Skema Unveils Skema 2024: Revolutionizing Schematic-to-BIM Design Workflow
New Release Learns from Your Previous Projects to Deliver Unitized Design for Multiple Building Types and Industrialized Construction Methods
Atlanta, GA – June 04, 2024 – Skema, a leading AEC solution provider, proudly announces the launch of Skema 2024, a groundbreaking solution designed to save architects, owners, developers, and builders up to 8 weeks in their schematic-to-BIM design workflow.
Skema transforms a firm’s proven and BIM-rich unitized design elements - whether created in Revit, ArchiCAD, IFC, or any other BIM software - into Design Catalogs for new build, adaptive reuse, and modular projects. By turning a firm’s valuable BIM outputs into BIM inputs, designers can resolve detail design elements during the schematic phase. This greater precision and accuracy supports modern methods of construction (MMC) and can save weeks of laborious BIM modeling tasks.
LPA Design Studios applied their Skema Design Catalog to create this BIM-rich schematic design using the intelligence of their own past designs. Skema goes from schematic to BIM in minutes, not months.
Skema Delivers Confidence in Early Design
The star attraction of Skema 2024 is the Design Catalog Manager, a first-of-its-kind tool that provides designers with complete freedom to create new designs using the intelligence of their own past designs.
Skema Design Catalogs give designers the ability to pull out unitized design elements from their own previous designs and then work with them like puzzle pieces to solve a new design. While these elements had specific sizes and shapes in their original project, Skema allows them to be adapted or morphed to any size or shape.
This approach is applicable to many building types, from healthcare to data centers. The Design Catalog elements, for example, can represent a nursing station, school classroom, hotel suite, or 1-,2-, or 3-bedroom apartments.
“Our clients have seen the value of putting their BIM to work in ways that weren’t feasible before,” said Marty Rozmanith, co-founder and chief technology officer at Skema. “Skema is the only conceptual and schematic tool that uses high LOD BIM as input, and we call that our BIM knowledge reuse engine. With Skema 2024 and the Design Catalog Manager, we are giving our customers full control over using Skema to reuse and repurpose their existing successful projects for various building typologies.”
Customers Accelerate Workflows with Skema
A dozen firms in Skema’s Pioneer Partner Program already have their best designs and standards in Design Catalogs for production use. Their unitized design elements are flexible, morphable, and deterministic “puzzle pieces” that easily snap into new layouts, providing designers with compete freedom to customize their own designs in new ways. They can experiment with whole chunks of the building to solve the overall arrangement during feasibility phase and fast-forward through mundane modeling and repetitive drafting tasks.
Michael Hodge, Principal, Digital Practice and Design Technology at TVS, said, “Skema allows us to generate custom libraries specific to client, typology, or market. We can iterate multiple conceptual schemes within minutes, live and in progress with the client. Each iterated scheme can be used to generate a highly detailed model solution, and within a few additional minutes that is a fully integrated Revit model.”
“Skema’s Design Catalog Manager gives us new opportunities to get more value from our BIM investments,” said Nicholas Kramer, LEED® AP, Associate and Director of Inspire Design at LPA, Inc..
Jeff Shaw, CEO, Bridge Commercial Real Estate and Senior Managing Director, Bridge Investment Group, added, “I have not seen a tool that harnesses AI more effectively than Skema to save time and money at the most critical times in the development process.”
Skema 2024 Key Capabilities
Skema’s key updates and functionality include:
Skema Design Catalogs.
Like a “greatest hits” album, Design Catalogs harness the power of a firm’s BIM models and firm standards to improve design workflows. With the Design Catalog Manager, designers now have direct control over all the inputs to Skema, and greater control over Revit model generation.
BIM Knowledge Reuse Engine.
BIM reuse is at the heart of Skema’s singular capabilities. Skema is the first AEC software solution to reuse Building Information Models (BIM) in an efficient manner.
Morphing.
Skema’s standout AI-powered morphing functionality lets designers stretch, pull, and manipulate Design Catalog elements while maintaining all of the inherent logic and BIM data. Whether angling a single unit or reconfiguring an entire floor plan, morphing offers a level of flexibility that is unmatched in the industry.
BIM in Minutes.
Skema’s “BIM in Minutes” acceleration takes the labor-intensive schematic-to-BIM process to a new level of efficiency. With the BIM data backing up these unitized elements, the result is a high quality constructable schematic design.
Tool Chains.
Skema is the only tool that is designed as a Swiss Army knife, supporting a native-data tool chain that avoids the precipitous drop-off in content and data integrity that firms encounter when moving between design phases and tools. Skema’s focus on automation and seamless integration with tools like SketchUp makes it a natural choice for firms aiming to wring out inefficiencies in their design workflows.
Skema is available now. Sign up for a free trial. Go to skema.ai/pricing for details on individual, team, and enterprise licensing.