DANIEL HOUGHTON / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Like the popcorn and beer concessions guy in a ballpark, I loudly announce the availability of your favorite Autodesk products for the (FY) 2012 season. It will come to you quickly when you use the download manager option. Pass your money down the aisle, please. Can’t yet see them in your geography or subscription center? Get them here as a free trial download:

http://usa.autodesk.com/support/downloads/

Direct Link: Rick \”Peanut Man\” Kaminiski

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.

It doesn’t get any simpler than this:

Revit: Back to Basics – Conceptual Masses in Revit 2011.

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

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.

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.

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.

Source: Revit Space -> Washington School and Revit.