Eric is a Virtual Construction drafter with Next Electric. Based out of Waukesha, WI, Eric and his team either add-on to or create building plans from the ground up, focusing on digitally adding electric finishes. Normally started after the major construction is underway, Eric is able to install the items virtually first to see exactly how they will fit with the schematics.
Transcript
>> My name is Eric Wagner. And I am a virtual construction specialist. So what I do is I made drawings for any kind of building project for large-scale building projects. And I do 3-D modeling for those buildings as well. We'll get engineer drawings from actual engineers. They'll sign off on something. And at that point in time, we'll put in -- they'll have a model made up and then we'll add our stuff to that. Other times, we do design, build, work which is what I do a lot of. And that is creating the stuff that we work with from scratch. We decide how many outlets, lights, that kind of stuff. So I mostly work in electrical work. A good recent one we had was a big eight-story medical building that we just almost completed. So virtual construction, we ended up getting an architectural model already built, all eight stories, nine stories. It's all pre-done, glass, walls, ceilings, everything like that is put in. And then our job was to make sure all the piping that you don't see above the ceiling all works together. We have fire protection, HVAC, mechanical, medical gases sometimes, electrical piping. That's a lot of stuff going through there. And so what we did on this project, which was something new, was we ended up modeling all of it before we put it in. And what that did is that allowed us to put our stuff up before other trades come up. Usually you have to put in the big HVAC ductwork first. This allowed us to do our stuff first and to move quicker because those guys were still working on getting it fabricated. Right now, we mainly use Revit. Revit is the main 3-D modeling tool that's used by most companies. That's used to draw, design, place items. One of the other ones that we use is a program called Navisworks. That is a great program. You take it from Revit. It puts it into another three-dimensional model. You put it into this program. And the other trades but theirs in an and it offers clash detection which means it'll tell you -- it'll analyze the entire project and it'll tell you where pipes are meeting up so then people get on the phone and you can work out -- I'm going high. I'm going this way. I'm going to move around. And then you can get it all done ahead of time which is why we were able to work ahead of everybody.
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