1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to construction and design tools, and in particular to computer programs and systems for designing buildings, generating accurate cut-lists, cutting and assembling materials, and reducing environmental waste.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The process of building construction has conventionally been a single file march of developers, architects, engineers, government, contractors, and material suppliers that operate in a sequential then pseudo collaborative fashion. This siloed, head-to-toe approach often leads to inefficiencies. Rough plans, with the details left open, lead to various interpretations, on-site decision making, and wasteful construction that is not environmentally friendly. It also limits the ability to optimize building scale and timing. Very often persons involved face unexpected results, and exceed costs. Conventional building methods commonly include miscommunication, waste, errors, litigation, and excess costs.
Conventional home and industrial building construction have commonly been done from plans manually drawn by architects and engineers. The simplest of these are just detailed enough to get government building department approvals for permits and for the contractors and subcontractors to be able to generate their own bills of materials, cut-lists, and labor estimates. Such buildings are made out of standard sized materials, like 4′×8′ plywood sheets, and 2″×4″×8′ studs. Cut-lists are generated by the craftsmen on-site, as pieces are needed. Inevitably, a lot of material is wasted, and many times the cuts are wrong, leading to more waste. The bills of materials too, are at best estimates, and too much material being ordered lead to more waste and too little material cost time.
The use of computers and computer aided design (CAD) leads to better drawings with more detail, and more accurate bills of material. Piece details are more common, but no guarantee that the pieces will all fit together. This stage of development still very much depends on the trades-people being able to catch any ordering and material cutting mistakes. But since the mistakes made are often very subtle, the mistakes are not discovered until much later in the construction. Correcting the mistakes commonly involves some reconstruction, and more than the expected amount of material.
A far better building practice is to have a complete design from the start, and all the necessary materials pre-cut and identified as to their use. With the proper use of well programmed computers, mistakes in cutting and marking can be very tightly controlled. In using such, if a trades-person finds that the computer indicates that the pieces will not fit, then a solution does not involve wasting a pre-cut piece.
Building information modeling (BIM) is an integrated process that allows architects, engineers, and builders to explore a project digitally before it is built. Coordinated, reliable information is used throughout the process to design innovative projects, more accurately visualize appearance for better communication, and simulate real-world performance for better understanding of important characteristics such as cost, scheduling, and environmental impact.
SOLIDWORKS is a three-dimensional (three-dimensional) mechanical CAD software program that runs on Microsoft WINDOWS and is developed by Dassault Systems SOLIDWORKS Corp., in France. SOLIDWORKS, is not specifically designed for working with standard building materials in the construction of homes and industrial buildings. This much of what is provided in the standard software product is not useable or does not fit the job very well.
SOLIDWORKS is a parasolid-based solid modeler, and uses a parametric feature-based approach to create models and assemblies. See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolidWorks. Parameters refer to constraints whose values determine the shape or geometry of the model or assembly. Parameters can be either numeric parameters, such as line lengths or circle diameters, or geometric parameters, such as tangent, parallel, concentric, horizontal or vertical, etc. Numeric parameters can be associated with each other through the use of relations, which allows them to capture design intent.
A design intent is how the creator of the part wants it to respond to changes and updates. For example, the hole at the top of a beverage should stay at the top surface, regardless of the height or size of the can. SOLIDWORKS can specify that the hole is a feature on the top surface, and will maintain that design intent no matter what the height is later given to the can. Features refer to the building blocks of the part, they are the shapes and operations that construct the part. Shape-based features typically begin with a two-dimensional or three-dimensional sketch of shapes such as bosses, holes, slots, etc. This shape is then extruded or cut to add or remove material from the part. Operation-based features are not sketch-based, and include features such as fillets, chamfers, shells, applying draft to the faces of a part, etc.
Building a model in SOLIDWORKS starts with a two-dimensional or three-dimensional sketch with points, lines, arcs, conics, and splines. Dimensions are added to the sketch to define the size and location of the geometry. Relations are used to define attributes such as tangency, parallelism, perpendicularity, and concentricity. The parametric nature of SOLIDWORKS means that the dimensions and relations drive the geometry, not the other way around. The dimensions in the sketch can be controlled independently, or by relationships to other parameters inside or outside of the sketch. SOLIDWORKS allows a user to roll back through the history of the part in order to make changes, add additional features, or change the sequence in which operations are performed.
In an assembly, sketch relations are matched, mates define equivalent relations with respect to the individual parts or components, allowing the construction of assemblies. SOLIDWORKS also includes mating features, such as gear and cam follower mates. This allows modeled gear assemblies, for example, to reproduce the rotational movement of a gear train. Drawings can be created either from parts or assemblies. Views are automatically generated from the solid model, and notes, dimensions and tolerances can then be added to the drawing as needed.
MillLister, Inc. (Chatsworth, Calif.) provides bill of materials (BOM), cut-list, mill list, and feature recognition detailing software and services with their SMARTLISTER, SMARTMODELING, and SMARTMACHINING that support AutoCAD®. SOLIDWORKS and others require complex formulas and parameters that drive the graphics on the screen. For cut-list or output to a computer numeric control (CNC) machine, the exported data is calculated from a formula database created by the user. If there is no formula, then there is no data to export. Complicated assemblies are therefore difficult and time consuming, if not impossible. The programming required yields quick, but simplistic results.
SMARTLISTER is a computerized orientation method that automatically extracts the three bounding box size values of CAD objects and then copies the values into the appropriate length, width and thickness columns of a grid or table. The process uses data stored in an orientation tag of three defined positions and three defined variables and compares the three bounding box distance values to each other. See, U.S. Pat. No. 6,928,331, issued Aug. 9, 2005, to David Robert Wishengrad.
SMARTLISTER measures and feature-recognizes the graphics on the screen. After drawing it in three-dimensional, SMARTLISTER generates the manufacturing data. No matter how complicated the assemblies become, the process is always easy, fast and straight-forward. The user only needs to know how to actually build the pieces in the shop and then draw it in three-dimensional.
SMARTLISTER automatically measures selected three-dimensional AutoCAD® solids and then creates bill of materials, cut-lists, mill lists, and CNC-ready DXF files. When SmartModeling is bundled with SmartLister, multiple three-dimensional solids and assemblies can be stretched in one operation, as well as move, copy, erase, mirror, array and copy-rotate multiple holes in multiple solids in one operation.