Autodesk Licensing and Computer Virtualization

Good information & insight from Anthony Hauck on Autodesk Licensing & Computer Virtualization.

http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/my_weblog/2014/09/licensing-and-virtualization.html

Autodesk 3ds team looking for Revit Users interested or using 3ds Max Design for visualizing Projects!

Autodesk M&E 3ds Max Gunslinger summit is a design-focused participatory event in Montreal (Canada) between our users and members of the Autodesk 3ds Max product management, development and design teams. The event is comprised of a series of workshops, design reviews, validation discussions, design charrettes, and more.

3ds Max and 3ds Max Design tools and technology have been used by visualization experts to tell the story of a design in dynamic presentations and won many awards in the entertainment industry.   Clients consistently respond to exploring their project or product in context, within their existing surroundings and bustling with life.  They, and other stakeholders, also find that video helps them understand complex information about the design.   This could be anything from construction logistics, complex function (such as a sliding roof), the impact of design options, or visualization of traffic, weather, stress, airflow and energy.    Cinematic storytelling techniques can convincingly evoke emotions and convey these messages with style.   Unfortunately, in the past, you’d need a large budget to deliver presentations that include these elements.   There are many ways to solve these issues but your feedback is essential.  This is why we’d like to meet with you in person.

We are looking to locate people who would be interested or available in attending.   The Gunslinger is by invitation only as we can only accommodate so many, and other than travel, all shuttles, hotel, and meals are included by Autodesk.   The meeting would be 4 days, Sept 16-19.    It is an opportunity to meet our team and influence tools that could help you improve the way you communicate your designs.  

If you are interested in the Gunslinger please let us know by completing a short survey.  We will then be reviewing the submissions for selecting users but if you are unable to attend this specific Gunslinger but are interested in future events please do fill out the survey.

https://autodeskfeedback.az1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_cTvMgy21fXPtdk1

FormIT 3.0

Sporting a new startup screen and a funky new icon, FormIT 3.0 has been released on the Apple App Store. So lets quickly take a look at some of the enhancements.

Starting with view functionality; you now have the ability to view and navigate your model from a top view. This is particularly useful when needing to sketch in plan. The ability to import a site plan or even a scanned floor plan and start to trace over the top is made a lot easier with this view. During my experimentation, I found this to be a very valuable improvement. Don't forget, if you are doing shadows studies, this can be helpful to get a sense of the impact of over shadowing on surrounding buildings.

We can now toggle the display grid on or off. This is achieved via the settings icon. Another huge enhancements which I believe designers will appreciate is the visual styles. Again, accessed from the settings menu.

These styles can include any combination of sketchy lines, hidden lines and extended lines. In this example, I have just displayed as hidden lines only.

This example is a combination of all three styles applied to the view.

Since its inception, we have been able to import images from our photo library as well as images from Google maps. In FormIT 3.0 this functionality has been extended further, as we can now control the transparency of images. To do this, just tap and select an imported image; go to the properties dialogue, which will slide out from the right hand side of the screen. There you will find a new transparency slider, which will allow you to control the transparency of an image. You will also notice something called vertical order. With this you can control the stack order of images. Simple drag one image above another in the stack, to sort how they stack above one another.

Painting geometry has seen some further improvements. As well as using solid colours, FormIT 3.0 includes a small number of bitmap textures, which allows us to improve the graphical display of our designs further. You can override the texture colour, but right now we can't use custom bitmap materials. Playing with these, dd yield some pleasing results.

You've probably worked out by now that I like FormIT. Whilst it does have some limitations when it comes to modelling, for instance I would love to see a mirror feature and better precision input would help, it's brilliant fun. In the right hands, you can produce some really cool models. Now, I am not suggesting that modelling Star Wars AT-ATs or AT-STs is something that you should rush out and copy; this is just me dorking around. But typically, I do these types of exercises to better understand the tool set, technology limitations and how you have to apply some lateral thinking to produce results.
I have been reading a lot about Start-ups recently. What I now recognise is that the FormIT and Vasari team are exactly like a Start-up, yet they sit within the larger Autodesk machine. They push things to market very quickly to gauge market feedback. Particularly FormIT, which is going through a rapid development / release cycle. FormIT also addresses and engages execs or senior designers who typically prefer tablet technology compared with say a desktop pc or a laptop. I have observed that the more "mature" designer can quickly jump in and be up and running, producing designs without any serious training or technical know how. This is exactly the intention of FormIT.

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Mac user & use bootcamp?

