Improved Collaboration and Performance, Optimized Drawing Workflows and Many More in the New Renga Release
The latest Renga release brings you enhancements and optimizations, and a serious piece of new functionality: improved automated calculation of structure materials, better project collaboration, optimized drawing workflows, increased application performance when working with large data.
Accurate material calculation is an important part of a designer's job. Despite the fact, that Renga provides various quantities for each model object, many entities used to remain incalculable for schedules. We are talking about layers of materials that make up walls, ceilings and roofs, and about their geometric characteristics (thickness, area, volume, etc.). We continue on developing scheduling functionality and have already implemented new quantities and ability to schedule objects included in assemblies to provide our users with the ability to schedule material layers. Which means they now can calculate all project materials. Let's have a close look at this update.
New data model entity in Renga called the "Layer" will give designers access to the geometric properties of material layers as well as to the properties of the material itself assigned to the layer.
Material layers and their quantities.
Each layer, like any other Renga object, has its own unique identifier.
And now few more words about quantities. In our previous release notes we looked at the enhancements to the quantity tool and showed you how we added new quantities to walls, floors and roofs. The attentive readers may have noticed that layers received the same quantities as the objects they belong to.
Layer quantities match the parent object quantities.
As you can see, Layer entity can provide all the required data from layered materials.
Here's a little tip for all our Renga users wanting to know how to generate total bill of materials and put together material volumes that belong to objects like columns, beams, stairs, ramps, etc., and to multi-layered objects (walls, floors, roofs). In order to do that you can use the general quantities (common to all types): gross mass and net mass, gross volume and net volume; then combine this data into one column, and generate the total bill of materials.
The resulting bill can provide both a schedule for the whole BIM model (without applying filters), and a schedule with the customized filters. For this reason we implemented Layers to the filter list.
Bill of project materials
Creating layer filter and generating schedule using the filter
You can use layer filters only in schedules, since layers are not yet BIM entities (they do not have geometry). And applying such filters in 3D View and on drawings will not work.
Our team has put a considerable amount of time and effort into implementing material layers to Renga data model. This continuing effort has resulted in the new ability to export this data to CSV format. Renga now generates a separate Layers.csv file when exporting. This tabular file contains as much model layer data as Renga schedule does.
Connecting Layers.csv to Excel
When working with CSV data, users can do scheduling in third-party spreadsheet applications and perform calculations.
Our development team added a new quantity for drawings – Number, which gives our users the ability to sort drawings by topics in the Project Explorer.
This feature will help designers to automate the process of numbering drawings.
With this new update we're making it easier to document your BIM workflows.
Project stakeholders can now document projects together
We continue on developing collaboration in Renga, and this release comes with the ability to collaborate on Project information allowing multiple users to enter and edit project data.
Collaborating on project data
Together with the development of collaboration functionality, we continue on enhancing Renga software performance to provide our users with the consistent modeling experience.
In previous Renga releases our users might have experience slow software performance when working with imported solid objects. New performance improvements to image drawing when zooming reduces time up to ten times, depending on the complexity of objects. This new improvement, for example, optimizes the performance of snaps on solids with a large number of complex curves.
We also implemented faster calculation for beam junction, which made it possible to reduce the time for opening projects with large beam systems by 2-3 times. This is possible due to the use of threaded calculation of beam node geometry.
Reusing the geometric representation of beams when exporting to IFC and solid formats will allow designers to reduce the size of the project file. This update will significantly simplify transferring and storing of information.
Another new handy functionality is ability to set the plane priority when working with them. It can be helpful when designing electrical power systems, because users can now select the plane in the view direction when placing wiring accessories. This update greatly increases modeling accuracy in the case of equipment located at the edge of surfaces.
In addition, the new release comes with the same style default settings for electrical power systems, piping and duct systems. Equipment with empty parameters will be prohibited from connecting to the system route. This feature completely reduces the chances for errors in models and schedules in cases when, for example, designer mistakenly paces in project an empty template instead of an equipment.
Renga doesn't connect default objects to the route
That's it for now, but as early as April we'll be coming with the new Renga BIM system release!
Download our full trial version of Renga right now and experience all tools and functionality that will lead you to improved project outcomes.
Authors: Irina Bryleva and Evgeniy Kiryan, Renga Software product managers.