Arcol simplifies building design with browser-based modeling | Hacker News Reader

Arcol simplifies building design with browser-based modeling

arcol.io

59 pointsjoeld4227 comments

This looks amazing!

I'm working on a construction project right now (not as an architect/engineer) and I can tell you right now that live collaboration is THE killer feature (your slick UI not withstanding).

If this job is anything to go by, the current state-of-the-art appears to be a single Revit model file released once a month, 10,000 excel spreadsheets and 3,000 PDFs of various versions and quality spread between Sharepoint and a Document management server.

I'm sure you've got an amazing roadmap, but it would be great to see you apply a modern take on:

- how to handle version control in a multi-user environment (endless designing is fun, but at some point you need to draw a line in the sand so that people can start work, then changes need to be highlighted for the guy on the ground swinging a hammer)

- collaboration with 3rd-parties that may have a subset of design responsibilities (e.g. HVAC, electrical - they can place things in a room, but can't adjust the dimensions of a room)

- design reviews - current state-of-the-art seems to be marking up PDFs of DWGs with comments (which the supplier completely ignores on their next revision)

I look forward to watching this product evolve!

Small typo on your Love Letter to Designers post:

"A promise we will make at Arcol is tolisten first"

Exactly! It’s great to see that this idea resonates!

We're launching Arcol today! Check it out. Modern CAD tool, built for the browser with Rust+Typescript for high performance and an elegant UX.

Check out the announce video that explains some of the ideas behind it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paul-o-carroll-38aaa1105_arco...

Feel free to post any questions and I'll do my best to answer!

Huge fan of anyone daring enough to take on Autodesk , also product is top notch design.

Thanks! We love to hear it!

As somebody outside of the industry, what's the final output of this product? I don't see doors, so I'm assuming this tool is intended to be used to rough out shapes and costs collaboratively? I totally see the utility in having a collaborative tool at those early stages. How far does Arcol go? Can it spit out blueprints?

Also, being asked to login to view the demo vid is jarring. The play button signifies a video to me, if it's a demo I'd choose a different symbol (and put it somewhere other than the center of the video).

Exactly, at this stage, the output is mainly for feasibility, presentations and communication. But we can also export models to Revit or 3D formats like GLTF to use in the next steps of the process, or for renders, etc. But we're planning to continue to add features to make it useful further down the AEC pipelines.

Good point about the play button, I'll pass that feedback along. :)

Neat, love it!

Hehe, I imagine the back-and-forth between the architects and structural/mechanical/HVAC guys will be glorious.

haha yeah! It feels like a real pain point in the industry right now. Hopefully we can make it easier for communication between design, engineering and construction.

Well done for zoning in on this problem. Many will try to solve this with a better email or kanban workflow or internal tooling. It takes some imagination to build something better. This solution looks very creative (i’m not in the industry so would not know what is the normal for this) and congrats on the launch!

Building services bow down to their structural overlords, we generally dont have a say unless we absolutely cannot squeeze duct in a given space.

Ive started work recently as a Revit MEP modeller. Id recommend your team look into a way of supporting common services models like vav/fcu/flex ducts/rect ducts, pipes, cable trays, conduit and so on.

Im not experienced enough to know if early stage mep designers will find this useful.

yeah, great idea. Eventually we'd love to get there, supporting all stages of the AEC pipeline. But the scope is so huge we can't give it the level of design attention and polish that we want if we try to do everything, so we're focused on feasibility for now and try and make a great experience for that.

Looks good!

Did a brief stint at one of your competitors and it's really cool how far browser based engineering tools have come in the years since I worked on them at Arup.

Webassembly is a blessing for that I imagine.

Looks a bit like the ThreeJS editor reskinned. Is it using ThreeJS?

It is using ThreeJS for the 3D rendering, with a custom Rust geometry kernel to generate the mesh buffers to render. The editor interface is React based.

Pretty general question, but what has your approach been for coupling ThreeJS + React w/ a Rust/Wasm kernel for mesh generation? E.g. do you have Wasm own the memory and you give ThreeJS views of the memory to upload to GPU?

We don't need to update the scene at once, so when geometry changes we rebuild the buffer and send it over to typescript, and the three.js mesh will own the buffer. By being careful about what needs to be updated, we can keep things interactive.

This is an older blog post but it covers the general idea of it: https://blog.arcol.io/parametric-geometry-engine

Currently we simply copy a slice of the heap's ArrayBuffer from WASM to JS. In the past we exposed the heap slice directly but it was technically "unsafe" (perhaps because the heap can grow), and doing a copy did not hurt performance in any measurable way.

Shouldn’t this be a launch HN/ shown HN?

Will there be a workflow? For eg. review & approvals and changing state of the final design?

We're hoping to provide tools that let firms build whatever workflows they need.

Right now, we have design options to present and compare different options and variants of scenes, and boards and comments, but we don't enforce any workflow.

Looking at how customers use these features and adding tools to enable this is definitely a big focus in the near term.

How suitable might this also be for game level design, for more vertical arena-like maps?

hmm, i've played around a bit with level design in the past and honestly Arcol wouldn't be that great a fit. I like Probuilder in Unity for that, I think the key to any good workflow is immediate changes and fast iteration, so you really want something that's pretty tightly integrated into your game engine.

It could be useful for greyboxing or even just generating some rough shapes though. We do export GLTF which is easy to get into game engines.

How does this compete with Autodesk's Revit & BIM Collaborate?

It coexists with Revit right now, and is a good place to do feasibility and early design and get instant metrics and feedback. We think it's a lot more collaborative and design friendly.

One day we'd love to take them on directly, I think there's a lot of architects out there looking for something better.

As far as collaboration features, we've built it from the ground up with collaboration in mind, so you can work with other users directly in the same scene and see their actions and updates. We've got collaborative presentation boards with views and metrics that can update live, and of course workflow features like commenting. And since it's browser based, there's not the friction of installing a desktop app, which can be significant at some orgs.

We'd love to know what you think though, give it a try and let us know what collaboration features you'd use!

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