Morales and Alfredo Amorocho.
Amarilo is a Colombian company, leader in promotion, management, sale and construction of
housing projects. Recognized as No. 1 in “Best Reputation” of the Construction and
Infrastructure sector. It has a presence in Colombia; Bogotá and its surrounding municipalities,
Cartagena, Barranquilla, Valledupar and Villavicencio, as well as in Panama.
It was established in 1993 and since then, applying good practices and distinctive skills in its
management, has developed housing projects, commerce projects, office buildings and
education. Because of its quality, continuous focus on innovation and business vision, it
projects its growth to other markets in Colombia and nearby countries.
A big thanks from Autodesk and the Forge team for hosting us for the past week.
We started the week in Bogota with a quick introduction of the people we will be spending time with during the week. From the Forge Developer Advocates side, we had onsite Michael Beale, Petr Broz and me. From the TS LATAM side we had Julio Palma and Mauricio Irastorza to help us with the attendees during the week in case of any business questions related to Autodesk Products.
We started out with a very productive morning sharing the different expertise from our attendees and what the focus for the week will be. We chatted with them while enjoying good coffee and different tropical fruit juices (which Petr enjoyed the most).
We had 1:1’s with the attendees to discuss their vision and proposed projects for the week and we wrapped up the morning with Presentations about Forge. A very full morning of knowledge showing tools like Petr’s VS Code Forge Extension, Postman & Insomnia REST collections followed by Advance uses of the Viewer, the Learn Forge material and the latest on BIM 360 API’s and a deep dive into Design Automation. During the afternoon our attendees were down to business to start developing their POC’s.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were days dedicated fully to coding and sharing of knowledge. Our friends from Amarilo gave us a Tour of their beautiful office and we got to learn more about the work they do in Colombia, it was a great experience.
We hosted our celebration and appreciation dinner on Tuesday night so our attendees could get to know each other better over a good meal and a couple of glasses of wine or beer of their choice. I personally enjoy this type of events since it gives them the chance to learn more about their personal interests and also learn deeply about what they are trying to achieve during the week and how it may connect to the work they’re currently doing. This time we picked the restaurant Oficial, which can best be described as traditional gourmet Colombian food with a fusion twist. It was a great time and meeting our LATAM TS colleagues made the night special.
Wednesday night some of us took a trip to one of our attendee’s house from Constructora Bolivar, who also happens to own a coffee farm in Manizales, Colombia. He invited some of us to a private tasting of his Coffee brand – BlueBird coffee. We learned about BlueBird’s roasting process and also different brewing technics to explore the unique taste of a quality brewed cup of coffee. Many thanks to Juan Hurtado from BlueBird Coffee for teaching us something else non-code related and for recharging us for the final part of the week with a tasty cup of Colombian coffee.
On Friday we wrapped up our accelerator, an intense week of developing reaching the final phase of Demo day. A chance for the attendees to show the work they were able to achieve during the week and hear from them any comments to make these events better. One of our favorite quotes was from a developer from Lima, Peru “This kind of events are amazing, the main reason is, I felt like we had a live StackOverflow support from the Forge Team and you cannot beat that”. We had companies from different parts of Colombia and also Mexico, Uruguay, Peru and Ecuador. It was an event filled with Latin-American talent and I couldn’t be happier.
- Conconcreto S.A – Initial adaptation of Cloud visualization to their system with display of Data and CAD model.
- Flesan del Peru – BIM application using advance uses of the Viewer and Issues API
- Prodesa SA – BIM 360 Project automation tool for data analysis and extraction for better Project management.
- Ti&Con S.A.S. – Data extraction from Revit models combined with ModelChecker app using Revit API, will develop DA4R integration in the future.
- TDC LAB – Developed an integration for quality verification of cost information under classification systems
- Hermosillo – Automation tool using DA4R for creation of walls from 2D Pdf for a full preliminary takeoffs system that will ease the estimator’s job. This by creating a schematic model that uses Revit components created using surveys and maps them into a 2D drawing of the project.
- Amarilo - Developing with the Design Automation for Revit they were able to achieve the revision of their models hosted in BIM 360 Docs verifying the parameters and rules through ModelChecker for the optimization of their audit process in their coordination phase. Giving them the necessary data to generate Visual reports and extraction to Excel sheets.
- Constructora Bolívar – Using MD and DM APi they integrated the values of their ERP to the extracted quantities from the model in order to generate a budget report. Developed a dashboard to be used in predictive analytics to take general proactive decisions and optimize company resources.
- hsbcad / HSB SOFTECUADOR CA – Using DA4A they created a bundle that has a command which obtains the geometrical data from their custom objects (hsbcad CLT panels) from the dwg drawings. Their bundle command reads the hsbcad CLT panels and nest them inside of big master panels to optimize material. The bundle command modifies the input drawing and saves the drawing with the result. They ran across a problem which we are investigating already to complete their workflow.
- Lagarsoft – Continue develop their app BIMDash.io which is a centralized dashboard that enables BIM managers to understand multiple performance metrics for different projects in a single dashboard. They to me seem like good potential System Integrators in South America.
- Build Change – Are currently developing a mobile tool that uses AI and Machine Learning to perform construction supervision in retrofitting sites. To do this, we are training the AI tool using thousands of BIM-generated images of the most common construction issues that compromise structural safety during our retrofit projects. In the Forge Accelerator we could find alternative ways to model 3D geometry thanks to the support of the Autodesk Experts. With their advice and guidance, we created a model in Three.js that resembled a brick and mortar wall, with accurate graphics and textures.
It was a week full of new ideas, intense work, good software development and the beginning of the adaptation of Autodesk’s new Platform, Forge, in Colombia. I want to thank all the people who helped making this event possible and a special thanks to Alfredo Amorocho (Amarilo) and Luis Morales (TDC Lab) for pushing us to bring an accelerator to Bogota. We had an amazing time; the presentations were a total success and we look forward to hearing more in the work of BIM and Forge in the future.