Avatech Utilities for Revit 2011 – Come and Get It

If you read the Revit blogs, you’ll know this isn’t the first post like this, so you probably know the drill.  Avatech has been kind enough to let me give away some of their stuff!

Avatech offers up an assortment of utilities that fill in some pesky gaps with the basic Revit functionality.  We have been using them for years and I can attest that we would waste a lot of time without some of these tools.

They offer a free version, but it only has a handful of the tools, and let me tell you, the Door Mark Update tool is an absolute lifesaver.

Would you like a free copy?  Absolutely you would!  How can you get one?  Post a comment to this article and let the world know how you plan on saving time with the Avatech Utilities, how you have saved time with them, or what you plan on doing with all the time you’ll be saving.  If you don’t know about them, be sure to take a look at their page for some more info.

Here’s the catch:

It has to be a haiku.

Oh yeah, I’m serious.  Three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables (if you are a syllable over I’ll probably overlook it). 

Am I evil?  Maybe.  But I thought it would get those creative juices flowing, and frankly, make it easier for me to read.  If no one replies, then I’ll know it was a bad idea.

Feel free to enter as many comments as you like.  Be sure to have your name and correct email address when you post.  That’s the only way we can get in touch with the winner.

After the 30th, I’ll pick the one that made me smile the most (might get some help from some friends) and you’ll get a code good for a free copy of the utilities.

Good luck!

Crazy Dimensions Strings

Dimensions, who needs them? 

Sadly, we all do, at least until the rainbows and unicorns of sharing the model comes to pass.  I know.  I hear all the sales guys tell me the same thing:  “Soon no one will be printing anything!  You’ll give a CD of the model to the contractor!  And donuts will rain down from the sky!”  I like to think I’m a pretty forward thinking guy, but we still have a long time until no one wants drawings.

In the meantime, we have to make due with creating a highly accurate model, and slapping dimensions all over it.

Revit does a couple “goofy” things with dimension strings and I thought I’d list a couple here, mainly so I don’t forget (that’s really all this blog is – a list of items that I KNOW I will forget about in a week or so).  I put “goofy” in “quotes” because once you understand what Revit wants to do, then it’s not “goofy” “at” “all”.

Revit has some nice features for dimension text.  One of these is the ability to add text above, below or as a prefix or suffix to the dimension text itself. 

So, you have placed a window in a masonry wall and you want to dimension the opening.  The dimension string snaps nicely to the window edges and you place your dimension.  Double-clicking on the text brings up the Dimension Text box where you will deflty type in “MO” to the field below the dimension. 

Except, you won’t.

What the heck is that?

The “Below” field is already taken by some other dimension!  How very rude!  What in the world is it?!  I won’t keep you in suspense anymore:  When you dimension to the edges of a window, the Below text is automatically filled in with the window’s height parameter.  You can’t change it, you can either tell your dimension type to show it or not:

What do you do?  Put in a piece of text?  Of course not.  You have to move your witness line.  It won’t actually move, but you drag the middle square grip to the wall edge and not the window edge. 

They’re the same line, aren’t they?  Pretty sneaky, sis.

While you are dragging, move your mouse over the edge.  It will highlight the line.  Check out your status bar and it will report the window element.  Slap your TAB key until the status bar is telling you that you are now selecting the wall.  Let go of your mouse.  You are now dimensiong the wall and not the window.  Congratulations!  You can now edit the Below text!  And as a note – yes, the Above text is also grayed out, but I have no idea why.  When we find the top secret Revit manual, I’ll let everyone know.

Another “fun” dimensioning oddity is a long dimension string that will either disappear, or chunks of it will disappear.  This one is actually much easier to understand.

You can dimension to pretty much anything in Revit.  Those dimensions are view specific.  If, for one reason or another, the element that you are dimensions no longer appears in that view, the portion of the dimension string that was touching it will hide too.  Why might an element no longer appear?

• The element was hidden
• The element’s category was hidden
• The view range changed
• The element was deleted
• The element was NOT in the original view, but in an Underlay (yes, you can absolutely dimension to elements in Underlay, then someone turns them off and your dimensions poof away, too!)

One of our biggest tips for dimensions has been to wait as long as you can during the documentation process to place them.  ABSOLUTELY build your model accurately (I shouldn’t even need to write that, but you know someone out there is shocked at it), but wait until the end to place your dimensions.  That way your views have had time to settle in, and certainly your model has baked nicely. 

Now where are those donuts?

Revit 2012 New Features – While They Last

This week, Autodesk dropped the latest version of Revit on the world – Revit 2011.  While much fanfare and excitement has been raised about its new features (and rightfully so), I am more excited about the super-duper sneak peak I got at the new features for Revit 2012, internally being called the “Apocalypse” edition.

