Hello, I'm Creighton Nolte, an architect and computer consultant.
Whether you're a design engineer or an architect, computer literate, or accustomed to using
pencil and paper, we'd like to show you how one computer can provide the solution you
need for every phase of your work, from design and drafting, 3D visualization, to marketing
and running your business.
In this video, we'll introduce you to some professionals in your field who have discovered
the versatility of the Macintosh.
They use Macintosh for everything, from daily office functions like simple word processing
to conceptual drawings and schematic design.
Macintosh handles complex design and CAD drawings while accommodating the need for a personal
touch.
The same machine which delivers impressive presentations can also perform detailed calculations
with accuracy.
The Apple Macintosh provides a full range of business solutions, computers to meet your
every need, including local networking and high-speed file transfer, compatibility with
DOS mainframes and workstations, and new powerful options capable of keeping up with your highest
flying design ideas.
You'll travel to the Mojave Desert to meet one of the most famous aircraft designers in
the world.
Then it's on to Granger, Indiana, where we'll meet his collaborator whose tail and wing designs
have revolutionized flying.
And then we'll move on to Kansas City, where Macintosh computers help architects design
exciting projects, from office buildings to the American Royal, home of America's oldest
rodeo.
After meeting these people, we'll be coming back here to my office in San Diego, where
I'll spend about a half an hour demonstrating some of the terrific things you can do on
Macintosh in the fields of architecture and engineering.
So our video will consist of two sections.
First, we'll meet some designers using Macintosh, in which we'll visit both design engineers
and architects.
And second, a closer look, where we will demonstrate a selection of useful software in the areas
of design, presentation, and managing your business.
And now, fasten your safety belts, we're going flying.
We're now flight testing the areas.
I'm Burt Rutan.
I have a company called Scaled Composites, located in California's Mojave Desert.
I'm an aircraft designer.
I'm probably best known for designing the Voyager, the aircraft that circle the world
without refueling.
The fact that the airplane did work, that it did fly around the world, it did double
a distance record, that's the most rewarding and enjoyable part of my work.
Our new Ares was designed on the Macintosh.
Now the neat thing about the Macintosh is I can go in and quickly try different things
and analyze them, develop geometry very quickly, analyze that geometry.
The speed of the Macintosh, particularly the Quadra, allows me to do a larger variety of
concepts.
We've developed 24 airplanes with no accidents, and the fact that we have this wonderful computational
tool that allows us to go in and do a lot of analysis very quickly is an element in
that safety record, no question.
Our work with the Macintosh involves just about everything we do, from organizing business
to program planning to engineering calculations to output of graphics for presentations.
We had a lot of problems trying to make a network with DOS machines.
Things didn't work, incompatibility problems, horror stories.
When we started buying Macintoshes to our delight, we plugged them in and they worked.
Our Macintosh and our Apollo 570, for example, work side by side.
We organized a network overnight, it works, and immediately we have high performance network
capability that's reliable.
John Rontz is an individual who, when he takes on something, takes it all the way.
John Rontz drives fast cars.
He plays world-class music.
John Rontz is the best airfoil designer in this country, and he helps us design the airplanes
developed at scale.
The opportunity to actually design an airplane is a rare privilege.
I'd say the most shocking thing about the power of Macintosh was seeing the ability
to draw things now on the computer faster than you could by hand.
The productivity is awesome.
A Macintosh can do things with graphics that DOS machines could only try to dream about
on their best days.
You can make crisp, clean drawings that look like draftsmen enslaving all night over.
A Macintosh is a device for not only testing and proving your ideas, but then documenting
them so that you can walk into someone's office and say, here, invest your millions in this
because we know this works, and it makes you look professional when you're selling yourself
and your ideas to your customers and to your clients.
So often, Sundays will begin with a Burt Rutan phone call.
Hello, John.
Yes, we have a new design here.
I'll fire up the Mac, and he's already got his Mac fired up, and he'll shoot me a drawing.
And within seconds, I will be looking at the same exact drawing that he's looking at.
What I want to focus on today is that aft wing, which is really the most difficult thing.
Just zoom in on the right wing.
He wants success on all levels, including art.
Gradually, I form a picture of the aerodynamics of the craft.
