Project Vasari – using Revit content

Fellow blogger, Robert Manna over at don’t think : Do Revit wrote a great post today about hacking Vasari, its well worth a read. Robert makes some useful observations and if you are new to the whole Vasari thing, hopefully by now you have realised that Vasari is built on the same technology as full Revit. This also means that as the file format is the same you can use normal Revit content inside of Vasari. Now the web is a wash with Revit content, be sure to check out Revit City or Autodesk Seek as a start point. But I am sure if you Google the words “Revit content”, you will come up with a bucket load of free content for you to use inside Vasari.

So you have downloaded some content, how do you get into Vasari? The quickest way is to drag and drop it into a current open Vasari project window.

The content can then be place as required.As Robert suggest in his post, you can then copy and replicate around the modelling canvas as required. In this example I have downloaded a tree from Autodesk Seek and placed it into my project.

Finally, another way to get the content loaded is to actually open the .rfa family in Vasari. Once you have the family opened, just choose “load into Project” from the Ribbon. The window will switch over to any opened project and you can placed as required.

Project Vasari – I can’t seem to render

I noticed this when I first started using Vasari. I could see the teapot icon in the view control control bar, but it seemed to be greyed out, so I assumed I couldn’t render and the functionality was disabled.

The reason for this is because by default when you start a new project in Vasari you start with create mass mode enabled. Its not until you either finish mass or double click the canvas that you come out of the create/edit mode. Once you do this, your teapoint icon will display and you can then click this to open up the render dialogue box; you will then be able to happily render your scene.

Mind you this assumes you have the material library for 2011 installed.

Project Vasari – rendering?

So you may have noticed in my blog post yesterday, that the youtube video showed me rendering the station canopy inside Project Vasari. I have had a couple of people ask me how I was able to do this. When they went to try and render they see no teaspot icon in the view control bar. No teapot icon, no rendering!

 

 

So how was I able to achieve this? Well its down to how Autodesk having enabled a common shared material library in the 2011 Autodesk solutions. This library is consistent across multiply Autodesk products, so if you already have say Revit 2011 or AutoCAD 2011 installed on your laptop or workstation, you will have this library installed by default. Therefore, as Vasari is basically the same as  Revit Architecture, Structure and MEP minus various features; Vasari will also share this library, so the rendering functionality is enabled! Sweet.

Project Vasari – Station Canopy Roof

Last year we did a competition for a railway station in London as part of the Crossrail development. The designer came up with a rather funky, yet beautiful looking roof for the proposed new station.

Unfortunately we didn’t win the competition, The roof was actually modelled in another application, but I was able to produce it easily in Revit 2010. So I thought I’d show you how to do it in Vasari using an adaptive component family nested into a mass loaded into a project. Hope you enjoy.BTW I don’t normally work this fast!!! :-)

Project Vasari – Metric Templates

I have been asked if I would be willing to share the metric templates I created in my previous post. Nothing secret squirrel here, so feel free to download them by click this link. DOWNLOAD Metric Templates

Project Vasari – no metric templates?

Ok, after you download and start playing you will soon find out that Vasari provides only imperial templates. Now after a bit of head scratching I discovered that because of the way Vasari is distributed its not easy to hack the imperial templates and make them metric.

So this is what I have done. I have opened all the standard imperial templates as new projects and new families. I then changed all my settings as required and saved them to a folder of my choice as rfa files with the word Metric added to the name.

I then changed the file extension of these files form .rfa to rft. This make them Revit templates, if you didn’t already know this.

I then whipped back into Vasari, application menu > options > file locations and changed the default imperial template to my custom template. At the same time I pointed to the newly created location for my metric family templates.

Job done, I now have metric templates, which saves me having to keep changing from imperial to metric each time I start a new project or family.