Everyone knows that the world will end in 2012, and that gives us a whole year to use the exciting new features in Revit 2012, or until the impending planetary crisis and destruction allows the electric infrastructure to keep our PCs running!  I for one, plan on getting a nice big generator, to keep posting blogs and tweeting, because when we are faced with the end of humanity, who wouldn’t want to keep reading about design software!

To be honest, the “experts” can’t agree on precisely HOW the world will end.  Being a forward thinking company, Autodesk is thankfully working on new features that can help the survival minded work with many of these potential catastrophes:

New floor design type – The “Hull” floor building tool will allow designers to barrel-curve their floors to allow free-floating buildings, in case of global flooding.

Enhancements to walls – An additional wall function type has been added.  “Bunker” can be used to create exterior walls for structures that will be integrated into mountains or at least 100′ below ground.

Integrated building analysis tools for hermetic seal – Quickly analyze your Revit model to see if it’s airtight.  No one wants a pesky zombie and/or flesh eating virus sneaking in to your safe house.

Enhancement to phases – The current phase model in Revit allows designers to show conditions from previous work.  But what if the Large Hadron Collider, or some other combination of solar flare and electromagnetic pulses, creates spacetime distortions?  The new Minkowski Phase option allows you to see the ramifications of your design decisions pushed through a fluid four dimensions or other potential spacetime ripples.

Additions to solar tracking tool – The new sun tracking system is nice, but a smart designer needs to pay attention to all the planets and other heavenly bodies.  The “Extraplanetary Tracking Tool” includes orbit and tracking data for over 100 planets, comets and stars, so you can safely align your building along proper astrological lines of power.

Numerous new components:

• Over 200 new models of generators
• Stand-alone turret or tripod mounted defense weapons
• Baseball bat, chainsaw and other excellent zombie stopping devices
• Nuclear-blast grade doors

This is just a small sampling of the new features.  I’m sure that this is bittersweet for the software team.  After such a strong showing, you’d want to keep working on the next release!  However, they realize the futility in this, and how difficult it will be to work on Revit 2013 when the planet has been destroyed.

In the meantime, I’m certainly enjoying all the new goodness that is in Revit 2011, in between the time I spend building my bunker.

Help Your Project Manager – Before He Kills you

To our chagrin, we have discovered that our number one hurdle with transitioning to Revit is not the software learning curve, it’s not the user’s need to shift to a new workflow mindset, it’s not even convincing PICs or the board that it’s time to buy new licenses.  It’s the Project Managers.

You need to be sure you fully educate your non-production PMs about how a Revit project will go.  Best bet is to have someone on the team who has already gone through a Revit project.  Someone who is willing to gently, or not so gently, let the PM know what is possible, what isn’t possible and most importantly what makes sense.

Your typical PM of this nature simply knows that they usually get plans at this week of the project, elevations here, and then sections here.  With Revit, the workflow and document production is shuffled all around, and that’s a good thing!

We have had more than one Revit models that were on the edge of failure because a PM demanded X, Y, and Z at very specific times.  Why?  Because it’s what he always had gotten before.  He didn’t want to hear about what made sense.  The team was too new to Revit to argue, so they built the model to support X, Y, and Z.  Unforunately, in Revit, they should have been focusing on A, B, and C at that time.  So the model suffered, and the team spent more time picking up pieces later on simply to accomodate this PM’s backward demands.

Every firm has at least one PM like this.  There is no easy way to deal with him or her.  Just keep a close eye on the model and work hard to make sure that there are no drastic flaws in the workflow that can bite you down the road.

Winter Blues and Online Classes – AU Virtual

Wow!  It’s been very long since I posted something!  Do you care?  Possibly.  If you do, that’s very sweet of you.  Winter is always tough; I don’t like the sun setting right after lunch.  And to top it off, I didn’t even get to go Vegas this year for Autodesk University.  Luckily, Autodesk brought the best parts of AU to me!  (Note: well, maybe not the BEST parts, but some pretty good parts)

According to this article, attendance at AU was down about 30% this year.  That’s physical-in-person-I-can-touch-you attendance.  Now stop touching me.  This was also the year that Autodesk introduced AU Virtual, which (according to the same article) was “attended” by about 20,000 folks.  First off, this number is hard to quantify and verify.  However, I’m not gonna argue with it, because I bet it was a LOT of folks who watched some AU classes online.