We have here is a Macintosh that is now pretending to be a Tectronix 4105 colored graphics terminal.
And this is the mathematical wind tunnel model that we've created of the airplane that Burt
sent us by modem.
See, Burt likes to design one thing that does five jobs.
And I like to think in terms of refinement and perfection and aesthetics.
A creative person needs a fast, intuitive worker alongside.
Modem is the most important thing we have.
The smart users build Macintosh.
That's where we are.
That's where the future is.
As you've just seen, the Macintosh is a powerful design tool for every phase of engineering
design, from initial concept through detailed refinements and presentations.
Now we'll take a look at the design process for architects.
Just as I do, the architects at Black & Veatch in Kansas City find that the Macintosh is
a powerful tool for every phase of an architect's work.
My name is Joe Brown, I'm a member of the Board of Governors of the American Royal,
the largest combined horse show, rodeo, and stock show in the United States.
The other hat that I wear is I am the President and CEO of Black & Veatch Architects here
in Kansas City.
Kevin, why don't you tell us what created the change, why we're making that change.
Black & Veatch Architects is an autonomous organization within the Black & Veatch group
of companies.
We have about 30 to 40 architects on staff.
We design office buildings, hospitals, schools, commercial buildings, industrial buildings.
Being from Missouri, as you may know, this is the show me state.
And so the people around here said, show me why you're going to do something different.
Why are you going to leave the MS-DOS base?
And this gave us the opportunity to lead and to show them what could be done quickly and
easily on the Macintosh.
We feel that we did a much better job on the Macintosh than we could have done any other
way.
Andy Anderson is our systems manager and he's the young fellow who sold us on being able
to use the Macintosh, the things that we wanted to do.
We'll just run the sight lines through the Macintosh and we'll have them in no time.
My job at Black & Veatch is to take care of the computer systems.
As we use the Apple Macintosh now, my job has become easier.
In the beginning, when architects created people, did a project, they created a perspective
on a drawing board.
Now, what the Macintosh allows me to give, instead of giving you one perspective, a project
allows you to give me 10 or 12.
I can walk inside the building.
It at least gives you some concept of what this building is going to look like from the
inside out and the outside in.
You certainly couldn't do it with the other computer systems that Black & Veatch used.
We did primarily all the design on the American Royal Building on the Apple Macintosh.
Kevin Gresh is a project architect.
The Macintosh helps us stay on the leading edge and that's important for us as architects
to be perceived by our clients as being on the leading edge.
We as architects must remain flexible during the design process.
We have a lot of input from our consultants, our clients, our city officials that make
it difficult to do these things, but the Macintosh makes it very easy for us to do these things
and at the same time we have to think about the aesthetics and the beauty of the building.
The Macintosh gives us the ability to communicate with our clients even better than before because
we can get multiple views of the facility that we're working on in 3D.
I am real happy with the speed of the Macintosh, the ability to pan, to zoom, to look at different
views, especially 3D.
They regenerate very quickly.
We use AutoCAD as our main production tool.
We use it from schematics through construction documents.
The Release 11 AutoCAD is more Mac-like.
It provides you with the same icons that you see in every other piece of software.
You see pull down menus.
You see hierarchical menus that are the same and you have an understanding of what you're
looking at before you even open it up.
We had people that would do AutoCAD on an MS-DOS machine and primarily that's the only
thing that they ever did and now we've got architects and designers that will use several
applications all at one time.
We have total networking within the company between MS-DOS machines and between Macintoshes.
We exchange files with other people, with other computer system platforms on a daily
basis.
We can just send it to them via Ethernet, use an AutoCAD's DFX facility without any
kind of a problem at all.
We did a proposal for a grain milling facility in Doha, Qatar which is in the Middle East.
We would never come face to face with a client so we developed a presentation that would
do our talking for us.
The Macintosh reveals the creativity in individuals.
We at Black & Veatch Architects needed something that was not in the back room that only two
people could use.
We needed something to make productivity happen within the office and we needed something
to put on everyone's desk.
We maintain a marketing database on the Mac.
We use desktop publishing as our main source of all of our proposals.
Macintosh is very versatile.
