Pretty Pictures

Saw this at Autodesk University two years ago at their opening demo… I’m sorry, I meant “revival”.  It has recently popped up on Autodesk Labs, and I hope hope hope that it doesn’t die a slow Labs death and never really see the light of day.

Project Newport (which to those of us living near Philip Morris sounds like a top secret cigarette attack) is being touted as a game engine for designers.  Which frankly, would be awesome.

No, I don’t want to make myself a root beer float and pull out the lime chips and sit on my couch in the middle of the night and shoot zombies in one of our designs.  Or do I?

Being able to leverage modern “gaming” processing hooks on video cards for real time visualization type rendering would be amazing and such a boon.  Right now, if we want real time 3d viewing of our Revit model, it’s in Shading With Edges and looks like a cartoon.  If we want some nice materials on there, it’s wait 5 to 30 minutes for this image to render.

And if nothing else, if this works like it’s touted I might help me kill Sketchup in my firm.  That’s too harsh.  Not kill.  But significantly maim.

Hopefully, Newport will happen and it will bridge these two.  I’m not expecting photo realistic real time rendering, but if I can see my building and it looks as good as a modern video game on my PC, that would go SO far to get our design intent to owners.

And if I can export it and navigate through it on an XBox360… how cool would that be?  I’m just saying…

Boot Camp and Phases

Second day of training wrapped up.  I always get a bit panicky, looking over my notes and thinking that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that I can cover all the material.  But we always seem to make it through.

Each time I do the class, I find myself adjusting the emphasis on certain sections.  With the economy in its current state (opposite of “awesome”), our firm has a larger percentage of renovation work than we typically have in the past.  In previous classes, day 3 of training has had a 20 minute discussion of the phasing available in Revit: “Hey, look that each element has a phase.  Neat?  Neat.  And, no, that demolish button doesn’t mean delete.  DELETE means delete.”  Tomorrow I intend to spend at least an hour on it.

We have not seen much need to go beyond the standard “Existing” and “New” phases.  Mainly the way the phase filters forces us to display things pretty much exclusively based on chronology, we just weren’t able to produce the documents we had expected.  There are workarounds, but overall, I would love to see a revamp of the phase filter system.  Instead of seeing it as “now” or “prior”, I would like each phase filter to be able to control the different phases and phase states individually.  Basically, the chart would get more columns based on the phases in the project.  Then one could select on, off or some override settings for that phase and state.

Ah, to dream.

And while I’m dreaming, a root beer float would be great right about now.