My experience with online classes has been hit or miss over the years, mostly miss.  The content is sometimes questionable (no, not inappropriate, just not what I was hoping for – get your mind out of the gutter.  And I told you to stop touching me!) the presenters are not always engaging, but the worst part is the format.  You are stuck staring at someone’s screen, quite often a PowerPoint, and you hear them talk.  That’s it.  You stare at the screen for an hour listening to someone else go on and on and on.  Eyes glaze, minds wander, snoring ensues.

I haven’t done much research into how the human mind learns and how it assimilates data, but I bet staring at a screen with someone talking at you is low on the list of effective ways to learn something.  Luckily, the folks at Autodesk agreed with me.

A+ to the format of the AU Virtual classes.  You have a screen on the left showing a PowerPoint presentation or an application, and on the right is a human.  A real live human being.  Looking up at the camera and talking.  This tiny little human addition made the learning far more engaging than most other online classes I had seen.

Another issue with most online classes is, man, you REALLY want to show something to someone afterwards, but you can’t record the presentation!

A+ to letting folks download the ENTIRE screencast and “handouts”.  This is an absolutely remarkable feature.  If I could do a backflip, I would.

I won’t put an overall grade on the presenters or the specific classes.  I will say this – the large majority of the classes we watched were very much worth our time and the presenters were clearly knowledgeable.

The only drawback was the selection of classes.  I’ll give this a C.  I imagine this was being handled on a more tentative and experimental basis, but there were certainly many more “real” classes that I would have loved to have seen “virtually”.

Lastly, A+ to the price.  For those folks on subscription, the price was very very low.  I don’t want to use the word “free”, because that’s a big check I cut every year to Autodesk.  Having AU Virtual as complimentary for the subscription folks made the value of subscription much greater, however.  And frankly, I sometimes scratch my head as to what exactly why I am paying for subscription fees (aside from the license agreement), wondering what extra I am getting from this.  Bonuses like this make me scratch my head a little less.  It is my understanding that the cost wasn’t crazy for non-subscription folks.  I bet well worth it.

Obviously, there are features to the “in-person” conference that just cannot be experienced online.  I have attended twice now and I look forward to going again, even with the excellent option of seeing the classes online.  And no, not because it’s just Vegas.

So, a big kudos to the team who put together AU Virtual this year.  If you missed it this year, be sure to take advantage of it next year.  Hopefully, Autodesk will continue to expand the offerings and keep the excellent work they did for the first AU Virtual.  Hopefully, they will keep the same cost for subscription users, or have a VERY low cost to offset some of the expenses.

And hopefully next year, I’ll get to back to Vegas.

It’s All In The Details

There are many misconceptions out there about Revit.  Some of these are holdovers from early versions, some are just bad ideas that people latched onto some time ago that they haven’t let go of.  Like Crocs or calling chicken sandwiches “burgers”.  One of those “Revit Rumors” has been popping up on my radar – Twitter, user comments, etc.  The idea that Revit is bad at details.  I have seen several tweets along the lines of “I like Revit, but it is lousy at doing details” or even worse “Revit is great, but I still do my detailing in ACAD”.

I’m not sure where this misconception about Revit being bad or difficult at detailing started, but it’s just plain false.  And those that claim that it is easier in AutoCrap, I would actually argue the opposite.

Revit has cleaned up and simplified the process of detail work in the computer.  We no longer have to worry about layers.  Or even worse, color, and if that color is going to impact the lineweight (I know some of you are still plotting with CTB, you cannot hide!).  There is a selection of Detail Lines, and what I see is what’s going to print.  It’s like my old empty plastic orange juice concentrate can that held my Koh-I-Noor pens, a black sharpie, and some grey markers.  Easy.  There are also fill regions and a masking region.  And if you happen to use the wrong “pen” or fill, select it and change it.  There is an excellent selection of already created detail components.  Fill patterns and line patterns automatically with scale.

And that’s just the pure detail elements.  Don’t forget that you can constrain detail elements to model elements, so if you’ve detailed a joint on a wall with detail lines, you can constratin it so if that wall moves or changes its thickness, those detail lines will update as well.  On top of that, there is the oft overlooked but VERY powerful Edit Cut Profile tool which allows tweaking the edges of model elements in my view.  So I know and have confidence that cut patterns and fill patterns are consistent and proper.

It’s change and it’s different and I understand that.  Over the last two years as we have been doing our deployment in earnest, a major new part of my job has been therapist.  Change is scary, especially change on such magnitude.  People like the tools they are used to.

But that doesn’t make them good tools.

The people who think AutoCrap is easier to detail in, are simply used to that piece of software.  Revit has taken a little of the software out of detailing.  Don’t let that scare you.  Come along with us.

But first take off those Crocs and put on some real shoes.