 

I can’t take full credit for this, as Phil Read pointed me in the direction. But if you are a Mac user running Revit under Bootcamp & you flip backwards & forward between Windows (Bootcamp) & the Mac OS, then you are going to appreciate Bootchamp! Check it out. It will speed up the process of booting into Windows from the Mac OS.

http://kainjow.com/

equinox is coming

designbymany - REskin

Be sure to check out the latest designbymany design challenge, called REskin which asks participants to cleverly reskin a decaying urban building in New York City. The competition is FREE to enter. Autodesk are sponsoring this first challenge & design submissions can range from a focused investigation to an entire reskinning of the building. The skin should be both inventive and buildable. All final submissions must be Revit models.  More information about the challenge can be found - 

http://www.designbymany.com/challenge/reskin

The winner of the REskin challenge will be chosen by a panel of judges, including Autodesk’s own Zach Kron, & HOK’s very own Greg Schleusner and will receive a full license of Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2013. Go for it! It will be fun.

BIM Handbook

I totally forgot about this, but I managed to get a “very small” piece in the BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers and Contractors By Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sack & Kathleen Liston. You need to a guide to BIM? get this book! As always, it available from Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/BIM-Handbook-Information-Designers-Contractors/dp/0470541377/ref=as_li_tf_mfw?&linkCode=wey&tag=httpautodeskr-21

i-model plugin for Revit

So Bentley provide a i-model plugin for Revit. Details can be found here.

http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Promo/Revit/i-model.htm

So on the face of it, this sounds cool if you are say an Structural Engineer or MEP Engineer using Revit & collaboration with an Architect using Bentley tools, but it ain’t much good if its the other way around from my experience.

We have a very complex project where we would have ideally liked to have linked in the Structural Engineers Bentley Structural Model & the facade Architects Microstation model into separate Revit models which we could then link into our main model. IFC I hear you shout! Well good luck with that, as its been a nightmare to get that to work. I will apportion some of the blame to both Autodesk & Bentley for not getting their act together to address the IFC disorder. Although, I have to say Revit 2013 IFC is way better than previous releases, but as this project must remain in Revit 2012 & most of the modelling is now complete, I’m not going to worry about it now. All I can say, is thank goodness for Navisworks! :-)

So the point of the post? People ask my; sorry! people tell me, that I have sold my soul to Autodesk Revit machine. That really isn’t the case, trust me. But right now due to limitations in interoperability I find it preferably to work on the same technology platform. Lets hope the holy grail of IFC does one day allow us to deliver robust data between technology platforms.

BIM Show Live 2012

Last year I was fortunate enough to be able to present at the inaugural BIM Show Live event. This year it returns even bigger & better! The event will cover 2 days 9th & 10th May 2012 at the Business Design Centre in London. It has a great line of speakers & if you are doing BIM or are looking to implement BIM within your organisation, this is very much a “go to” event. I will be speaking with my colleague Cara Di Pierro, but also Joyce Chan & William Lopez Campo from our HOK London office also have classes. If you are interested in attending, more details can be found here.

http://www.bimshowlive.co.uk/

My headache (under NDA)

I generally try to not rant on my blog, it makes you look unprofessional & does you no favours in my humble opinion. However, today is different. I have a headache & it hasn’t gone away ALL day & to add to that, somebody has irritated me & I suspect they have irritated somebody bigger than me. What they have done somehow seems to have ruined it for everybody else. You know who you are! Not sure what sort of power trip you are on, but it’s not cool if I am honest.

When a company puts in place an NDA, (non-disclosure agreement) they put it in for good reason. I have signed more NDA’s than I care to remember. In fact I am thinking of getting one tattooed on my arm. Nether the less, this particular blog pushed out information which is indeed still under NDA to the masses. Why, I really don’t know. They gave some lame bullS**T excuse about they are a journalist exercising their rights as a writer, really? If they are a journalist, that makes me the pope.

Yeah so you wanna be first every year, whoopie do, anyone can grab a load of screen grabs & stuff them on a website & say look at me, ain’t I great. So this numpty has let the cat out of the bag. All I can say is look for quality posts in the next week or so on your favourite product, from your favourite bloggers which hopefully gives you a candid view on what is good & what is not.

So if I have offended the “said” person, sadly I care little, because as I said at the start, I have had a headache & I still have it now.

Launch of NationalBIMLibrary.com

So it really has been a week for BIM content announcements! This is great to see & I am excited to see BIM moving forward in the UK. It seems to have taken a long time for this topic to become a priority. When I first started using Revit, that was 2002, many firms were really not talking about BIM back then. In many cases it was more about generating a model for documentation, scheduling & visualisation, nothing more, nothing less. Times have changed & people are now recognising BIM is about data not just pretty visuals. So after his ecobuild presentation, I managed to speak with Stephen Hamil from NBS about the launch of the nationalBIMlibrary.com.

