For those of you not familiar with Shared Parameters yet I plan on attacking them one day with tutorials… I promise you that you will end up running into them in your Revit lifetime.
This is the initial public release of Revit SP.Writer for Excel.
This utility is intended to manage shared parameter files for Autodesk Revit platforms. It was written and tested using Excel 2007.
A whole lotta love for 3D and conceptual design is coming out of Autodesk Labs and Autodesk Research this week. Here’s two pieces of news that will get designers to stand up and take notice.
A new app was anounced: Autodesk 123D Beta As a result of Carl Bass speaking at the Maker Faire last weekend, we were all treated to a new tool to enable the coming personal factory revolution.
Below is a sample that I whipped up with no training. Oh, and videos are provided to help you get the most out of the feature sets. One of the most interesting is the construction method awareness, which if you are expecting to output using 3Dprinting, or simply want to unfold and cut from flat stock on a CNC machine, there’s little out there that is more straightforward and simple to use. They’ve also teamed up with a handful of online services to help you make your digital creations materialize, and for a limited time, fabs are 50% off.
Too much news today to wade through… here’s a good recap of what’s coming in Revit 2012. Thanks to David Light for such an in-depth look. Revit: Autodesk Revit Architecture 2012.
So, you’ve managed to build some cool masses of your early design. What now? While this is not fresh news, it just makes sense to highlight some of the things you can now do with a Revit to study your designs from an energy performance perspective.
It has been said that nearly 60% of the possible energy reductions possible as compared to a base design can be achieved by decisions made in the first two weeks of form finding. This is before the architect has even begun to thing about glazing types, or involved an engineer to approach the problem with systems.
There are really two easy approaches to getting at this data. They involve place, and of course orientation. For example, there’s the sun, which can make or break a design, and then there’s other climate factors and the cost of energy for your region.
Starting first with orientation, depending on the climate, you will want to either avoid or capture direct incident solar radiation - insolation for short. This can be accomplished with the Solar Radiation tool. This freely available tool, found through Autodesk Labs will let you understand the hotpots based on daily peaks, hourly, or averages over a period of time. So for LasVegas, it would be good to look at the summer. You’ll want to avoid situations like this: Death Ray.
Climate data, now readily accessible through Revit using the subscription advantage pack for Revit Architecture and Revit MEP 2011 connects you to over 5TB (yes as in terabytes) of worldwide climate data from weather stations. You can place your building on the Earth, make some basic assumptions about percentage of glazing, shading devices, and use. Waving a magic wand (OK, starting the Analyze Model tool) pushes your design to the cloud, it will be analyzed in Green Building Studio and you can get real comparative analysis. Yes, this supports the Revit design options. This report also, of course includes costs and potential for on-site renewables and passive strategies.
Where it all comes together
So, you say you are not on subscription, well have no fear, because for a time, these are all available for the low, low price of FREE in a standalone package, with the bonus of massing and rendering. Vasari, is a preview of a Revit Lite if you will, allowing designers to have the early tools without all the other project overhead associated with a full-featured documentation tool. So, if you haven’t tried Revit or Green Building Studio, now’s your chance. You’ll never look back. But don’t take my word…
David Light elegantly demystifies how to create 12 different primitive forms in the Revit Conceptual Massing tools.
Uncomfortable with the massing tools? Not found them useful? Dont’ think they are powerful? Anxious about getting started? Let it all melt away… then get cracking, ’cause we have conceptual energy analysis coming up in the next post.
Because I can… links for your devourment on the release of Revit Architecture 2011. I simply haven’t the time. These guys have collected some great information for you, and there’s much more as you wind down the rabbit hole.
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?”
Oh, yeah. I love interoperability! After all, technology and process integration is one of my primary job responsibilities at NBBJ. Can’t wait for the shipping version of these new 2011 updated tools and getting the designers more new cool tools.
We’re getting so close to concurrent design and visualization. I wonder what the current state is of Project Newport anyway?
You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.
- Zig Zigler
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.
Revit Model Groups are a wonderful thing. They allow capturing repetition in the building model, and provide a way to tag through the groups, maintaining unique instance properties of the contained elements for scheduling. Determining best practices for Revit Model Groups has been challenging and a moving target. Some old rules no longer apply. I love the fact that The Factory has been making strides in improving group functionality and stability from release to release. For instance, mirroring works very reliably in Revit today, versus 2 years ago it was verboten. Here are my first two good rules to begin with that are hard and fast (until some new feature makes them obsolete one day), and they are:
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.
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.