Spinning! 3d View Quick Tip

Sometimes it’s the small things that we forget or overlook.  I was surprised to find out that someone who I could consider one of my top Revit users was unaware of the following little nugget.  So I thought I would jot it down here.

Navigating through your 3d view can get a little tricky when your model starts to grow.  Holding down the SHIFT key while center-button dragging will rotate your model around to let you get a better view of another side.  By default, Revit rotates around the center of your model.  This might lead you to rotate-pan-rotate-pan-rotate-pan until you see the angle you want.

Here’s the nugget.  Wanna know a nice trick?  Select an object before you rotate.  The object you select will then become the center of your rotation.  No more rotate-pan-rotate-pan-rotate-pan!

We’re All Getting Twitchy

Warning: I’m a geek.  A pretty big one.  I try to keep these posts to be on the low end of the geeky spectrum and relatively accessible to those of us in the design industry who like and use technology.  This post may…scratch that… this post will leak far over onto the geek end of the spectrum.  You have been warned.

So, we’ve all seen Twitch now.  Or we’ve read about it.  Only those that live on the west coast, or apparently somewhere in the Pacific can actually test it out.  No.  Not the islands.  Actually physically in the Pacific.  This is what I saw when I tried:

Do you have a boat out there running Revit?  Neither do I.

But I digress!  Basically, it’s remote processing and hosted computing for some of Autodesk’s apps.

And it’s about damn time.

I don’t know when the guys at Autodesk Labs first started thinking about this, but my brain started getting tickled to the idea as a possibility several months back when I heard about the announcement of the OnLive video game service.  If these guys have actually worked out a way to avoid the latency and possible speed hiccups of the Internet, and push really really high end video games to my screen, then there is absolutely no reason it can’t be done with high end BIM and modelling software.

High end PCs to run Revit and other apps are expensive.  I could argue that in the business world, aside from these production workstations, there isn’t much need for the typical user to have a PC that costs more than $500.  Our typical workstation runs us about $2500-$3000, and we don’t even get the uber high end stuff.

But if Revit could move to the hosted model, businesses could keep their hardware costs down.  IT departments wouldn’t have to waste time deploying and maintaining software on hundreads of PCs and could focus on what they are really good at (namely, napping and drinking Mountain Dew).

And Autodesk would benefit as well.  Piracy would be a thing of the past.  The subscription model that is the Holy Grail for all software companies would be a given.  They could start charging per hour for little spurts of licenses needed, like in the summer when we always get a bunch of interns, and then proceed to run out of licenses on our FlexLM server.

And for the really big firms that don’t want to share the time?  Autodesk partners with a hardware company, and rents out a Revit Rack.  A preconfigured, preinstalled series of rack servers that the local network users login to.  IT does a quick setup for IP address and the like through a nice web interface, then the Rack gets monitored and maintained and supported remotely by Autodesk.

Can you tell how giddy I am?  I am giddy.

If the latency issues and file sharing questions are resolved, then performance for the end user could be better as well.  If the virtualization for servers movement has shown us anything it’s that PCs and servers are wasted power.  For the majority of time, your PC sits there and twiddles its thumbs.  We spend the big bucks for gobs of RAM for the 15 minutes a day that your PC has to think really hard.  Aggregating the hardware resources into a shared server means more power for everyone.  Chances are you are not going to be rotating that 350,000 sf model in 3d view the same time that someone else is.  So for that minute, you get more RAM and horsepower from the shared resources.  And if more people come on board, you don’t need to spend $3000 in hardware and unknown costs in IT setup time, you just need to spend a couple hundred bucks to add some more RAM and maybe another hard drive to the server that hosts the application.  Oh, and you want to work on your model on the road or from home?  Piece of cake.  You just need an Internet connection.

This makes so much sense.  This SCREAMS it makes sense so much.  It’s good for firms, it’s good for Autodesk, it’s good for users.  It’s not often that everyone wins.

The Autodesk Labs guys are pretty darn smart, but they hit it out of the park with this.  I have no idea if anyone from Autodesk reads this blog (I bet “no”), but I hope that the business side of the company realizes that this is the future and they need to make it happen.

/nerd hat off

Revit, EcoTect and Green Building Studio – Just Like Peanut Butter and Salami

Watched Autodesk’s webinar today titled “Sustainable Analysis and Revit Architecture.”  LEED and BIM.  I challenge anyone to find two “hotter” acronyms in the industry right now.  So clearly Autodesk is going to be on top of this and come at us with some amazing software that will blow our socks off, right?  Right?

Sigh.

