boonedam – bim objects

 

Steve Stafford wrote a great article a few months back about quality of content & the fact its like the wild west out there! So this was pinged to me by one of our BIM coordinators this week. boonedam have started to produce Revit content.

These are actually very cool families; they are fully parametric & are of a quality is high, but here are my concerns……

• Theses families are huge!

• Level of detail is LOD 400, which is manufacturing detail, I suspect you would need a workset for these alone!
• There is no control for level of detail, so no difference between course, medium or fine.
• These are doors, so they schedule as doors, in many cases revolving doors live in curtain walls, so you will have a headache getting these into a cw system.
• They looked liked hacked families; they may have started as generic models & then been converted to doors, as they is no host wall, so when you place them they are stand alone.

• Maybe I’m being daft, but do I need all this detail? The label on the glass? Really?

• You don’t need all the profile information!

• On a positive note, they render beautifully & contain plenty of data as well as including multiply types.

Hopefully, I haven’t put you off, because as long as you are aware of these limitation, then you will be fine.If you want to try it yourself, make a request on the website. http://www.boonedam.co.uk/bim/

Bisley – Revit Content

If you ask any interior designer want they want from Revit, apart from the normal comparisons with sketchup; the second most important item is content.

With this in mind, last year my colleague Mark Pritchard and I set about a task of contacting all the main furniture suppliers we worked with to see if…..

1. they actually knew what Revit was?
2. they had Revit content or where planning to build Revit content?

It was a very interesting exercise as it highlighted a genuine knowledge gap in the industry. The BIM message may be getting out to the architects and designers, but there is a disconnect with the supply chain. Overall it was a successful exercise as we managed to highlight the importance of manufacturers content. So much so, many of these firms where going away to investigate what was required to build Revit content.

However, one particular firm stood out over and above the rest was Bisley.

http://www.bisley.com/

Bisley are manufacturers & suppliers of office storage equipment.After meeting with Gareth Evans from Bisley last year, he went away and did some research on Revit. He got Bisley to invest in Revit, he put himself on a Revit training course and started building content!

This is a comment from Gareth “I have started to draw up our pedestals and am loving using Revit over AutoCAD.”

Bisley are working on a place to post all there content and I will let you know once this has happened. In the short term, Gareth emailed me over three examples, which can be downloaded from here. If you have any comments, please feel free to post them and I will pass them on to Gareth.

Now some people are going to disagree with me, but good quality Revit content isn’t something you should have to pay for. Good quality content in my humble opinion is a marketing opportunity for the supply chain!

Content is King!!

It is often said that content is king! Although Revit comes with a bucket load of parametric content out of the box, there will be cases where you want to either create your own content or use your favourite content from other applications such as Autocad or Sketchup.

In this example I am going to show you how to use Sketchup content within your Revit families. It won’t be parametric, but it will help enhance your Revit presentation projects. A word of warning before we start, some Sketchup geometry can be rather heavy, so keep it simple and light weight. If you haven’t got a copy of Google Sketchup, you can download a free copy from the following address
http://sketchup.google.com/download.html (remember that the free version of Google Sketchup is for personnel use only :-) ).

Content can be downloaded from the following address http://sketchup.google.com/bonuspacks.html in this example I have downloaded the Component Library for People.

We are going to use one of the 2D people from Sketchup to create a silhouette for use within Revit.

Once you have Sketchup installed and the component library downloaded, start Sketchup and browser to the following locations:- C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 6\Components\People\2D Silhouettes

Open up the component called “Silhouette_Man_Hands_Pocket.skp” Save this component to a suitable location on your hard drive so that it is easily accessible from within Revit.

Next start up Revit. Then go to the File pulldown menu>new>family>Entourage.rfa This will open up the family editor with an Entourage template.

Next load your “Silhouette_Man_Hands_Pocket.skp” directly into the empty Entourage family. To do this go to the File pulldown menu>import/link/CAD formats. The Import/Link dialogue box will appear.

Make sure you have the following settings selected:- change the file type to Sketchup File SKP, positioning should be centre to centre, Layer/level colour should be set to black and white, Scaling units, set to Auto-Detect.

Import your “Silhouette_Man_Hands_Pocket.skp” into the family. You may need to be repositioned your man so that so is on the centre of the two reference lines in the family. Next go to a 3d view to make sure he has imported in correctly.

Next save the new family with a suitable name, in this instance I have just called him sketchup man.rfa.

Your newly created content is now ready to use. Load your new family into a new project. Next go to components in the Basics design bar and place your man in a plan view. If you now go to an elevation or a 3D view you will see him.

The nice thing about this approach is that the man will cast shadows when you enable shadows in a view. The man will also appear in a 3d view giving the impression of silhouette without the overhead of a complex 3d figure.

So in summary, use what ever content you like to spice up your Revit presentation projects, however choose the content with care as complex geometry will add weight to even the smallest of projects. Good Luck and enjoy. :-)