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.

Revit Arch 2010 Advantage Pack and 2009 UI Issue

I haven’t been able to extensively test, but it looks like the aforementioned 2009 UI “hack” that you can do in 2010 gets confused a wee bit with the Advantage Pack on Revit Architecture 2010.  I plan on spending some time in an upcoming post discussing the Advantage Pack (I know – you can’t wait), but wanted to get this out there now since I haven’t seen it in the Intertubes yet.

We always knew the 2009 UI tweak wasn’t fully supported, but it looks like the Advantage Pack has set it a couple more steps out of alignment.  First up, the newly introduced (and much loved) Structural Ribbon loses the Truss tool in the non-ribbon interface.  Just can’t find it anywhere.

The “Tools” toolbar is… weird.  The tools seems to have been shuffled.

In order from left to right, I have listed what the icon is, and what the command acutally is:

What it looks like	What it really does
Show Work Plane	Work Plane
Linework	Work Plan Visibility
Spell Check	Spell Check
Join Roof	Find Replace
Some kind of mini Work Plane button	Tape Measure
Measure	Match Type
Show Hidden Lines	Linework
Hide Hiden Lines	Show Hidden Lines
Paint	Remove Hidden Lines
Split Face	Paint
Edit Cut Profile	Split Face
The Hammer from Demolish	Edit Cut Profile
Join Geometry icon next to the word “Demolish”	Demolish

So, that looks like one tool (Spell Check) that does what it looks like it’s supposed to do.

Align, Split, Trim and Offset all seemed to be saved from this madness, but the next batch of tools fared worse.

What it looks like	What it really does
Unjoin Geometry	Join Geometry
Cut Geometry	Unjoin Geometry
Don’t Cut Geometry	Cut Geometry
Copy/Monitor	Don’t Cut Geometry
Edit Wall Joins	Edit Wall Joins
CENSORED	Edit Beam Joins
Match Type	Join/Unjoin Roof

Again, we have one tool that matches its icon.  Weird.  Mousing over any of these will tell you what it’s going to do, you just have to ignore the picture.

A couple other items:

• If you have installed the Model Review, that just throws a nice error on bootup and won’t even load.
• The DB Link tool seems to be MIA
• The wonderful Convert Lines tool is also not to be found in the 2009 interface.
• I have not installed the Framing Tool, so cannot comment on its availability

That’s all that really jumped out at me.  I imagine I am missing some.  I also was not able to test/verify if keyboard shortcuts to these missing commands will work.  Also, I cannot verify if the other Revit flavors will have these same hiccups.

I’m not too surprised by this.  There was no reason for Autodesk to maintain support for a tweak that was completely unsupported.  The moral is just to pay attention if you are using the 2009 UI and have or plan on installing the Advantage Pack, you may be forced to hop in the Ribbon to see the full benefits of it.

I Hate It When I’m Wrong – Revit 2010 UI

We waited until the first service pack was out (web update – whatever they call it) before we deployed Revit 2010.  I, for one, was singing the praises of the much maligned Ribbon.  “See how clean it is?” I would say.  “See the nice big icons?” I would point out to the nonbelievers.  “See how it’s organized so well?” I would show my cats – who frankly didn’t care.

The first indication of something VERY bad showed up when one of our more experience Revit users reported crashes on his brand new 2010 model.  Not much content in there at all.  Very few views.  This was a tiny file that should have been able to run on a PC that was four generations old.  But he was crashing.  A LOT.  Up to seven times a day.

Soon after, another experienced user was reporting the same thing.  Different project.  Different user.  Virtually same hardware.  A recent multi-core XP 32bit workstation, 4GB of RAM, and a nice video card.  About 18 months old.  The hardware shouldn’t have been the problem.

We spent a LOT of time back and forth with Autodesk support.  They looked at the model, they told us to downgrade the video driver (yeah, you don’t hear that one too often, do you?) they said to not run anything along with Revit.

Same results.  Numerous crashes each day.  And these weren’t gentle “Revit is about to die – let’s save a recover file for you” crashes.  These were “POOF! Revit is gone!” style crashes.

We took two approaches.  For User A, we wiped his PC, upgraded him to XP 64bit and threw 8GB of RAM in (the max the motherboard could handle).  About 2 total hours of work stretched out over 2 days waiting for updates and installs, plus around $170 for the RAM.  He reports that 2010 is running great now!  Whoo-hoo!

For User B, we edited the ini file that allows 2010 to run in “debug” mode and use the 2009 interface.  About 2 minutes of work stretched over 2 minutes, plus around $0 for buying nothing.  He reports that 2010 is running great now!  Whoo-hoo!

Wow.  I am scratching my head over this.  I am so frustrated that the user interface was designed so poorly that it alone causes enough memory to be sucked from resources that are essential to the software running in a stable state.  I can’t be the only person out there.  And I’m not.  I think the 2009 UI tweak was one of the most re-tweeted Revit items on Twitter in a while.

We have been training new users on the Ribbon interface for months now.  Do I go back and spend my time showing them the old interface?  This is crazy.  This is shameful that Autodesk let their product ship with such a major memory drain.  Two updates later, still a big hole.

I certainly hope this is a major priority for the team.  I love the Ribbon.  I just wish it didn’t suck so much… memory.

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

Placing a Tag Outside its Host

Seven times out of ten, you place a tag and you want it to be near that item that you are tagging, be it a door, room, window, whatever.  The tag wants to be near the host, otherwise, what’s the point?  You might as well be placing tags by tossing them in the air and letting them land wherever, like as much confetti.

