PRESS RELEASE: ARCHVISION & AVAIL KICK OFF 2018 WITH ADDITIONS TO EXECUTIVE TEAM

Lexington, KY – January 30, 2018 – AVAIL and ArchVision announced today that both companies have made new hires to augment their executive lineup. Corey Rubadue joins ArchVision as Chief Executive Officer and Jim Clifton joins AVAIL as Chief Operating Officer.

Mr. Rubadue has refined his knowledge of visualization development and software engineering during his experience with ASGVIS and Chaos Group. First-hand knowledge of the challenges faced in architecture led to the founding of ASGVIS in 2005 and pioneered the integration of the V-Ray renderer into SketchUp and Rhino. ASGVIS was acquired by Chaos Group in 2011 and Rubadue and his team continued to refine the software. In late 2016, he oversaw the launch of V-Ray for Revit. In August 2017, Rubadue founded Oonix Solutions LLC to expand his focus on visualization to support a broader range of technologies and applications.

“I’ve always had a great appreciation of the ArchVision technologies,” says Rubadue. “Joining ArchVision is a strategically aligned fit with where my professional sights are set.”

“Corey’s expansive experience in the visualization industry is unmatched and he brings a wealth of partner relationships he has developed over the past 15 years in the field. I’m looking forward to having Corey at the helm of ArchVision and know that he will lead the company to the next level”, said Randall Stevens, founder of ArchVision.

In Mr. Rubadue’s new role as ArchVision CEO, he will oversee Product and Content development, Sales, Marketing and Personnel.

Mr. Clifton comes to AVAIL most recently from Bluegrass Vascular Technologies where, as Chief Operating Officer/Founder, he developed technology from product concept to regulatory approval to initial market launch. With over twenty years experience in software product management, Jim provides energy, drive, and creative force to early stage, complex technologies.

“Jim’s experience with every phase of the product development process makes him the perfect candidate for his new role as Chief Operating Officer”, said Randall Stevens, CEO of AVAIL.

Mr. Clifton will focus on developing and refining AVAIL’s go-to-market process and provide oversight for Sales and Marketing, Operations and Finance.

About ArchVision

Founded in 1991, ArchVision improves design modeling and visualization with RPC technology that provides architectural entourage in the form of people, tree & plant and automobile content and environment clutter. The newest product to the ArchVision lineup, Family and Detail Warehouse, is a collection of over 27,500 Roof, Window, Door and Foundation details, available as native Revit Drafting Views and AutoCAD DWGs, with unlimited downloads. ArchVision currently serves customers located in over 100 countries. For more info visit www.archvision.com.

About AVAIL

AVAIL’s enterprise and content management software solution indexes content and helps users find it in new ways. Based in Lexington, KY, AVAIL grew out of a need for a better way for AECO professionals to access the voluminous content being managed across their enterprise. With over 50 combined years in the AEC industry, the AVAIL team is passionate about helping firms discover a new way to find and manage content. For more info visit www.getavail.com.

Accessing RPC using AVAIL

We have some exciting news to share! The RPC platform is preparing for major changes. We are already delivering new RPC content and giving you tools to create your own content but that’s only the beginning. We are also in the process of replacing the ArchVision Dashboard with AVAIL. Dashboard was our first content manager designed to help you be more successful. Our goal was to give you a tool to access, manage and create your RPC content quickly and easily. In short, Dashboard is one of the main inspirations driving AVAIL. So, what’s the big news?

RPC content can now be accessed via AVAIL!

As part of our first phase of development, we have made the majority of our RPC content accessible through the RPC|All Access Marketplace channel in AVAIL. See the instructions below for getting started. Moving forward we will continue to move current RPC content over to AVAIL as quickly as we can. We will continue adding brand new content as well. If you are using RPC’s then most likely you are a visual person. AVAIL’s easy-to-use interface makes finding ALL of your content faster. To see a full list of AVAIL features visit the AVAIL website.

See the video below to hear more from CEO Randall Stevens about the relationship between AVAIL, ArchVision and what the future holds for both companies.


Instructions

1. If you haven’t already downloaded AVAIL, do so here. If you already have a version of AVAIL, you will need to make sure you are using version 3.4.3 or above. You can check your version in AVAIL by clicking the Settings button .

