As many know, Digital Twins are all the chatter these days. What is often not talked about is the "prep" work behind a digital twin. Model clean-up, sheet sets, documentation aggregation, mapping GUIDs and assets to records and more. The list is long and can be very time consuming. Here is an overview of one of the tools we use to help us along this journey.
Enscape - it’s not just for awesome renderings! Below is a brief outline of how we use Enscape for our Digital Twin development:
What you see in your 2D plan is NOT what is often modeled
Everything you see (and don’t see) in a 3D view is an asset for the facility.
There exist a multitude of platforms to do quick reviews of models. At Intemation, we often use Enscape to review spaces, asset placement, and asset accuracy - which is to say accuracy as to does it represent what has been built/installed?
Family placements (see 3D views below):
Why is a light fixture landing halfway into the floor? Is it a misplacement? Was it a random snap the user didn’t realize? This is a quick fix.
Notice the “corner guards” in the 3D view – this is simply the use of the wrong family and it having been placed only to show a corner guard in the 2D view. This is a quick fix of both the family and placement.
Finish materials – default material is a simple fix. Finishes should be tracked – when paint has to be touched up or replaced, what was used originally? What are the colors? Finish texture? This is a simple data point in a room report.
We do this not for design, we do this to align what exists in the model will more closely represent what is on site. This translates to more accurate schedules for exports to database, accurate counts and element GUID identification for programmatic mapping to our Forge viewer in our Owner digital twins.
Enscape provides us an opportunity to model better, see better and coordinate better. It’s tools for BIM, visualization, annotations are excellent for quickly working through a model’s clean-up. The material library editing tools are excellent. The asset library flexibility is impressive. And the quickness to work between Enscape and the model with instant updating is invaluable.
Ultimately when this is published to the Owner hub, the 3D model is cleaner, easier to navigate, and accurate as to asset placement. Simply a better user experience overall.
Before:
After:
Finally, this makes what can be a tedious task of model clean-up a little more enjoyable as well; seeing end results which simply "work" better is a win for our Owner teams. What tools do you use for tasks like this?