Instead of carrying a large set of drawings down to the instruction site, the PowerBook
gives us the opportunity to do critiques in the field and do memos immediately.
At Black & Veatch, our business rides on our performance and our performance rides on our
creative abilities and the resources that we use.
What we're doing is addressing the client's needs.
And we can do that and we can do it tastefully and aesthetically and we can all do that quickly
and easily on the Macintosh.
Welcome back to San Diego and the demo portion of our presentation.
In the next half hour, I'll show you some creative and time-saving possibilities available
to designers using Macintosh.
Of the many powerful software packages available, we've selected just a few in three main areas
– design, presentation, and managing your business.
We'll begin with my personal favorite, design.
Computer-aided design has been out of reach for many but the largest companies.
That's because older CAD systems were expensive, requiring heavy training and full-time operators.
But all that has changed by designing with Macintosh.
With the Macintosh, and particularly with Vellum, I can have someone who maybe only
works a couple or four hours a month sit down and be creative and productive developing
CAD drawings.
Imagine a conceptual design tool which lets you sketch your ideas as they evolve, then
change your drawings automatically to the correct dimensions when your ideas become
more concrete.
Here's Aaschler Vellum, a design tool with many intelligent time-saving features including
parametric design, associative dimensioning, and the drafting assistant.
To create a simple design, first we select the line tool and begin creating a shape.
Here's a simplified wing design from Burt Rutan.
To give you an idea how friendly and intuitive design on the Macintosh can be, let's look
at a key feature of this program.
It's called the drafting assistant and it's a built-in intelligence which works behind
the scene to continuously give you on-screen visual feedback.
Burt uses it throughout his design process.
Vellum's drafting assistant automatically snaps to all the proper points, tells you
what they are, and it helps you readily identify the geometry.
I can go up here under layout now and show the 2-D analysis and here's all the rest
of the 2-D data including inertias of the wing.
Vellum is very intuitive, but there's no sacrifice in precision.
Burt Rutan, for example, copies the Vellum data into other programs to run performance
checks.
He can do this because calculations Vellum generates use double precision floating point
accuracy to 16 decimal places and exporting these figures is seamless, quick and easy.
Burt simply cuts and pastes the figures from Vellum into a performance analysis program.
Further performance checks and finite element modeling programs such as Cosmos derive information
from these original numbers.
In the end, calculations appear on customized spreadsheets such as Excel.
It's a spreadsheet in which we calculate detailed performance data.
I think at one time I used to type in numbers like this and even read numbers over the phone
to John Rontz, crazy.
Another important feature of Vellum is integrated parametrics, a feature that helps you refine
your design.
Here's a simple example to show you how integrated parametrics works.
You simply sketch a rough approximation of your design.
Here a simple triangle.
To alter your design to fit exact specifications, you dimension it by selecting your dimension
tool, allowing you to pull off the dimensions.
Let's say this piece must fit in a pre-designed spot with specific dimensions.
Now simply enter in those new values.
I'll do that on two sides.
Go to the edit menu and select resolve and the program automatically resolves the geometry
to scale.
The graphic changes to match the dimensions you specified.
The integrated parametrics feature works with associative dimensioning, allowing you to
assign variables to describe the geometry.
You can also change the geometry and the dimensions update as you watch.
A conceptual design tool, an accurate and precise engineering tool, Vellum on the Macintosh
may be just the introduction you need to try out your design concepts on the computer.
Once I started using Vellum, that was what it took for me to get away from the pencil
on conceptual design.
After that, I've done it all on the computer.
My drawing board has dust on it now.
Chemical design tools on Macintosh are great for architects as well.
Take a program like Alias Up Front, which quickly and easily helps architects design
and visualize their projects in 3D perspective views, complete with shadows.
The ability to do 3D modeling saves us time in doing sketches.
You can easily pick a view.
If it doesn't look like what you want, you can easily go on to the next one.
We have the ability to look at the building from any sun angle and develop any kind of
condition that we want any time of the year.
For a client, this would be very important for them to see, especially if we have more
than one building next to each other.
The 3D modeling gives us the opportunity to look at the building from all sides.
We can get down at a level that a person would be looking at the building, for instance,
and we can actually see those elements.
