Friday, June 27, 2008

10 Reasons to use Revit

I received this email the other day from a fellow Revit user, entitled "Reasons to use Revit". You may have seen some of the images before, some are spoof, others are real but I thought it worth sharing. If anyone ever questions why you using Revit, show them these beauties, ( cheers Chris)  it certainly made me smile. :-)

1. Camera views????

1 

2. Clash detection.......

2

3. Parametric's gone wrong

4

4. A new form of fire escape

5

5. Escalators for the vertically challenged

6

6. When parametric change fails to deliver...

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7. Reduce your carbon footprint; borrow light!

9

8. No guests allowed

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9. Combating the Credit crunch

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10. A Classic!!!!!

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

Autodesk Acquire Ecotect!!!!

EcoExample_VisPage_400

It would seem that Autodesk has acquired ECOTECT, which is great news for those of us using Revit. Details on the acquisition can be found here....

http://pressreleases.autodesk.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=433%3C%2Ftd%3E

http://www.squ1.com/store/academic

ECOTECT is an industry leading building analysis program that allows designers to work easily in 3D and apply all the tools necessary for an energy efficient and sustainable future. If you want to know more about there product range go to http://www.squ1.com/.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Archicad gets multi-core support

Respect to the Archicad team for making the product support multi-core processors!!!!

http://www.graphisoft.com/products/archicad/ac12/

Not that I'm a big Archicad fan, I personally found it a rather awkward application to drive, I'm sure that others with argue against this. :-) But the point I'm trying to highlight here is that the product can now support the lastest fastest multi-core processors on both the PC and MAC platform!! Common on Autodesk, we need the whole of Revit to use the "might" of our hardware not just the rendering engine.

Problems linking large DWG's?

Ok, its a fare cop! I haven't posted anything useful for sometime and I'm feeling slightly embarrassed about it.You only need to see the activities of others; for instance my fellow blogger Mr Stafford has been very, very busy. :)

Anyway, I came across this issue recently with linking large DWG's plans into Revit and I thought I'd share my findings. As many of you may know Revit is not particularly happy about having large DWG's dumped into its environment and often it will kick you in the teeth. It certainly doesn't take any prisoners! So a few weeks back I received an email from a good friend of mine saying that he was having a hell of a job linking in a very large DWG into Revit. Now he is a very experienced user so he certainly knows what he's was doing. He found that when he zoomed into the linked DWG, things seem to be jumping around. So he emailed me the DWG for me to take a look at and sure enough Revit would happily allow you to link in the DWG. However, when you tried to zoom in within the view and snap either a reference plane or linework off the DWG to allow you to place an coordinate, the view did jump around! Very bizarre... Now I had seen this behaviour before, but I thought it had been resolved in a previous release. This whole situation makes the process of sharing coordinates difficult as you can’t get the coordinates to read correctly from the linked DWG. First off I thought it was related to the Revit environment not liking the very large DWG. If you take a look at the image below you will hopefully understand the issue.

Picture1

So I decided to go back to good only AutoCAD and open up the DWG to see if I could track down the issue. What I discovered is that the DWG contained a number of blocks and one of these was the structural grid. After a quick "explode" of the blocks within the DWG (something I don't always like doing) and then a re-link, everything was fine and you could link and share the coordinates without any issues what so ever. If you take a look at the image below you will see the DWG with the exploded blocks and that you can now place coordinates and geometry.

Picture2

 

So the moral of this story is to check whether any DWG you may be linking contains blocks, because if it does you make have issues sharing coordinates or even working on the linked DWG. By the way, this issue has been reported to Autodesk, so lets hope they can resolve this annoyance in future releases.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Posting from Windows Writer Live

windows_1_img

I'm trying Windows Writer Live for the fist time. I found a reference to it on Nicholas Iyadurai excellent blog site called http://revitize.blogspot.com/. I believe he had been pointed to it by James Van http://allthingsbim.blogspot.com/ . I'll let you know how it goes, but it does look like it will give me a bit more flexibility when publishing posts.

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Phil Read moves on......

I would guess by now many of you will be aware that Phil Read has left Autodesk for pastures green. Phil has very much been the public face of Autodesk and I first meet him four years back at an Autodesk reseller event. I must admit I found him very inspirational and I am sure he has also inspired many other Revit users around the world as well. Anyone who has sat in on one of his sessions at AU will know what I mean.

So armed with his new mac book pro and iphone I expect him to be keeping Autodesk very busy as he pushes from a different direction! I also thought you’d like to know that he has also started his own blog, so it’s worth checking this out as he gives his views and thoughts on technology in Architecture. You can find the blog here….

http://architechure.blogspot.com/

In the meantime, good luck Phil and see you at AU2008 mate!

Scheduling with Conditional Statements


David Fano over at DesignReform.net has posted an excellent video tutorial on the use of conditional statements and how you may use them for scheduling. Its definitely worth checking out if your new to formula in Revit.

Revit 2009 to Max Design 2009 whitepaper

Autodesk have released a new white paper entitled "Autodesk FBX-Based Revit Architecture 2009 to Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009 Workflow2. This gives guidance for anyone considering using the two products together and how to maximise the FBX file format between the two products. You can find details here.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

IES VE-ware tool goes live

The new VE-ware tool from IES is now available for download. VE-ware is a free Building Energy and Carbon assessment tool suitable for all building types across the world. The software is designed to assess performance and benchmark your design against the Architecture 2030 challenge, providing feedback on a building energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission. The tool is very easy to use…

You start by inserting your Revit geometry data.

Define where your building is located in the world.

Define the following parameters
Building type
Construction materials
Heating and cooling system
Room types

Running a simulation gives you the following data
Energy consumption
Co2 emissions
US benchmark against the AIA 2030 challenge


If you want to know more, take a look at the IES website where you will find more details on the VE-ware tool.

http://www.iesve.com/ve-ware