2. Once you download and register AVAIL, launch Dashboard.

3. Click on the Browse Channels button  in AVAIL.

4. Click on the Marketplace tab, then click the “+” to subscribe to the RPC | All Access Channel.

5. Go back to your Channels    and find the RPC | All Access Channel in your list of Channels.

6. Simply click each piece of content to download.

 

Bar_Restaurant clutter in AVAIL

Family and Detail Warehouse (F+DW)

When we launched Detail Warehouse in late 2015 our goal was to provide an extensive collection of native-built Revit details perfect for starting or bolstering your own internal library. The library boasts over 27,500 door, foundation, roof and window details across 50 sub-categories. Also included in the collection are nearly 1000 ready-to-use Revit Components which have been very popular.

The popularity of the components prompted us to continue to add additional Revit Families throughout 2016 including wood screws and sleeve anchors, concrete anchors and a comprehensive collection of AISC Steel Shapes improving over the OOTB (out of the box) content that ships with Revit.

We’re expanding the overall mission of Detail Warehouse to be the preeminent stock library of native-built non-manufacturer-specific Revit families, components and details. As such we’re changing the name to Family and Detail Warehouse (F+DW). When we think of how many times the same families are modeled over and over and over around the world it becomes clear that a great stock library that’s growing and improving would be a great service to the industry. With a Family and Detail Warehouse subscription you get access to just that, a collection of the most popular native-built families and details, ready-to-use or edit to supplement your needs.

Casework

The first major category we’ve tackled is Casework. Included in your F+DW subscription are dozens of casework families driven by thousands of Types providing you with the most extensive commercial collection of casework available. The casework library alone will save your team hundreds of hours should you opt to produce them yourself. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you! We’re not stopping there. An extensive collection of Doors is in production. We’d love to hear what you think would be helpful.

AVAIL

As you may already know the F+DW library is managed and delivered through our sister company platform AVAIL. AVAIL is an enterprise content & workflow management platform designed to help AECO firms organize, manage and deliver content within their organization. You can learn more about AVAIL at getavail.com.

F+DW subscribers can now take advantage of new advanced workflow features in AVAIL. With an AVAIL license you can now control distribution of F+DW “Channels” of content across your organization, control download access, and allow users to request Families by “Flagging” them which notifies admins of the request. The F+DW library of content comes pre-tagged within AVAIL making it easy to find the content you need quickly.

We hope you’ll find the expanded mission of the Family and Detail Warehouse and the AVAIL content & workflow management platform a welcomed addition to the industry and your firms ongoing content strategy.

Publish your own 3D+ RPCs!

Quite a while in the making, we’ve launched a new RPC Creator service that supports the creation of what we refer to as 3D+ RPCs. A 3D+ RPC means the RPC contains both texture and underlying geometry data. You’ve been experiencing 3D+ RPCs in the form of the RPC Automobiles we’ve been publishing for many years. More recently we began partnering with companies like AXYZ Design to publish their incredible people models as 3D+ RPCs. This new RPC Creator service is still in beta and can be found at labs.archvision.com.

Now you can convert your own geometric models into RPCs ready to place in your favorite modeling/visualization app such as Revit!

In order to make your own 3D+ RPCs using the new service you need to supply 3 essential pieces of information 1) geometry in the .obj format, 2) a master texture as a .jpg or .png, and 3) a 124 x 98 pixel preview image. That’s all you need. Upload each to the service and you’re handed back an RPC file in less than a minute.

Why?

In the early days of ArchVision we were in the visualization services business. One of the lessons I learned was that if you’re going for realism, the best visualizations were the ones with an inordinate amount of “detail”. For interior visualizations it was a very “inward” challenge in providing all the “stuff” other than the building itself that were needed to make the scene come alive and look “real”. For exterior scenes it was the opposite; you’d model the hell out of your building but when it came to visualizing it creating the “rest of the world” around it became a headache. Enter RPCs. RPC People were a great addition to those interiors. RPC Trees were great for creating a boundary for that exterior world (or hiding mediocre architecture 🙂 ) and RPC Automobiles helped fill those parking lots.

RPCs have some unique characteristics that have made them a popular way to add entourage and other “stuff” to your designs and improving your visualizations.

