This is “the first step of many” for the startup aiming to bring AEC software into the 21st century.
Motif, the BIM software startup that emerged from stealth in January with $46 million in funding, has launched its first product: a cloud-based collaboration platform for engineers and architects.
The platform, which is accessed through a web browser, provides a whiteboard-like workspace for those in the AEC industry. Users can bring in text and images, write and sketch, add comments, and collaborate in real time on an infinite canvas.
The twist is that Motif goes beyond 2D whiteboarding. Users can also bring in 3D BIM models, annotating them in all dimensions. With bidirectional plugins for Revit and Rhino, the models stay up to date, and comments made in Motif go back to the source.
Here’s a look at how Motif’s new platform works, why it’s far from finished and how the startup is attempting to modernize BIM software.
Motif’s first step of many
When Motif announced itself to the world earlier this year, it came out swinging.
“[T]he AEC industry is using 20th century tools to design 21st century buildings,” wrote Motif CEO Amar Hanspal, formerly co-CEO and chief product officer at Autodesk, in a blog post titled The Motif Vision.
“Our mission is to revolutionize building design by merging geometry, cloud services, and machine learning to enable a dynamic, collaborative, and intelligent process,” Hanspal added.
That mission, combined with the fact that Motif’s leadership team consists entirely of Autodesk veterans, suggested that the company was gunning for the BIM heavyweight, Autodesk Revit. Now that Motif has officially launched its platform, it’s clear that a full-featured Revit alternative is still a ways away.
“This is the first step out of many,” Matt Jezyk, vice president of product at Motif, told Engineering.com.
Motif remains focused on Hanspal’s vision, but there are two reasons to take it slow, according to Jezyk. One, it’s not easy to spin up a full-featured BIM platform (who knew?). Two, even if Motif could pull a Revit out of its hat, it would take time for users to switch over.
“We wanted to come at this problem a little bit differently and solve for the collaboration part first, and then add in more and more of the modeling capabilities,” Jezyk said.
Motif sees collaboration as an underserved part of the BIM market. Jezyk, a trained architect, has seen firsthand the hoops his peers jump through to communicate their ideas. “It’s interesting and somewhat confounding to me,” he said, “the number of times that I see people working on basically graphic design problems.” Why should an engineer with a master’s degree waste time messing around in Adobe InDesign?
Jezyk pointed out that modern collaboration tools like Miro, Mural and Figma are changing how people work together and what they expect from their software. Motif wants to meet those expectations for the AEC industry.
“The first thing that we’re coming to market with is focused on collaborating and reviewing and collecting information from the sources where people are working today,” Jezyk said.
A collaboration platform for BIM users
Motif’s real differentiator for engineers and architects is its compatibility with 3D data. The platform supports common 3D file formats including OBJ and glTF, so users can drag and drop 3D models as easily as they can a PDF or picture.
And if those 3D models come from Revit or Rhino, even better. Motif has developed plugins for those programs to create a real time link with Motif. A model created in Revit, for example, will retain all of its properties in Motif and stay up-to-date as changes are made in Revit. The link goes both ways: Comments added in Motif will propagate back to Revit.
Right now, Motif users can only view and mark up the data from Revit or Rhino. They can’t modify the geometry or otherwise change the data. Their comments are sent back to Rhino or Revit, but no other annotations make the journey. Jezyk says these limitations are deliberate.
“We can technically push information back into Revit and change things too,” Jezyk said. “But we’re trying to be very intentional on that to support user workflows… right now, the workflow that people seem to expect is sort of a one-way stream.”
In addition to Revit and Rhino, Jezyk said Motif plans to develop plugins for AutoCAD, SketchUp, Grasshopper and Dynamo.
Motif also has a feature called Frames, which allows users to create presentations directly on the web platform. Jezyk compares it to PowerPoint slides, though he emphasized that the info in Frames stays up to date as models, renders or other data changes.
Motif particularly focused on its user interface, aiming for a modern UI that looks simple but doesn’t sacrifice sophistication.
“You don’t have to be an advanced parametric design person or a coder to figure this stuff out,” Jezyk said. “You can hand this to a high level executive and they could still use these tools, but it’s sufficiently powerful enough to work for the technical staff as well.”
How to access the Motif platform
Motif’s BIM collaboration platform is now available, and Jezyk says it already has paying customers among a stable of early adopters that helped guide the platform’s development. Some of those early adopters are DLR Group, Perkins&Will, Heatherwick Studio and the Nordic Office of Architecture.
If you’re interested in trying it out, for now you’ll have to contact Motif. Later this year you’ll be able to subscribe directly through the company’s website, though Motif is still determining plan and pricing details.
Jezyk suggested that Motif will embrace a freemium model, in which a limited version of the software will be free and additional functionality will be doled out in various subscription tiers. “It’ll be comparable to some of the other online tools that are out there today,” Jezyk said.
Motif, as its CEO proclaimed, wants to revolutionize building design. This new platform may be the first step of many, but if it makes it easier for building designers to work together, then it’s a step in the right direction.