Two times out of ten, you tag something and there just isn’t enough room for that tag to live there.  So, you enable a leader from that tag.  Excellent.  A nice clean arrow indicating precisely to what item that tag is referring.

Then comes the oddball.  That one time out ten (probably even more rare) that you want a live tag to pull info, AND you don’t want it near the object you’re tagging, AND you don’t want a leader.  The out-of-the-box tags in Revit don’t want you to feel like you can accomdate this.  As soon as you move a tag too far from an item, Revit tells you that you MUST activate leaders and have that connection back to the object in question.

We ran into this situation… and I won’t keep you in suspense, we found a way around it.

Our firm standards for interior elevations indicate that we show the room number JUST BELOW the actual elevation.  We wanted to keep the tag “live” so it was pulling the number from the room, in case the room number changed.  “Dumb” tags are SO un-Revit.  But, every time we dropped the tag down, it asked to turn on the leader, which we didn’t want to do.  How to fix? 

The question really was, how does Revit know if a tag is inside or near the item that’s being tagged anyway?  Opening up the tag itself gave us our first clue.  The only thing in there is lines, text and… some reference planes.  Quickly checking the reference planes indicated that these planes were of the “origin defining” type.  You probably see where I’m going with this.

Turns out, Revit doesn’t care at all where the “graphics” of the tag is at all.  The origin point of the tag is how Revit determines if a tag is inside or near an object.

Solution?  Create a new type that had the graphics droppped down below the origin.  As long as that invisible origin was inside the room, the tag was below the elevation, and it didn’t need a leader line.

This can obviously be applied to any tag type, with even more clever placement being defined by parameters and types.  It doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice to know that you can keep the “automagic” updating and not lose out to the last 10%.

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.

What Makes a Successful Reviteer

I have been doing many levels of training and all kinds of support for Revit Architecture in our firm for the last year plus as we’ve been working, project team by project team, on getting revit to be our primary design and documentation software.

A consistent question from the principals in each office is “which person will be good at Revit?”  A very valid question, but obviously a very difficult one to answer.  You can’t point and say “yes” and “no”.  I mean, you can, but you might be wrong.  And you might get in trouble.

What I have discovered is traits that are usually a good indicator of being successful and, more importantly, traits that usually indicate NOT being successful.

Here’s the big one.  AutoCAD (or as we refer to it here in the BIM Basement, “AutoCrap”) or other CADD experience.  There are two camps here.  The first camp thinks that if someone is good in on CADD software, they will be good in them all.  The other camp recognizes that there are differences with traditional CADD and BIM and have convinced themselves that someone who knows CADD will just have their brain full CADD stuff and won’t be able to empty their brain to learn Revit.  From what I’ve seen, it just doesn’t matter.

Obviously, Revit is a piece of software.  There are people who are just naturally inclined to using software.  Setting that aside, knowledge or the lack of in a CADD package are almost a zero indicator on Revit success.  Someone who is good in software may have a quicker time picking it up, but in the long run successful Revit users come from both a strong CADD background and from very limited CADD background.

The best indicator I have found of someone who has success in Revit is knowledge of how a building goes together.  Time and time again, we have seen incorrect views because the model was put together wrong.  And it was put together wrong because the person working on the model did not understand how part A plugged into part B.  They might have known in the past that they were supposed to draft a thick line and then a dashed line next to it, but they never understood what they were drafting.  The people who understood what was being drafted, or what they were drafting know how to build the model properly, which is key to a successful Revit project.

Luckily, that can be learned, if you have the right person.  The number one indicator that I have found concerning someone NOT being succesful in Revit probably won’t come as a shock.  It is a good indicator for most new tasks.  Attitude.  Attitude is huge.  The desire to learn something new, the willingness to admit that their old methods do not apply anymore, the acceptance that things change.  Using Revit and working on a BIM project is a major shift.  A lot of people hate change.  These two items are totally incompatible.

So, unfortunately, there is no litmus test on who will be great at Revit and who won’t.  It pretty much comes down to common sense.

Not to sound melodramatic, but BIM and Revit represent one of the largest changes in the industry since… well, I’m not really sure.  You know who in your firm is ready and able (and willing) to come along for the ride.

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.

Revit 2010 Impressions

So, we’ve been working with 2010 (update 1) for a bit now.  I have some preliminary impressions.

It seems to like to crash a little more.  At least, we are getting some reports of crashing on two very specific projects.  Both of these projects were updated from 2009, so that might be our issue.  But honestly it’s too late to go back.  Another potential issue with those projects is the linked Civil files.  WAY out in space.  We are approaching that as our working theory and seeing what we can do about cleaning up the DWG before linking.  I hate adding steps for my PMs, but five minutes of work up front to save three crashes in a day seems well worth it.

The Ribbon is not that scary.  I’ll just say that now.  Really, suck it up, try it out, and you might actually find that you like it.

Now it’s time for me to whine about change.  I haven’t spent more than 15 minutes in it, but man I cannot get my big head around the new massing tools (and on a possibly related note, if anyone can find “Curtain System by Lines” in 2010, let me know – I miss her).  I need to sit down for an hour and just do it.  I know they wanted to make it easier, and more ‘Sketchup-y’ (ugh… the S word…) but so far, not that much easier.  So far, none of our PMs have actually used the massing tool for any design work, but it’s there, so I really should know how to do it so I don’t get that blank vacant stare when someone asks me how it works.

I mean, no more than my usual blank vacant stare…