1) Convenient – with an RPC you never get a “missing texture” warning. All of the data required to render are included in the .rpc file.

2) Fast – RPCs can be optimized to carry just the right amount of geometry and texture data to make your visualizations standout without bogging down your model. In some implementation such as 3dsMax, textures contained within RPCs dynamically scale themselves when loaded which optimizes the memory footprint required to load those RPCs (ie. you can efficiently stuff more into your scene)

3) Temporal – Context matters but has always been difficult in content creation. With the new 3D+ RPC Creator service you can designate separate geometry (referred to as the “Icon”) which is placed in the model and “swapped” out at render time with the full Mesh contained in the RPC. Internally we refer to these as the “Preview Mesh” and the “Render Mesh”. This dynamic swapping of data helps optimize what you see and when you see it and challenges the “one model suits all needs” mindset of content creation. This can be especially important in workflows like Revit > Visualization where the underlying model is important for one purpose (eg. documentation) but not well suited for another (eg. visualization)

4) Versatile – RPCs are supported by the world’s leading modeling and visualization platforms: Revit, 3dsMax, Autocad, Civil3D, SketchUp, FormZ, Modo, Rhino, Photoshop and more. Publish your content as an RPC and it’s ready-to-use on any of those platforms.

We look forward to hearing your feedback and seeing your results. You can even share your RPCs with the rest of the community in Stash!

Randall

DETAIL WAREHOUSE, AVAIL & PANOPLY

0014668DETAIL WAREHOUSE

ArchVision has just released a new content subscription service called DETAIL WAREHOUSE. The DETAIL WAREHOUSE provides access to over 27,500 native Revit Drafting Views designed to kick-start or supplement your in-house Revit standards library. The collection is comprised of foundation, door, window and roof details representing 50 sub-categories of construction details. In addition, you’ll also have access to nearly 1000 Revit Components.

The goal of DETAIL WAREHOUSE is to provide you with an efficient starting point and ongoing complement to your own internal library. For only $499 per year you can access the entire reference library drawing on what you need, when you need it. Learn more at DETAIL WAREHOUSE.

AVAIL

DW_AVAIL_ChannelsBesides offering the most extensive collection of Revit Drafting Views available anywhere, access to the DETAIL WAREHOUSE is provided via ArchVision’s innovative new content management platform called AVAIL. Through AVAIL, DETAIL WAREHOUSE subscribers can access foundation, door, window and roof “Channels” and search and download content closely matching their needs. A Properties Panel presents high-resolution previews of each Drafting View. AVAIL let’s users browse or search the content in a Channel but also offers an innovative new way to find content we call “Panoply”.

PANOPLY

As you can imagine the terms and tags used to describe the construction details found in DETAIL WAREHOUSE can be complex making traditional search necessarily complicated. AVAIL solves that problem using our proprietary filtering technology called “Panoply”. At the core of Panoply is a concept we refer to as “contextual filtering”; allowing you to narrow the content being displayed in each Channel based on a pre-curated sets of relevant tags. As tags are selected Panoply reduces the relevant selection set providing you with a “dynamic path” of sorts for locating content.

Panoply is something you have to experience to appreciate. With just a few button clicks you can filter through thousands of pieces of content. AVAIL, with it’s integrated Panoply technology, is being developed to provide you with a robust solution for managing, publishing, and accessing content on your network in a user-friendly way. I refer to it as making content “human” again. No more archaic filename abbreviations or ridiculous file folder structures to stand in between you and the content you need. The centralized content on your network will be liberated, no longer the victim of traditional Windows file folders. We’ll be talking more about AVAIL and Panoply in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to learn more about AVAIL and be notified when updates are available visit avail.archvision.com.

DW_AVAIL_Panoply

BCS / RTC Post Event Review

Whew… Blog PostArchVision was busy in July. Wednesday before last marked the inaugural Building Content Summit (BCS). The BCS was the day before the Revit Technology Conference (RTC) which was held in Washington, DC. I acted as co-chair for the BCS along with Parley Burnett of InView Labs (makers of Unifi). What an event!