Those are the kinds of things architects really need to do.
One of the keys to architectural design is staying flexible through the design process.
Let's look closer at Up Front, and I'll show you how easy it is to mock up and modify your
design very quickly on the Macintosh.
Let's say our client decides to add a pyramid penthouse on top of his building.
Here's our setting.
To add our new element to this drawing, we'll select the wall tool, choose the ground plane
by clicking on it, click and drag for a height of the pyramid, then select the corner parts
to enclose the shape, clicking at each corner point.
When you complete the shape, the program shades it with a color which I've preselected.
Now that we've added this new element, we can use the shadow function to see the effect
of the pyramid on the adjacent structures.
The program allows you to enter a time or location for precise shadow calculation.
We've selected February 2nd, Groundhog Day in San Diego for our shadow study, and now
we'll enter the time of day, 3 p.m., click on Calculate, and then the Make Shadows buttons.
Here's what it will look like.
As you can imagine, a design tool like Upfront can help you eliminate costly preliminary
models and give you more time to explore additional design options.
Upfront offers a variety of input and output options, including picked, DXF, and encapsulated
postscript files, so you can export your concept studies into other applications to create
a proposal, for example.
You can get a quick view of your idea by printing it out on a laser printer, or, if you need
a larger size, a plotter.
Upfront also allows you to draw right over a scanned-in photograph so you can see your
building in its setting.
3D modeling helps us save time and money.
For instance, we're able to do more views in less time.
We're not spending all night putting together a perspective for the next day.
We're spending all day putting together six or seven perspectives for the next day.
Our next software demo is a powerful, integrated 2D and 3D design and drafting package, which
works both for architects and engineers.
AutoCAD Release 11 from Autodesk is the latest version of this industry standard.
Now, with a Macintosh user interface, Release 11 brings you the Macintosh ease of use that
you've been waiting for.
The Macintosh brings you workstation-level performance at an affordable cost.
To start with, it's easier to get into your files.
An AutoCAD Release 11 file can be opened simply by double-clicking on its icon.
The Macintosh advantage in AutoCAD Release 11 speeds you quickly through your design.
You can tear off the tool palette and position it anywhere on the screen, as well as any
other menu from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
The tool and modified palette can easily be changed to horizontal or vertical positions
by simply clicking on the arrow at the corner of the palette.
Hierarchical menus further prompt you so that you do not need to remember complicated text
commands.
With the new Release AutoCAD, the old text-based commands are still available for those die-hard
people that need them.
Other choices include choosing how you look at your drawing, starting with the color of
your background screen, which you select with a mouse click.
The Configure Display dialog box allows you to turn on or off the status line, screen
menu, and select the cursor crosshair style.
The floating tool palettes provide more alternatives through pop-up lists.
Pretty easy, right?
But the friendly interface doesn't stop there.
To assist users at any level of experience, AutoCAD has a unique help feature that is
accessible at any time from within AutoCAD Release 11.
Now that we've made some choices, let's do some work.
Today we want to reshape and apply hatching to a specific area.
First we select the area by clicking on it.
Notice the grip or handle points, which are unique to the Macintosh environment.
Not only do they tell you that you've selected the area, but they allow you to reshape or
resize your selection with ease.
I'll make this a little bigger.
Now we want to apply a hatch pattern.
Choose Hatch Pattern from the Settings menu, and a selection palette appears to offer several
choices.
For feeling a little wild today, go for a 3D Escher look, and the area fills in automatically.
In spite of how easy AutoCAD is on Macintosh, we don't sacrifice function.
For example, look at the bi-directional cut and paste clipboard support.
When you copy a drawing from AutoCAD to paste into another CAD or design application, it
retains all its vector data, meaning you can manipulate the image as in its original form.
Other high-end features include ADS, the Application Development System, which extends your ability
to create customized applications, and the optional AME, Advanced Modeling Extension,
for complex 3D surface modeling.
Here's what Andy Anderson has to say about these features.
We're excited about the extensions that they have in there.
We did not have the availability of AME or ADS, and those are exciting to us because
we can develop our own programs here, our own way of doing things within AutoCAD that
are inherent functions to Black & Beech Architects, and AutoCAD allows you to do that.
