With great fanfare…I’m pleased to announce that the big project is finally published. Over 700 pages of scripted material were written, then recorded to produce these tutorial lessons. But you don’t have to read them. Narrated by yours truly, I hope you enjoy and learn something new.

CADLearning Revit Architecture 2011 Tutorials

Go check them out here, or login in with a free membership to view samples: http://www.member.cadlearning.com/

These projects are truly collaborative efforts. Many thanks to Dan Dolan, David Cohn, David Harrington, Matt Murphy, David Redding, Michael Bass, Temesgen, and the entire production team at 4D Technologies. A special shout out to Phil Read for putting me back in touch the team after having worked with them on ADT videos way back in the day – was it really 2004?

Most importantly, thanks to Betsy, my sweet and understanding wife, for putting up with those long nights and weekends and me forgetting to take out the garbage.

And now… some final work to polish up the more advanced content, and back to my day job (and more blogging). Autodesk University is around the corner, don’t you know.

Read the press release here: CADLearning Revit Architecture 2011 Tutorials Published

Alan James Wooldridge

Greg Arkin

Jay Zallan

More details, and a review to come in a later post.  Perhaps I’ll get some good CadLearning.com video script writing for Revit 2011 done at some point during my 14 hour flight to Shanghai next week. As Alice said, “What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?”

We’re getting so close to concurrent design and visualization. I wonder what the current state is of Project Newport anyway?

Source: Revit3D.com – BIMBoom Revitlution: FBX File Link with Revit Architecture & 3ds Max Design – Have to see this video.

Every once in a while we need some inspiration to take action. Plan, Prepare, Expect. A simple formula. Unfortunately, most people who begin using Revit expect success, while simultaneously skipping those first two steps. The outcome is invariably failure. Persistence sometimes prevails, but you end up with a headache when it’s all said and done. Planning costs time and preparation costs money. Since most architects have an inversely proportional abundance of the former, rather than the later these days, it seems appropriate to plan for your future success.

I’m a big advocate of planning. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a complex process, consisting of many things. The right tools can help you adopt this process, and Revit at its soul has the ability to be a transformative technology in the architectural and engineering communities. Ultimately, when used to it’s potential Revit can affect the way buildings are designed and built. That scares non-technical architects, because “tried and true” methods have always worked for them. Have they really though?

The landscape out there is shifting. the design, technology and communication paradigms are shifting. So, if you haven’t bought a ticket on the BIM train yet, or you there, but feel you are simply along for the ride, you need a plan to upgrade to business class. Incorporating BIM into your firm, or from an owner’s perspective mandating BIM on projects is not simply a technology solution. More importantly, it is a cultural, and management issue. Players at all levels of your organization need to be involved in the decision-making process. Additionally, when starting a new project, you need to understand the potential of a BIM workflow by creating an execution plan. The Penn State BIM Project Execution Planning Guide version 1.05 was released last month, and there are some excellent organizational documents there to help you capture critical path information about the project. But this isn’t your only source for this type of information to allow you to develop organizational and project strategies for using BIM.

Autodesk has just this week publicly released a plan to aid in the successful delivery of BIM projects. Titled the BIM Deployment Plan, it is a great framework for starting to have the conversation with your firm project delivery and technical staff. The process is well documented, and incorporates many best practices and experience from my former colleagues in Autodesk Consulting. Read more, and download your copy here. Give it a try and maybe, just maybe, everybody wins.

The official press release can be found here, for those who are interested in the marketing spin.

1. Constraints on elements will bust the group, whenever the conditions of the constraints change. My best example of this is: You cannot have walls with level-attached tops inside a group if any floors you wish to place those groups on another level that has a different floor to floor height.
2. Instances of Groups must be composed of identical elements. Like an AutoCAD block, if you remove an element from one, it is no longer contained in any other instances of that group. (R.I.P. April 15, 2008, with the ability to Exclude elements from an instance of a group – Hooray!) But, there’s a catch. Beware of hosted elements.

For this article, let’s focus on Rule #1.

The sneaky thing is: You may observe the behavior for walls inside groups is benign. As you may know, elements such as a wall can be given either an explicit height, or have its upper extent constrained to a level, floor or roof element, or a reference plane. Since nested elements must remain consistent in every instance of a group, those which contain walls that are top-constrained to a level, attempt to respect the resultant height of the constraint to the next adjacent level. At least the walls do not break the group if placed on levels whose floor-to-floor height varies. An override for Top extension is auto-magically placed on the new nested wall instances to keep them consistent, and no warnings are displayed. You have to be mindful of what really happened. A properties override, if you will, was assigned to the new walls during their creation. Looking at the walls from an section or elevation may not show any difference. The original constraints are still present so… can we do it?

Not So Fast! Remember this: If you attempt to change the height of your levels, you will be in a severe amount of pain. The feared warning will come up stating: “Group instances of the same type do not contain identical members.” When you are presented with the option to Fix Groups… Revit simply asks you to ungroup or make unique groups for the naughty thing we just did. Rule number 2 still applies.

Recommendation: Be cautious

So, it might be best to create groups for large room-based compositions which include walls to be designated by the level the were created for. New groups should be created for the other levels, and so on… You should ask yourself whether the walls are helping or hurting you if inside a group. I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but you should consider the consequences. Because of all this chicanery, I still recommend for cases such as demising walls, or any other conditions where walls are to be stacked one on top of the other, don’t model these per floor, and certainly don’t place them in groups. You may be better served to model them with a single-spanning wall starting on the lowest level and connected to its uppermost limit. This is easier to make changes, and accomplishes an efficiency with less geometry in the model. Think shaft walls, plumbing chases, and tenant separation walls, as these are critical to be sure they actually stack. Unless you are building a construct-ability model, don’t build it the way it will be constructed in reality, but to convey design intent. Structural engineers and contractors will probably argue with me on this one, but at least in the early stages of design, it is a far easier thing to manage the building model this way.