The goal was to bring 50-100 manufacturers, arch firm content managers and software/service providers to talk about the ins and outs of “BIM Content”. We ended up with 104 attendees which read like a who’s who in the world of BIM from Anderson Windows, CertainTeed, Victaulic, Haworth, Autodesk, and Bentley to AECOM, HDR Architecture and Perkins + Will. We had a full day of speakers and small-group round-table discussions mapping out the many issues left to resolve in the BIM content world. Follow @rtcbcs for post-event info and plans for the next Building Content Summit. The event website can be found at http://www.rtcevents.com/bcs2015/.

So why was I involved? For those that hung around for the Revit Technology Conference and stopped by the ArchVision | Chaos Group | Cl3ver | IrisVR booth you got a sneak peak of why. Not only does ArchVision’s RPC file format and underlying delivery platform have an important role to play in the BIM ecosystem but we’re on our way to expanding our presence in the BIM world with some important new products.

First will be an exciting new BIM content collection called DETAIL WAREHOUSE. In the coming weeks ArchVision will release a library of ~25,000 (yes, you read that correctly) natively-built Revit Drafting Views of common, light-commercial building details (roofs, windows, doors and foundations). This subscription product will give you access to the industry’s most extensive collection of details. In addition to the details will be approximately 1000 new Revit Components. The combination provides a great way to start your Revit Standards library or augment your existing collection. Watch detailwarehouse.archvision.com for more info.

The big news from last week was the sneak peek at AVAIL, our game-changing content management platform. AVAIL is a content-agnostic, simple way to index the content on your WAN and consume it in new ways. AVAIL can be used to organize your company’s internal Revit Standards Library, inbound manufacturer content, your visualization group’s materials and textures, your marketing departments project photos and PDF cut-sheets and more! If you missed seeing it at RTC stay tuned for more details. All delivered through a modern, easy-to-use desktop application interface that finally makes finding and using your firms “content” a pleasure, not the nightmare you’ve had to endure trying to work with Windows file folders for managing content. Sound interesting? Watch avail.archvision.com for more details.

Summer of Content

U_K5Wi1sI’m pleased to announce that ArchVision is a Silver Sponsor of the 2015 Revit Technology Conference (RTC) in both North America and Europe where we’ll be showcasing some of our newest developments in late July (Washington, DC USA) and October (Budapest, Hungary).

Not content (see what I did there) with resting on our laurels the team at ArchVision has been working feverishly on some exciting new developments.

RPC

On the RPC front we’ll soon have a new update for Entourage Workshop that includes Autodesk Cloud Rendering support, support for RPC Planting families, and a new option for making 2D RPC geometry face the camera in Revit.

2.4 v-ray_for_ants_2 If you were in Atlanta last month for the AIA annual convention and expo I’m sure you were as blown away as I was at Chaos Groups preview of VRay for Revit.  Our teams have been working together closely to make sure your RPCs flow through seamlessly.  They do!  Take a look at these images.  Your RPCs in Revit have never looked better than when they’re rendered with VRay.  If you missed AIA don’t miss RTC so you can see it for yourself!

If you haven’t stopped by the recently relaunched ArchVision Labs site you may have missed the news that we’ve been working on an RPC Plug-in for Sketchup!  Been a long time coming but it was worth the wait.  There are still a few things to get sorted out but we’ll be releasing this to existing customers for beta testing soon.  We’ve also begun working with 3rd party Sketchup rendering partners such as Podium and VRay to ensure smooth workflows.

It’s in the Details…

We’re working to expand our content offering beyond RPC.  First will be a collection of approximately 1,000 Revit Components.  The Component Warehouse will be the first “Channel” of non-RPC content available leveraging a new content platform we’ve been developing (more on this soon).  The components are easily browsed or searched.

Need Revit Drafting Views?  Detail Warehouse is a subscription “Channel” where a small yearly fee gains you access to a library of tens of thousands of Revit Drafting Views ready to customize to your particular needs.  The Detail Warehouse is a great way to get your own standards library off the ground or augment your existing library.

If you’re already registered for RTC be sure to stop by our booth on the exhibit floor to see all of these exciting new developments.  It’s not too late!  You can still register for RTC and be sure to register for our class: “Take Control of Your Assets (including Families and Drafting Views) – an RTC Lab!

