Thursday, February 28, 2013

Tower repeater fun continued…

BTW you are not limited to just producing boring square towers. Once you have the framework of the repeater working, you can use different types of adaptive component blocks to form the floor plate itself.

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Here I have created a T shape unit, which can be flexed & adjusted as needed, you could easily consider creating other forms as well.

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Tower repeater fun

 

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I was wondering whether there was any merit in using the new 2013 repeater functionality to create massing blocks, especially for towers or buildings when doing master planning.

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Specifically you might want to show floor plates, but don’t want to go to the extent of using the mass floor functionality. Well I came up with this, it may have some use, if nothing else its a good demonstration of the repeater functionality in Revit 2013.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Common sense prevails

I don’t need to say too much in this blog post as this reply to the Revitforum explains everything we need to know.

http://www.revitforum.org/out-there/12753-revitforum-org-domain-13.html#post78989

I am positive somebody senior within the Big A saw sense & made a great leadership call. I don’t know who that was, but I would like to say thank you. Now lets focus on the positives & get this industry moving forward to a collaborative way of thinking by using new technology. :-)

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

A fuss over a five letter word….

I consider myself a reasonable fair person. In fact one of my biggest bug bears relates to fairness. Treat people fairly & typically I have learnt you get a lot in return. Some may say I’m a soft touch & maybe not hard enough, but I care little, if I can sleep at night, and then I am happy. So it saddens me to actually have to write this blog post. It relates to the fact that Autodesk Legal are now after the domain name of Revitforum.

http://www.revitforum.org/out-there/12753-revitforum-org-domain.html

As many of you know, I am passionate about the Revit technology. I have built my career & to some extent my reputation, for what that’s worth, on the use of Revit & the ability to share this passion with many others. The technology excites me, I live it, I breath it; am I best Revit user out there? No way! But I have helped write books, helped setup User groups, the list is endless. I would reckon I have given away more than I have got in return. But once again, I care little as I can sleep at night in the knowledge that my passion for this technology has somehow rubbed off on others. So to now hear that Autodesk Legal are now targeting a forum which has been setup to share the knowledge with others because it uses the word “Revit” in the domain is beyond comprehension. Trust me, I understand why Autodesk want to protect the Revit brand name, but this is beyond a joke. Now if you look at say Apple, there are hundreds of blogs & websites that use the word Apple & Mac; I don’t see Apple rushing around to steal back those domain names. When are Autodesk Legal going to recognise that sites like the Revitforum provide a quality service to its members through the use of knowledge sharing. I would even say that somebody needs to actually explain to the said Legal department, that the AEC industry now considers Revit as the tool of choice for delivering Building Information Models. Fundamental to BIM is a process which requires collaboration & knowledge sharing; that’s not me saying this, but industry thought leaders like Patrick McCleamy & many others who will remain nameless. So this Legal team wants to then target an industry which is trying to move forward & make a change by being disruptive just to protect the a name. If you actually stand back & think about this, its total madness. SO instead alienate the customer base who are actually your best spokespeople, just because of a five letter word. Whatever next? Lets hope some senior figure within the big A looks at this & recognises how “silly” this actually is.

Friday, February 08, 2013

More screen space please

cuh19501

I have a Macbook Pro 15” with a high resolution screen which I have connected to an AOC 23” IPS monitor. But I find that even though the monitor & the Macbook provide a good combined screen real estate, you can never have enough! Whilst I would love to go out & purchase a bigger screen, like many we all have budgets. I had a Dell 21” LCD monitor kicking around which was collecting dust. One annoying thing about the Macbooks (not the retina) is you are limited on the number of screens you can connect. So I did some investigation. It seems that there are a number of good USB to VGA/DVI connectors now on the market, but what I wasn’t sure about was whether the frame rate of these devices would work for tools like Revit. It also seems that many of them are Windows only. So in the end I went for this one from a company called Digital Climax (slightly dubious name), but overall an excellent solution.

http://www.climaxdigital.co.uk/epages/BT3449.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT3449/Products/111174

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It was straight forward to connect up the monitor after installing the drivers. It offers drivers for mac or windows & overall it works very well indeed. You notice a slight lag, but nothing which would really annoy you. If you like twitter feeds & email on screen all the time, then this is a superb option, Youtube & dvd play back is not so good, but this shouldn’t put you off. Be aware though, you will find that there are various USB to VGA/DVI adapters on the market, but make sure that if you need the flexibility of both platforms, mac & pc, they offer drivers which can support both these platforms. I noticed a number of USB 3 to VGA/DVI adapters which would provide better bandwidth but these were Windows only. Overall, a highly recommended solution, especially if you are a laptop user & you need to expand you desktop.

Thursday, February 07, 2013

FormIT– focus

A nice tip when working in FormIT 2.0 is the ability to double tap two fingers on the screen & the model zoom to fit the screen.