First, a couple caveats.  I had been keeping an eye on this software for a while now, in fact, I watched a very similar presentation last year.  My expectations weren’t high, but I am always hoping for a miracle.  Secondly, the presenters did a very good job.  They clearly knew their stuff and presented it well. 

But the software.  Oh, man, the software.  It absolutely felt like they were trying to sell us a portable cassette player for me to listen to my songs from iTunes.  Sure, I could convert my songs to analog and find some cable and recorder to put them all on cassette.  But… really?  And the worst part is, the guys selling me the cassette player are the ones who convinced me how awesome iTunes was in the first place.

Here’s Revit.  It’s a bucket for me to put in all this amazing and valuable information about my building.  I love it.  I am not only drinking but I am mixing and serving the Kool-Aid as well.  I also love other software that can look into my bucket and do something with that information.  It doesn’t have to add to the bucket, but if it’s looking at the bucket and I make a change, I know it will see that change.  Or at the very least I can export A LOT of my bucket’s data to another file.  I spent all this time putting info in, I want to be able to get it out.

Neither Ecotect nor Green Building Studio can look into my bucket.  I don’t think Autodesk created these apps originally, but they’ve had them for a while.  And this software cannot read a Revit file.  Just won’t happen.  You have to export your model to GBXML for one and DXF for another (wait, is that right?  DXF?  really?) 

So, with the DXF all you get is geometry.  All of the information (the “I” in “BIM”) is gone.  Poof.  If my model contained that data, I have to re-enter it.  That is so amazingly counterproductive it makes my brain want to bleed.  The GBXML takes my rooms.  Nothing about the fenestration, no material data, just the rooms.  Again, loss of “I”.

Autodesk has been pushing Revit as the cornerstone to the Rainbows and Unicorns world of BIM for some time now.  And it is absolutely a platform that could support it.  It frustrates me that that the two services that the guys who make Revit have for us to analyze and make important decisions about our design are so stone-age when compared to Revit.  I will not ask my production people to input building information and data more than once on such a grand scale.  That is a waste of time and hence money.

I certainly am not privy to the inner decisions at Autodesk, but from what I’ve seen of Ecotect and Green Building Studio, nor am I a software developr, my suggestion would be to scrap them both and start from the ground up with a new service/software that is built on the Revit database model and can talk directly with and pull data from an RVT file.  This shoehorning of the Revit files into anitquated and ineffective software is just going to frustrate people and send them to find another solution in the end.

Now, pass me some of that Grape Kool-Aid.

Revit Utilities or Why Can’t It Do That Already

Avatech (big reseller) has recently repackaged their Revit Utilites for 2010 so they can sell them.  They used to be free <sniff> but, alas, such is the way of consumerism!  Quick note – if Avatech is your reseller, they still are free… sneaky!

We used the utilities back in 2009 and they were very very good for the price (it was free).  All of my comments are based on the 2009 versions, assuming that they haven’t updated significantly since then.

The Door Mark Update and Room Renumber tools were exquisite, and features that many users scratch their head and wonder why they weren’t in Revit to begin with.  They do exaclty what they say they are going to do.  It’s not magical, it can’t read your mind, but it does as well as it can.

The Space Update tool held promise, but we never had the opportunity to use it on a complete project.

I prefer Autodesk’s Google Earth utility.  The Avatech one seems bulky for some reason.

The RevitCity Content browser does precisely what it advertises to do.

Change Case, Grid Select and Room Phase Copy are new to the 2010 utilities.  I want to say that the Change Case has been “borrowed” from Avatech’s BIMReview software.  If it works clean and efficiently, then it would be a welcome inclusion.  The plot thickens?  A search for BIMReview on Avatech’s website brings up links to two pages, both of which are inaccessible.  Has BIMReview been put out to pasture?

The web site lists their Revit Utilities package for $395.  Worth it?  Can’t report that.  With the current state of the economy, you need to evaluate your own internal needs.  I will tell you that it would be definitetly worth a couple seats if they can incorporate some network licensing.  Last time we talked to them, this was being bounced around, but they had no idea if it was feasible.

They do have a subset of utilites that are (drum roll) free!  Avatech Utilities for Revit Lite has the following utilities: Room Renumber, Grid Select, Space Update and GridSelect.  For the Room Renumber alone this is worth it.  You have to give them your email address to download.  But who doesn’t ask for your email address these days?

Overall, a good batch of utilities.  Some kind of network licensing (and a slightly smaller price tag) would seal the deal.

I am both excited and nervous at the third party add-ons that we are starting to see.  A clean and untouchable Revit was a nice dream for a while, but until it is able to have every single feature that everyone would ever want, these extras will be a welcome addition.