Pro-Viz Texture Collections Now Available in ArchVision RPC Format

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ArchVision (Lexington, Kentucky USA) and 3dRender (Sheffield, UK) are pleased to announce a new partnership.  Effective immediately 3dRender’s Pro-Viz People collections now include RPC versions of the content.   The Pro-Viz People collections make available 500 high quality people textures as PNG, JPEG and now RPC, perfect for enhancing architectural renderings.

As RPC, users will experience a much simplified workflow in Revit, 3ds Max, Autocad, Microstation, FormZ, Rhino, Modo and Photoshop.  RPC enables one-click placement and drag & drop into select applications simplifying the workflow by removing the tedious process of creating native geometry and materials traditionally needed to get PNG & JPEG formatted textures into 3d models.

“We’re excited to partner with 3dRender on this new initiative to make the world’s best architectural entourage available as RPCs” said Randall Stevens, CEO of ArchVision.  “Having Pro-Viz People textures in the RPC file format will be a welcomed addition for thousands of RPC customers around the world.”provizcomplete500

The RPC platform not only enables dramatically simplified workflows for placing and managing architectural entourage in 3d models but also provides search & tagging of content inside ArchVision Dashboard, mass editing and placement tools, cloud rendering support and new non-photorealistic stylization of content inside Autodesk Revit via Entourage Workshop. The Pro-Viz RPCs will appear, pre-tagged, within ArchVision Dashboard for ease of organization and search.

“Publishing our extensive architectural texture collections as RPC makes our customers investment more valuable.  Features such as ArchVision’s new Entourage Workshop for Revit bring an entirely new capability to our collections” said Tim Barrett, Owner at 3dRender Ltd.

Use of the RPC platform requires a separate license available at archvision.com.  The Pro-Viz collections including the new RPC format are available for purchase at 3dRender.co.uk and at archvision.com.


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About ArchVision Inc.

ArchVision’s mission is to improve design modeling and visualization with content and content management software solutions. We do that in several ways. Our RPC (Rich Photorealistic Content) technology provides render-friendly, image-based architectural entourage primarily in the form of people, tree & plant, and automobile content to customers around the world. RPC was selected by Autodesk as the default tree & planting solution that ships with Revit.  ArchVision’s Dashboard content management platform provides content organization and search tools for managing vast amounts of design content as well as plug-in and license management.

RPC has become the defacto-standard solution for managing architectural entourage with support for the leading modeling and visualization platforms and solutions including Autodesk Autocad, Autodesk Revit, Autodesk 3ds Max, Bentley Microstation, Robert McNeel & Associates Rhino 3D, The Foundry Modo, Autodessys FormZ, Chaos Group V-Ray, Accurender nXT and Adobe Photoshop.

For additional company or product information or to inquire about the RPC SDK, contact ArchVision at +1 859.252.3118 or email support@archvision.com.

About 3dRender Ltd

3dRender Ltd is the creator and distributor of Pro-Viz(TM) 3D texture and image entourage products, designed specifically for use in high-end architectural visualization.

Our Pro-Viz(TM) products are used by thousands of CG artists worldwide, along with many of the industry’s leading architects and visualization studios, including Foster+Partners, Red-Vertex, Atkins Global, WZMH Architects, VisualWorks, LAUBlab KG (the creators of VRAYforC4D) & many others.

The Power of Universal Tags

We’ve been hard at work on the ability to easily convert 2D textures into RPC and now have a new Dashboard-integrated RPC Creator tool in widespread use. Converting your PNG and TIFF cutouts into RPC is as easy as dragging and dropping those alpha-masked images onto the Drop Zone within the RPC Creator. Add a Name and Height and an RPC is generated complete with a custom icon and preview. As an RPC you’ll find many advantages over the original PNG or TIFF format including automatic Sketchup-style “Face Me” capabilities within applications like 3ds Max, Revit and Autocad. For those of you who have gone through the process of trying to get your 2D cutouts to play nicely in those apps you know how many steps it takes to accomplish what should be a simple task. RPC makes that pain go away.

We’re also introducing the first of a series of organizational tools designed to make finding the right content easy. Accompanying the RPC Creator is a new Tag Editor. The Tag Editor lets you add Tags (metadata) to the RPCs you create. These Tags make content searchable within Dashboard. We’re also introducing a visual tag-cloud feature called Filters that presents the Tags that have been added to content in an easy-to-navigate visual interface. Click on a Tag or Tags and quickly filter to the content you need.