DL – Why have NBS decided to launch this initiative around BIM?

SH – At NBS/RIBA Enterprises our mission is to be the leading providers of information to the UK construction industry. Through our specification products we already provide structured and maintained data for generic specification, proprietary specification, technical guidance and the latest standards and regulations. This can be thought of a national information model. What has been missing from our information model to date is the geometry. Now that object-orientated CAD packages support true information and not just 3D geometry then this is a natural step for us.

DL – The inevitable question will be, how much content do you have in the NationalBIMLibrary.com?

SH – Our launch set of content is around 200 pre-defined constructions covering external walls, partitions, cladding, ceilings, roofs, floors, windows and doors. These have all been created for UK construction industry custom and practice – for use on jobs in the UK or those abroad to British Standards. The launch set contains concept objects and also rich detailed objects – with full information for construction and FM. We are currently around half way through the next set of content which will be another 200-300 pre-defined objects covering sanitary ware, floor finishes, cubicles, hard landscaping and signage.

In terms of work flow, what we are missing are proprietary objects. But through our RIBA Insight sales force we are now securing contracts with the leading manufacturers. We are going to be pretty flat out over the next few months delivering this, but throughout 2012 we’ll see some of the leading manufacturers appear within the site. The user will then be able to take a concept object, work through its design, then toggle this to the manufacturer object to specify for a tender package or record in an as-built package.

DL – As you know, the discussion about standard is a real hot topic right now, what are your feelings on open standards?

SH – They are critical. But standards should ideally be set based on what the majority of the industry are doing. With BIM, the majority of the industry is not there yet. So there is a danger that standards are set and this limits innovation. A balance must be achieved here and the only answer to this is through collaboration.

At NBS, our chief exec Richard Waterhouse is part of the B/555 committee working on the BS 8541 standards. Our Head of Content Development John Gelder is one of the leaders on the changes to uniclass through CPIC. We are members of buildingSMART and also on the buildingSMART data dictionary team.

Now if we take IFC for example, our feeling with NationalBIMLibrary.com was to take a pragmatic look at this. IFC defines international ISO agreed property sets including COBie, so we’ve used all of these in our objects. In terms of authoring layered objects such as floors and walls we have worked with BIM Academy to create a process that uses an IFC source file and then generates native files in multiple native BIM formats such as Revit and Tekla and ArchiCAD. However, we don’t think it is strong enough yet to create functionally parametric objects such as windows and doors at source – so we don’t argue that it’s the answer to everyone’s problems just yet.

I am quite surprised at the amount of IFC bashing that goes on. Especially considering its basic use, this is as an open record format (like COBie). Back in the late 1990s people didn’t criticise HTML4 when it didn’t work in Netscape like it did in Internet Explorer and Opera. The “customers” strongly told the software vendors (Microsoft and co) that this wasn’t acceptable – they demanded change. When the customers say they are not happy then companies react to this – and now due to open standards, all websites can look great whether viewed in Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Chrome. The same needs to happen in the BIM community world-wide.

That said, I think things are changing and the software vendors are listening. We’ve done some fantastic work with the likes of BIM Academy, BSRIA, AEC3 and Autodesk on a recent TSB funded project around IFC. There are also some very interesting developments coming from Tekla, Graphisoft and Vectorworks around the openBIM movement. At NBS we are members of the BIM Technologies Alliance, the technology group supporting the UK government’s BIM strategy – I am confident that real progress can be made through open standards through collaboration.

DL – Is there room for more than one national library of BIM components?

SH – What I think the government strategy does very well is to concentrate on specifying requirements and then to let the UK construction industries innovate. As the major construction spender in the UK this is a fantastic way to get competition amongst the private sector – whether this with architecture, construction, software applications or information delivery. So I think competition is going to be great for UK construction and we’ll see many providers of BIM content such as BIMStore.co.uk who have also recently featured on this blog.

Before ecobuild started I was speaking with the guys from BIMStore.co.uk and we wished each other all the best. Later in the week I sat and watched Rob’s presentation on the http://www.spacehus.co.uk/ and it was fantastic – true use of BIM in action giving cost certainty in creating low carbon buildings. Afterwards I think it was mentioned that there would be nobody left in Newcastle that week with BIM Academy, 4Projects and kykloud all down presenting at BIM at ecobuild.

When asked who will benefit most from BIM (designer/contractor/client)? I wonder whether it will actually be National Rail?

DL – And what are the plans for the development of NationalBIMLibrary.com?

