Building Information Modeling for Masonry Committee (BIM-M)
Chair
Morgan L. Wiese (Term Ends 2026)
Mission
The purpose of the TMS BIM-M Committee will be to provide a structure for implementing and maintaining BIM for the masonry industry.
An initial task will be to assist the National Building Information Modeling for Masonry Initiative by providing input into Phase II, Project 3. The definition of this project from the “A Roadmap for Developing and Deploying Building Information Modeling (BIM) for the Masonry Industry” document is as follows:
3. Masonry Wall Model Definition – Phase II
This project is at the core of masonry BIM. Because masonry BIM is a computational model of masonry construction, and masonry walls are the fundamental assembly in masonry construction, it is critical that the data representation of the masonry wall support all of the functionality that is envisioned for BIM-M. Currently, it is simply not computationally practical for BIM software to track individual masonry units in an entire building. Therefore the masonry BIM data structure must include the definition of wall types, and must provide the means to map these wall types onto regular and irregular regions on wall surfaces. This project will develop requirements for the digital representation of masonry walls in BIM systems. This will lead to the development of masonry families, through which a set of masonry units (extracted from the data structure defined in the masonry unit project) are arrayed according to established rules to take a generic wall in BIM and represent it as a fully-described masonry wall. It is anticipated that these walls will be represented in different levels of detail depending on the needs of the BIM user. For example, in early stages of design and on large-scale buildings, walls will be represented as regions without populated masonry units (wireframe mode). As more detail is required, these regions will be populated as masonry units represented as 2-D polygons, and finally as full 3-D photorealistic rending with masonry units modeled as solids. In addition, the wall definition must include the propagation of masonry units in various bonding pattern with modular coordination of masonry veneer and backup systems.