The list routines, the ability to tie your AutoCAD drawings to a database using C.
Advanced users will be pleased to know that you can launch AutoShade from within AutoCAD,
go back to AutoCAD, make changes to the drawing like moving a chair, a desk, or a window,
and these changes are automatically made to the AutoShade model.
This is made possible on the Macintosh with System 7 and a feature known as Inter-Application
Communication.
Finding files created on other platforms with AutoCAD is not a problem with the Macintosh
version.
Files from AutoCAD on all platforms, Macintosh, DOS, and Unix, are 100% binary compatible,
which means that they require no translation or conversion.
This allows you to share your Macintosh AutoCAD files seamlessly with your clients or consultants
who might be using AutoCAD on a PC or workstation.
And the ability to read or import and write or export DXF and IGES files is as simple
as choosing a command from the pull-down menus.
In summary, both architectural and engineering designers will find AutoCAD Release 11 on
Macintosh, a valuable design and drafting tool that has all the power of AutoCAD with
the ease of use of the Macintosh.
As both architects and engineers know, design work is not an isolated task.
You probably have to send your files on for further refinement or integrate the work of
others into your design.
Connectivity with the DOS environment is often critical.
In addition to the powerful import and export options built into most design programs, the
Macintosh itself provides the capability to read from and write to DOS disks, as well
as initialize them in both double-density and high-density formats.
Also, file transfer and translation between the Macintosh and DOS systems is made even
easier with an application like MacLink+.
Translation formats for many types of files can be selected from pop-up menus.
And translating the files is as easy as point and click.
With Macintosh, compatibility is built right in.
Great designs are one thing, but they still need to be communicated effectively.
This is where a little showbiz can help.
The next package, Presenter Professional by Vidi, is both a modeling and scene description
program as well as a presentation tool.
For now, here's a quick look at its presentation capabilities.
Once you've got your complex model constructed, an airplane, a building, or a machine part,
you may want to create a photorealistic presentation to show your client.
Presenter Professional allows you to create complete and realistic images from your wireframe
designs by rendering with lighting, textures, and colors.
This program assists you in making choices by using the metaphor of a photo studio, so
you have your subject, light sources, and your camera position.
All of these can be moved around until you've got exactly the image you want.
Let's move the camera closer, and now a little higher.
See how the wireframe version of our image reflects these changes?
Once we've chosen our position, we can render it, specifying materials, textures, and colors.
The program allows you to choose different combinations, like wood and marble, even wood
and stone.
How about it fully rendered in Chrome?
Presenter Professional adapts to your creativity.
Presenter Professional can render any image, not just planes, and you can choose the degree
of resolution, reflection, and detail.
Gives you the kind of versatility that was once only available on high-end CAD systems.
And Presenter Professional can generate PIX files, which we can export into an animation
program like Macromine Director.
This can add the magic of movies to your presentations.
Macromine Director allows you a great deal of flexibility in presentation.
In addition to the animations of 3D graphics, you can also create an interesting presentation
for clients with still images scanned in or captured on video.
The architects at Black & Veatch created their effective marketing presentation for a huge
grain storage facility in Qatar, with only two weeks to learn the program and make the
presentation.
This demonstration of Macintosh ease of use and power was so successful that the same
team was asked to create a montage of Black & Veatch designs to show at a client open
house.
There are many applications available to help you present your ideas.
Let's say you're starting with photographs.
Even reality can be altered and enhanced on Macintosh.
Here's the site of a new building.
Let's say we want to study the visual impact of our building in the context of the surrounding
environment.
Using Adobe Photoshop, we can seamlessly add a proposed design to a still photograph, a
slide, even a frame grabbed from video.
Not only can this help to present your ideas to clients, but it can also help to study
design alternatives.
These presentation tools can create a wide variety of images from your product in any
setting, your building in relation to its environment, or your new plane design in flight.
Let's take a look at how the versatility of Macintosh saves designers time and money,
whether they're designing buildings, aircraft, or whatever.
In the area of managing your business, we'll look at proposals, project management, and
accounting.
We'll start with the meat and potatoes writing the proposal.
Here at Scale, I would say we do several hundred proposals every year.