SH – We’ll be listening to user feedback and asking what they want. After the next set of generic content goes live and the manufacturer content is coming through then we can create more new architectural/landscape content – or look at more configurations of our launch set – or concentrate more on components for the structural, services or infrastructure side of BIM. We’d be happy to take any steers from readers of your blog or the linkedin group we have.

Finally, it’s not all about high quality technical content – but also about clever software. NBS customers can expect to see better linkage and coordination between the specification model and the geometric model coming soon. Also I think our TSB funded research project shows that there are more exciting things on the way with respect to linking the BIM objects through to financial and environmental cost databases. We have a team of people now dedicated to this project, we strongly believe that BIM is the future.

If you want to know more, be sure to check out the National BIM library website and be sure to join the linkedin group to feedback your thoughts.

The BIM library - http://www.nationalBIMlibrary.com/

The linkedin group - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4103410

Tools4Revit–New Sort Mark Tool

The guys at Tool4Revit let me know that they have released a new application called Sort Mark that allows new possibilities in sorting and renumbering Revit elements.

“We made it as “easy-to-use” as possible. Sort Mark will help you to get rid of some daily pains and save your time. Trust me, it has never been so simple!”

Sort Mark Features:

• Detect grid geometry and renumber it;
• Renumber grids automatically after they have been changed in the project;
• Powerful and flexible functions allow to renumber any Revit element in different ways;
• Write swing direction for the doors;
• Write flip/mirror orientation for the selected elements;
• Recalculate shared X, Y, Z coordinates;
• Create new shared parameters etc.

Checkout the link to these videos, which explains the various features.

http://www.tools4revit.com/SortMark/E-Help-001/

Baku Images

I got these images from the HOK project manager today; these are the latest images from Baku Flame Towers!

Rooms to 3D Mass – case-inc apps

A few weeks back, case-inc released their monthly app. The February 2012 instalment was a tool which allows you to convert a Room to a 3D Mass.

More details can be found on the case-inc website ….http://apps.case-inc.com/ The tool is really valuable, however, the initial release had some limitations. When you converted the Room, it was actually converting it to a Generic model. Not a big deal, but you needed to be aware of this. So after some positive critical feedback, our friends at case-inc made some tweaks! So now when you choose Rooms to 3D Mass, the output is indeed a 3D mass family! Now all they need to do is find a smart way for us to automatically name the generated families rather than a have a long winded database name; did I say I was demanding? ;-)

Well done guys & a big thanks you from the Revit community. :-)

To BIM or Not to BIM?

This is an extract from Architects Journal from the 15/12/11, this article looked at trends in design & construction for the UK going into 2012…hopefully AJ won’t mind me highlighting the comment about Revit. :-)

Merry Christmas & a happy New Year

I would like to wish all my readers & followers a Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year. Thank you for the continued loyalty & look forward even bigger Revit & BIM stuff during 2012!

Disney & BIM

James Vandezande sent me this great article yesterday. Well worth a read…

http://www.stitchkingdom.com/disney-new-fantasyland-imagineering-technology-17327/

More Project Neon – Revit 2012

I quickly threw a few more files at Neon today, nothing particularly spectacular, but I was keen to see how far I could push it. Overall very positive results, although I did get one file which went a little screwy…be sure to read the online help as there are some useful tips to guide your through the rendering process. http://neon.labs.autodesk.com/index.aspx

Project Neon – Revit 2012

Be sure to check out Project Neon for Revit 2012.

http://neon.labs.autodesk.com/index.aspx

Project Neon has recently been updated to allow you to do cloud based rendering from Revit 2012. Just sign up, download & install the Revit 2012 plugin & you are good to go! I threw a couple of render at the system today & I am very impressed. It will even notify you once you render is complete!

Once the plugin is installed, you will find another tab which allows you to publish your render online or to view your render gallery.

The images can be rendered using all the normal settings with Revit. You simply click the “render online” button, pick your 3d view you want, set the image quality, then the image size, followed by the File format. You have three file formats to choose from PNG, JPG & TIF ; then just hit the “Start Rendering” button.

Your file is the published to the cloud where a host of super computers rip through the render in no time at all. Once the render is complete, you are alerted via email. Login to Project Neon & you can view & download your completed render from there. You will need to set up the exposure settings on your host workstation before hand but that's a small price to pay for the speed of rendering. Be sure to give it a go! This is genuinely an exciting development for the Revit user & harness the essence of cloud based computing.

Social Media @ HOK

Ken Young, Senior Vice President and the Chief Information Officer for HOK shares HOK’s experience on social media.