Got any best practices of your own that you wish to share? Feel free to add comments, or drop me a note from the contact me page.

The Proving Ground

The post on Grasshopper and the Revit API: importing points into a Conceptual Mass is brilliant. More please!

The Proving Ground by Nathan Miller: Streaming Grasshopper Points into a Revit Conceptual Mass.

Revit is a disruptive technology, which makes it frightening for some, but exciting to others. Revit and the BIM workflow it fosters has the power to transform the practice of architecture, in conjunction with IPD (Integrated Project Delivery) and sustainable design. With these tools, we need to figure out as a collective industry how to go from good to great. Read on for more of Jason’s insight, which is the first in a series of drawing parallels to the lessons from this excellent book:

Good to Great – “First Who… Then What” – Jason Grant Blog – Adaptive Practice by Jason Grant.

I’ve run across this problem myself, and solved it in much the same way as Harlan describes below. One of the baffling things is that 64 bit operating systems have been available for more than a few years now. You would think that a company such as Adobe would have been more on top of the move to 64 bit. Read on for the fix:

If you are running 64 bit Revit and you try to run a video from the Help files, you will notice that it doesn’t play. It will prompt you to install Adobe flash, and then the video will not run.

Currently Adobe Flash Player does not support playback in a 64 bit browser. It is possible to run it on 32 bit browsers installed on 64 bit systems, but unfortunately Revit will default to the 64 bit browser in Help. Click here for more information on Adobe’s schedule for Flash Player 64 bit support.

So, to view the videos, you can do the following:

1. Launch the Help menu.
2. Open the document with the video and select the video link.
3. Right click inside the dialog and select Jump to URL.
4. Copy the text from the Current URL dialog.
5. Launch 32 bit Internet Explorer and paste the contents into the address bar.

Click here to view a short video illustrating this process.

Source: The Revit Clinic - Watching Help menu animations on a 64 bit machine

The first fixes some issues with wall editing! Boy if that isn’t something every architect and structural engineer needs… as well as some MEP folks. You should seriously consider applying this hotfix. Thanks to Harlan for sharing.

A new Wall hotfix has been posted.  This hot fix applies to Revit Architecture, Structure, and MEP and addresses a issue that causes a crash when modifying or deleting walls. Files are included to fix Update Release 2 or the Subscription Advantage Pack, so make sure you download and install the correct files. Also, make sure to go over the readme files included.

Hotfix – Crash when modifying walls update 2 & subscription advantage pack release

Secondly, there is a hotfix that only applies to those who have installed the RAC (Revit Architecture) Subscription Advantage Pack. Does it repair the broken Classic Mode hack? Sadly no. But you will have control over the graphic display of Structural elements after applying this repair. Everyone else, move along, there’s nothing to see here.

A new hotfix was released today for anyone running the Revit Architecture 2010 Subscription Advantage Build # 20090925_1815. After applying the Subscription Advantage Pack for Revit Architecture 2010, the structural settings dialog is no longer accessible.  The included hotfix will resolve this issue. I have included both the technical solution with additional information as well as a link to the hotfix below:

Structural Settings dialog is not accessible after applying Revit Architecture 2010 Subscription Advantage Pack

Hotfix – Revit subscription advantage pack structural settings dialog

Sources (The Revit Clinic):

1) New HotFix Available

2) Revit Subscription Advantage Pack Hotfix Available – The Revit Clinic.

No, not that kind of cloud!

BIM and cloud computing have traditionally not been very close friends. What is interesting, is that there are companies out there innovating. There are model servers, data exchange formats, cumbersome and expensive hardware solutions that don’t really address all the issues.

Graphisoft has done what no other BIM software vendor has been able to do: reduce the time and space gap to project collaboration. But, what does it all mean? ArchiCAD 13 Makes Ground-Breaking Leap in BIM File Sharing | Cadalyst.

Does this mean that the competition is moving ahead. Maybe, but technology leaps come in shifts, not incremental change, and the development of the BIM sharing in ArchiCAD 13 is simply a redo of a tool they already had. If you managed to click through and watch the video on Teamwork, it is less impressive than the article makes it out to be. Revit can add color to worksets as well with filtering, and while doesn’t have chat, there are already many standalone technologies for this. All of this seems really distracting to getting work done. There has to be better ways to manage a project and improve communication. It may not be the right path.

Is that a pie in the sky, or SAAS?

One possible alternate future in Autodesk Labs may be just what we all need: Project Twitch. Sure this is being touted as a way to try before you buy AutoCAD, Inventor, Maya and Revit without the ability (yet) to save and print. There is a real potential for this to become something beyond play. This is true Software as a Service (SAAS), which seems to hold the possibility of reducing many obstacles to adoption. What obstacles? Well, collaboration, as in the solution above, would be a hurdle not requiring a lot of hardware or convoluted rights management to access parts of the building, it would just work. It would remove the barriers of geographically dispersed teams, and allow better and more reactive collaboration the way Revit currently works.

SAAS when done well, can help reduce hardware and operating system upkeep and could potentially become much less of a burden on IT departments and cost-concious design firms who could use a bit of a break after the last 18 months. This would open up your favorite design tools, like Revit to any platform you wish to use such as; Windows, Mac OSx, Linux, PS3, or whatever… OK maybe not a Commodore 64, but most anything.

Again, this is just a possibility. Two things need to happen; there needs to be an increase in trust from the industry that hosted data and applications are secure and highly available, and secondly there needs to be an improvement in performance. While just a technology preview, Project Twitch is not yet ready for replacing a locally installed application that works even when the power goes out. Someday… just maybe it will. OK, stop daydreaming and get back to work.