Revit 2010 subscription advantage videos

For all those that need to know what’s included, check out Steve’s link.

http://revitoped.blogspot.com/2009/10/dept-of-echo-revit-subscription.html

Revit 2010 subs advantage – selection sets

This may have been blogged elsewhere and it was certainly highlighted by Autodesk at last Tuesday’s blogger day, but the Revit 2010 subs advantage pack introduces various enhancements.  The one I personally found particularly useful is the ability to make changes to the tool you are using once you have created a select set. Previous to this release, if you made a selection of items, picked a tool and you found you had picked the wrong tool, you had to drop the selection , reselect the items and then pick the correct tool! With the 2010 subs advantage pack, you can make a select, and then switch the tool you want to use. So if you pick “copy”, then change your mind to say “mirror”, you can do this on the fly without loosing your selection set. Take a look at this video to see what I mean……

Hauer Opus Panels in Revit 2010

Thought I'd share this with you all. Last year I managed to create an Hauer Opus panel in Revit 2009. This was achieved by nesting various components into a cw panel family. So when 2010 was released, I was keen to find out whether I could create the panel using the new cw pattern based family. Its taking me a couple of months to find time to look at this, but I have been working on this challenge now for 3 days and I have finally got there! I need to get out more! :-)

I will explain more in a future post. BTW it does have parameters, so I can control the shape.

The Dog Bone returns for Revit 2010!

Now you're probably wondering what the hell I'm going on about! Well a few years ago, when I working for Excitech,  a colleague and I (Lawrence Hooker - Inventor genius) looked at how Revit and Inventor could work together, especially around the area of Freeform modelling. Inventor is really geared towards mechanical design and fabrication, however its modelling capabilities, although explicit, are amazing.  Well I came up with a building form which I knew just wasn't possible in Revit 2008. We nick named the building the Dog Bone, because if you look at the building in plan, the profiles which make up the shape of the building look like a Dog bone!

So we designed the form in Inventor using these profiles, saved this as a SAT filed, imported this into a Revit mass and the applied the floors, wall, curtain walls etc. The image below is from that file, if you have read Mastering Revit Architecture 2009, you will have seen this image before.

Ok, fast forward 2 years, we now have Revit 2010. With the new concept modelling tools, I was particularly interested to know whether I could rebuild the Dog Bone in 2010, without the  need for Inventor. I was sure I could, but I needed to be convinced.

So opened up a new concept mass template and setup three levels. I then add dimensions between the three levels and turned these to parameters. This would allow me to control the central profile that would make up the form.

On each level I sketched the Dog Bone Profile. To make life a little easier for me, I extracted the original profiles as DWG plan guides that I had used in Inventor and imported these into Revit and sketched over the top using reference lines and arc. Utilizing the original profiles would ensure that the form would build as close as possible to the original concept.

Then selecting all the profiles, all I then had to do was choose Create Form from the Ribbon and the Dog Bone returned! 

The added bonus of Revit 2010 allowed me to divide and pattern the facade. 

The new concept mass was then loaded into the Revit project environment where I once again applied, floors, walls and curtain walls. This is the Revit 2010 version of the same design.

To me, this just reinforces the amount of effort that has taken place to get these new tools into Revit 2010 and this is only version 1 of this implementation. I am sure they will be improved even further  in future releases of Revit, but this is a great start.

More Concrete Balusters and Railings

Not one for blatantly copying!! :-) I recently used the Concrete Balusters and Railings families that Steve describes in this thread in a sample project. This was to prove to a "doubter" that Revit could do this sort of complex stair design. Thanks Steve.... ;-)

Back of Walls - Project

I thought I like to share this project with you. Before I decide to venture into a fulltime career in Revit I used to work for a firm of Architects based in Winchester, Hampshire, UK , where I was employed as the CAD manager / architectural technologist. I got involved in allsorts of projects which allowed me to use Revit in a real working environment. As a practise, the firm is a very progressive when it comes to technology and they really understand the benefits of 3d design and coordination. I worked there for 10 years so I meet up with a lot of architects during that time.

One of the guys I worked with moved on from the practise a few years ago and went to work for a smaller design practise which focuses on residential design. We continued to keep in contact with one another and around 18months ago he asked me if I’d be interested in doing some design visualisation for him on a project in central Southampton, UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southampton

As you can imagine I jumped at the opportunity. The site is on the line of the old city walls, so it was extremely sensitive with the planners. The site had remained vacant for over 20 years because of the challenges and restrictions that the planning as well as heritage authorities had applied to the site.


The idea was to build a Revit model shell based on AutoCAD drawings and use this model for design review as well as rendering the final model in 3dMax for street scene and impact studies.

During the 18 month period the design had to be changed over 4 times in Revit to meet with various restrictions and refusals. Finally, before Christmas 2007 the scheme received planning permission. Fundamental to the application was the photomontages and the 3d design studies which helped the planning team understand the impact of the proposed building.
The scheme design consisted of a lot of custom balconies and features which where all modelled up as families, although they required few or little parametrics within the families themselves.
The model actually didn’t take that long to build, around 4 days in total including the families. The model was then exported to DWG and we used the DWG link within 3dsMax to file link the model into Max for Rendering. The final rendered output where saved as high res TIFF files. These where opened in Photoshop where the views where composed with existing site photographs from a 8mega pixel digital camera.

What this exercise shows too many is that Revit can be used at all stages of the design process. I speak to a lot of architects about Revit as a design tool and sadly some get it, others don’t. I’ve worked with architects who just don’t believe Revit will replace the traditional CAD process. My view is 2d CAD will not disappear any time soon, but the process of Revit and BIM is starting to take a real hold on the architectural as well as the construction industry. I am definitely seeing that here in the UK. You only need to see the numbers that pitched up for some of the Revit classes at AU2007. Remember when 2d CAD first appeared? nobody believed it would replace the drawing board. You’d be hard pushed to find a drawing board in some architectural practices these days and if they do exist, they are piled up with drawings and print outs!!!

These are electrifying times, Revit may still not have hit the big time for some, but those that have seen the “light”, swear by it. I certainly believe that 2008 will be an exciting year for the further adoption and growth of the Revit platform.