We'll start out with a template, which is generally a word process or document, which
is another proposal.
We'll ask, which one that we do it in the past is this most like?
And we'll go in and modify that document so it has all the boilerplate stuff in it.
And then we can bring in output from our program planning software, and output from spreadsheets,
and we essentially merge that.
And it looks like you've spent a week preparing this big, long proposal when actually the
amount of work to prepare that proposal is relatively simple because of the nice environment
of the Macintosh.
With the Macintosh operating system, using the features of publish and subscribe, when
you make changes in a spreadsheet, any document which subscribes to the spreadsheet, like your
proposal, for example, automatically reflects those changes.
So we see the analysis chart automatically update, again, a tremendous time saver.
That used to be something we'd stay up till midnight trying to get out a proposal.
Now we can do it between 4 and 5 o'clock.
If you happen to miss your overnight delivery service, you can fax your document directly
from your Macintosh.
Project management is another facet of your business that Macintosh handles with ease.
Let's look at the way MacProject helps Burt Rattan with his scheduling and job costing.
On Macintosh, you can clearly lay out schedules that are visually understood so that participants
in a project are able to understand the chain of events.
Here's a sample schedule for one of Burt Rattan's projects.
On the left is a schedule chart showing the critical path for this project.
Below is a task timeline, also called a Gantt chart, which shows the sequence of the tasks
and their duration.
To the right is a project table which summarizes all the tasks.
Let's look at the schedule chart in detail and see how the changes made in one window
reflect the information in the others.
Select a task by clicking on it, then move the cursor to the task menu and select Show
Task Info.
This window shows you a summary of all the information relative to the task.
The way we use the project software to track deadlines and get things back on time is primarily
it gives everyone on the program the visibility of where we are.
It allows us also to go in and quickly change the man loading.
Or let's say, for example, we decide this project's not going to make it on time.
Say, okay, we're going to work from now on Saturdays.
I can go in and add Saturdays, and in one second I'll know the new completion date.
I can find that kind of information just like that, and that saves me money.
Time is money, and in our last section, Accounting, we'll talk about managing both.
I'm going to start by letting Pat Stork, Vice President of Finance for Scaled Composites,
show you how they use one of the many excellent software packages created for independent
businesses.
We use the Macintosh daily in our accounting functions here.
We have several of the Great Plains modules.
We have General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Inventory Purchasing,
Job Costs.
Our Macintosh system is a lot better than the MS-DOS system that we used to have in
here.
The ability to move back and forth between applications, the numerous reports that are
available.
There really isn't any comparison to our old system.
I use spreadsheets extensively.
There isn't a day that I'm not working on a spreadsheet on my Mac.
I've just recently done our three-year plan for the company on a very large spreadsheet,
and there was no other way I could have done it without Excel and the Macintosh.
The Macintosh gives us the ability to have better financial control.
It just gives us a better overview, and as managers, we're better able to control the
company and keep an eye on things that are important to the upper management.
Creative people, such as architects and design engineers, sometimes complain that it's hard
for them to keep track of the hours they work so that they can accurately track their costs
and bill their clients.
Here's a terrific way to let the computer automate this function.
Timeslips 3 is a versatile time and billing program that can adapt to the many ways that
you work.
If we are black and veatch, we might start by creating a new timeslip for Kevin, the
project designer.
From this list of users, we can select Kevin's name and return to the timeslip.
Now we need to select an activity for Kevin to be working on from this list.
Click on conceptual design and then the select button.
Now we'll select a client from the client list.
We can choose a billing rate or a fixed fee and whether it's a billable activity.
Now we can let the computer keep track of our time by just clicking on the turn on button,
which starts the clock.
Timeslips 3 keeps track of Kevin's time while he's working and when he's finished, he just
turns it off.
Timeslips automatically creates reports formatted the way you want.
It's easy to create detailed invoices of reports this way.
Now that we've shown you a wide variety of the applications available for architects
and engineers, we hope you have a better understanding of how Macintosh can help you conceptualize,
design, produce, and squeeze more hours out of every work day.
With increased power and speed, high end, easy to use CAD, and an array of software
to cover all your design and business needs, the Macintosh is the versatile solution for
every architect and engineer.