I had an email from Ben Bishop from Ideate yesterday to say they have released an updated version of their successful Ideate Explorer Application for Revit 2011. If you haven’t seen Ideate explorer take a look here….
http://www.ideateexplorer.com/index.php
A trial version can be downloaded from:-
http://www.ideateexplorer.com/trial.php
By far the coolest feature is the ability to export your saved searches to Microsoft Excel.
I have been receiving this message a lot when running Revit 2011 on a Dell Latitude with 8gigs of ram, Windows & (64bit) and a Nvidia v3100m graphics card.
What normally happens, is that I will be happily working away in Revit 2011 then suddenly the screen with go black; a little disconcerting; next a message box will appear in the bottom left had corner of the screen with the above message. Revit doesn’t crash, but you do notice that the graphics will be rather sluggish. A save and restart of Revit resolves the problem. It would seem that this crash is as intended, even though very annoying, this statement refers to something called a TDR. A TDR or Timeout Detection and Recovery is a feature that attempts to detect problematic situations and recover to a functional desktop automatically. This feature first appeared in Windows Vista, but it tries to keep the OS going without freezing the PC and forcing a restart.
One issue is that this particularly laptop does not have certified graphic card drivers, it certainly doesn't appear on the Autodesk graphic card list. I have tried drivers from the Nvidia website, but this hasn’t helped. So after a bit of digging around on the internet last night, it was suggested that if you turned off the Windows 7 icandy and actually run in Windows classic mode it would stop the issue. I have been trying this for the 12 hours now and so far……the issue hasn’t returned.
My copy of Mastering Revit Architecture 2011 arrived this morning ( a big thanks to James, Eddie and Phil as well as Peter at Wileys). If you have not seen this book and you are new or even a seasoned Revit user, you need this book! What Eddie, Phil and James have included in terms of depth and breath of knowledge makes it an essential book to have on your desk. What makes this book even more important is that it is Official Autodesk Training material and it will prepare you for everything you need to undertake the Autodesk Certified Associate and Professional level exams.
James approached me a few months back to contribute to this publication and has been a honour to be able to do so, to what is by far the best Revit book ever. Don’t believe me? Get a copy, you will not be disappointed. :-)
A few months back I looked at how to create a helix in Revit 2010 without the need of any heavy math. Zach Krone and BIM troublemaker did similar examples on there blogs with varying degrees of complexity.
So I figured the other day that there must be a smarter way to do this in Revit 2011 with the new adaptive component tool. Take a look at the youtube Video for more info.
With a bit of messing around you can end up with something like this. :-)
