What is BIM? - BIM 360 Tutorial

- [Narrator] So we're going to be talking about BIM 360 and I thought a good place to start would be what is BIM? Let's discuss. So the acronym BIM stands for Building Information Modeling. So to break that down, let's talk about each one of those parts of the acronym one at a time, but, just for fun, let's do it backwards. So we'll talk about modeling first. And with modeling what we mean is that we want to represent our design as a 3D model, not as a 2D drawing like you see in front of you. More like this, a three dimensional digital model of what we're designing. Now, why is that important, why is that an advantage to us? Well, think about this, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a model must be worth a million because with a model you can explore inside and out, you can look at it from different angles, you can turn off parts of the model and leave other parts on. The sky's the limit to what you can do with a digital model. So it really does an amazing job of enabling the visibility of what you're designing to many different stakeholders within a design project. All right, what about information? What does that mean? Well, inside a BIM model, you will find that information is attached to each one of the components of the model. So, the example on your screen, is a column in a building, and you'll see that there is information associated with that column listed to the right. Now, that information could be literally anything, but typically it has to do with information that's important to designing the object, constructing it, maintaining it, or any number of functions; maybe how it performs mechanically, it's capacity, really anything that will help people understand the function of that object. So that's another big part of BIM, of Building Information Modeling, is the information attached to the objects. So let's look at the first part. The building. Now, naturally the first thing that pops into your mind is a building. Something you walk into and occupy. But that really limits them to one specific type of design, or construction. Some people like to think of the building part of BIM as a verb. So, I'm building a bridge, I'm building a road, or any number of things. And that really broadens the definition to include things like infrastructure, or even manufacturing, or definitely buildings. So BIM isn't just restricted to the buildings that you see out there. Houses, and hotels, and hospitals. It also applies to infrastructure, especially bridges, underground pipes, and other things that are not buildings, but yet we build them. So BIM, you take a three dimensional model of something, you attach information to it, and that just happens to be something you are building, so we end up with Building Information Modeling. So why is BIM such a big deal? Well, to tell you the truth, BIM has literally revolutionized the way people design, build, and maintain buildings and other projects. Think about it, it's a difference between a roll of paper drawings and an information packed digital model that can be kept up to date and seen by all of the different people involved in a project on practically any device at any time. Imagine the impact that has on efficiency and collaboration. Yup, it's a big impact, and that's why BIM has become the standard in design and construction across the world. So we talked about the BIM part of BIM 360, but what about the 360? Frankly, I'm not sure exactly why Autodesk chose to put 360 in the name, but I have a good guess. By using the Cloud BIM 360 puts project data at the center, giving everyone on the project team 360 degrees of access to it. That's much better than the traditional way of working where parts of the project are stored on many different computers, used by many different team members. So, speaking of the Cloud, what is a Cloud platform anyway? We'll cover that in the next video.