Filters

As we began working on these new features we thought about how best to help you organize and make use of your content. We made several observations:

Observation #1: Everyone knows tagging can be a powerful organizing tool but there’s one big problem… nobody wants to spend time tagging things.

Observation #2: A lot of the content you use is also being used by other people around the world.

So why not take advantage of the fact that the same content is in use across the globe and let Tags automatically follow the same content? With Dashboard we have the ability to do just that! We’re excited to introduce a concept we call Universal Tags. Here’s how it works. We don’t share your content. In fact, your content never has to leave your local environment for Universal Tags to work. We create a unique identifier for each piece of content and use that to track the Tags associated with the content. The effect is that when you introduce a piece of content into your own environment that has been viewed in Dashboard by someone else, we essentially get an up-vote  for common Tags that have been associated with that content. After a specified number of up-votes the Tags can be converted to public tags.  If no one has added tags or you’re the first to introduce the content to Dashboard you’ll have to add your own tags. It’s a powerful network effect, as tags are added by one person everyone benefits!

As you know, information is only as useful as it is accurate. So it’s up to you to add meaningful tags. The Tag Editor will let you remove Tags that you don’t find useful and we use those as votes as to the value of that Tag to others.  We also use this concept to automatically provide a Name and Height to RPCs during the RPC Creation process so assigning a descriptive name and accurate height helps everyone.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these new features.

Dashboard 2.1 Adds Viewport Mode and Channel Filters

A new version (2.1.5) of Dashboard has just released that includes a couple of significant features we think you’ll enjoy.  You can download the latest installer at https://archvision.com/dashboard/download.
 
Viewport
 
Viewport for Dashboard is a new 3D viewing mode that lets you preview your RPCs in full 3D.  For 2D motion RPCs (2.5D) it will also let you scrub through the animation sequence with a simple time slider.
 
Viewport_mode
 
Besides being a great new RPC preview tool Viewport for Dashboard can drastically improve your work flow for using RPCs in Photoshop.  If the name Viewport sounds familiar it might be because you’ve been using the RPC Viewport plug-in for Photoshop.  That plug-in allows you to open and view RPCs directly in Photoshop, choose a viewing angle, and open the chosen view onto a new layer.  Sounds ok but for anybody whose used the tool to place lots of RPCs the process can be tedious.  When you use the Viewport plug-in directly in Photoshop it has to close each time in order to place the content on a new layer meaning you have to go back into the menu to initiate it each time.  Viewport for Dashboard replaces that workflow.
 
Now when you preview an RPC directly in Dashboard using the new Viewport viewing mode you can choose your viewing angle and click the Render button.  A small thumbnail will appear just below the Render button that you can then drag & drop directly into Photoshop.  If you’re using Photoshop CS5 or above the new rendered view of your RPC will be placed on a new layer as a Smart Object that you can scale and place within your scene.
 
We think you’ll find this new work-flow to be a huge time saver when using your RPCs in Photoshop.  Hopefully you’ll love us for it rather than cursing us for not having it sooner!
 
Filters
 
We’re continuing to roll in expanded features to the core of Dashboard.  With this new release you’ll see the addition of Filters at the bottom of the browser.  
 
Filters_1
 
The idea is to take meta data associated with content and use it as a Tag Cloud.  That Tag Cloud can then be used to filter content being viewed in each Channel.  For example, if you click on the People Channel and open the Filters panel you’ll see all of the Tags currently associated with the content in that Channel.  The Tag Cloud will by default sort by Popularity of the tag but you can also choose to display them alphabetically.  Clicking on one of the Tags will filter the content within that Channel to show only those RPCs that have that Tag.  Pretty simple.  Choose an additional tag from the cloud and you’re performing a boolean “and” search.  Clicking on “female” and “sitting” will show you only the RPCs of sitting females. There’s also a new “local only” option on the Filter bar that lets you choose to see only content that resides locally (ie. already downloaded).

 
Give it a try! It can be a huge time saver.  We believe the concept of filtering rather than explicit searches provides you with an alternative quick way to drill down to just the right content in an intuitive, visual interface.  
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