AMAALA Triple Bay Marina Yacht Club

• 43% faster BIM collaboration
• 40% faster design collaboration
• 8-month delivery vs 16-month baseline

The team utilized BEAM to transfer façade elements between Rhino and Revit during the Construction Documents (CD) and Schematic Design (SD) stages. BEAM enabled them to efficiently update and document envelope elements, which was crucial for maintaining the rapid pace of a project like the Yacht Club.

This Rhino-to-Revit bridge was especially important for AMAALA's Triple Bay Marina Yacht Club given its complex, organic geometry inspired by Red Sea cliff formations. Design teams worked across Schematic Design, Design Development, and Construction Documentation using BIM Collaborate Pro for coordination, which project leads credited with a 43% overall reduction in collaboration time and a 40% acceleration in design collaboration compared to earlier project delivery methods.

AMAALA's Triple Bay Marina Yacht Club presented a significant geometric challenge: its design, inspired by Red Sea cliff formations, relies on cantilevered terraces and curved, organic surfaces that don't translate easily into standard BIM elements. Modeling and documenting that geometry accurately, without losing design intent between the concept and construction-documentation phases, required a workflow that could move fluidly between a NURBS-based design tool and a parametric BIM platform.

The project also had to coordinate that complex geometry across multiple consultants and disciplines on a compressed schedule, with project leads noting that addressing complex geometry and coordinating with multiple consultants solely in a 2D environment would not have been suitable to meet the project's timeline.

Before establishing this Rhino-to-Revit workflow with BEAM, teams working on organic, curved geometry like AMAALA's cantilevered terraces and cliff-inspired facade typically had to choose between two imperfect options: model complex NURBS surfaces natively in Rhino and rebuild them manually in Revit for documentation, or attempt to sculpt the same curved forms directly in Revit's more limited free-form tools. Either approach risked losing geometric fidelity or adding significant rework time when the design needed to move from a design-focused environment into fabrication-ready BIM documentation.

Coordinating that handoff across multiple consultants and disciplines in a largely disconnected environment, without a unified cloud collaboration platform, would also have made it harder to keep Schematic Design, Design Development, and Construction Documentation phases aligned on a project with this level of geometric complexity and an accelerated delivery schedule.

Using BEAM to bridge Rhino and Revit gave the AMAALA Triple Bay Marina Yacht Club team a way to carry the building's cliff-inspired, cantilevered geometry from concept design into fabrication-ready construction documentation without losing design fidelity. BEAM converted complex NURBS surfaces modeled in Rhino into adaptive Revit families, preserving materials and parameters so the facade and terrace elements stayed coordinated with the rest of the BIM model across Schematic Design, Design Development, and Construction Documentation.

Combined with a broader cloud-based BIM collaboration workflow, the project team reported a 43% overall reduction in collaboration time and a 40% acceleration in design collaboration, along with a 17% time saving during design and a 28% efficiency gain in change management. The yacht club's documentation was completed in roughly 8 months, compared to an estimated 16 months using alternative software approaches.