IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Clarity 2014 - My Favorite Unexpected Feature

You might have seen some press releases about it already, but IMAGINiT just announced Clarity 2014 today. There are plenty of ways to get into the details of what Clarity does or what's new in this release - take a look at our product page, sign up for one of the webcasts held on Friday, May 17, watch a recorded presentation, or contact your local IMAGINiT office for some personalized attention - but I wanted to take a moment to point out one of the features that I put in my top ten of what's new.

Hyperlinks in Data Sheets

What really brought this to the forefront in my mind is that this was a feature that I didn't know existed until I was showing a colleague of mine (Kaylee Krom) the new Clarity 2014 beta site on an iPad. She started navigating around a Room Data Sheet for a sample project and then tapped on an area of the project's keyplan. That tap brought us to a new Room Data Sheet for the building. I had no idea that feature existed until she was just poking around and brought it to my attention. Sonofa...

Well, we started looking further and wouldn't you know it, the development team put all sorts of new hyperlink capabilities into the program and web portal.

If you are in a Room Data Sheet, click on a different room in the available Key Plan:

 

... to jump to a different room's Data Sheet.

Or, if you are looking at a table in the Room Data Sheet, click on the Type Name of a piece of equipment or furniture in the Room Data Sheet:

... to get to a Data Sheet for that object (in this case, called a Specification Sheet).

All of this is done by editing the Data Sheet templates. They are all based on HTML, so everything can be customized to your heart's content. Add or remove information from any Data Sheet. Add or remove any graphics. And when you want a parameter to link over to a different type of Data Sheet, all you need to do is edit the template add "(roomlink)" or "(itemlink)" after the linking parameter and you're there!

In its raw HTML it might look a little scary if you've never coded before, but there are tools in place to make it a fairly painless process.

There's a quick look into one of the items that is new for Clarity 2014 - and a thanks to Kaylee for being the one to point it out to me. :)

have fun!

joe

IMAGINiT Scan to BIM 2014

Well... it's out!

IMAGINiT Scan to BIM 2014

We've placed a few new tools in this release and improved on some other tools - in fact, there is an area on a sample pipe cloud that I use in client presentations that doesn't work for me anymore.

huh?

So now you're re-reading that last statement trying to figure out if I really meant to say that. :) Yes, I did. One of the key things in working with point clouds is an understanding of the conflict between what Revit wants to draw and what your deliverable requirements require. This particular cloud has some pipes that bend through corners that are not quite at angles that Revit wants to draw. I've used this section of the cloud to draw a couple of pipes, prove that they are in alignment with the point cloud, and then move to trim the two pipe segments together (forming an elbow in the process). Previously, the trim would fail with a traditional Revit error message, and that would allow me to talk about this give-and-take between the dirty real world and the pristine Revit modeling environment.

Well, now between Scan to BIM 2014 and Revit 2014, all these connections join just fine. Thanks, Matt.

Aside from improvements like that, we've added in functionality that includes support for new point cloud technology in Revit (including RCP files), easy access to changing the point cloud display settings and the creation of 3D perspective views from the viewpoint of the scanner location.

NOTE: if you are in a perspective view, you won't be able to select the cloud to change its display settings through IMAGINiT Scan to BIM tools. You'll need to use traditional, it-takes-more-clicks-and-time-to-get-it-done processes to change visibility/graphics of the view.

Take a look at the page and the what's new overview video by Beau Turner.

http://www.imaginit.com/scantobim

 

 

It’s March – That Must Mean New Software!

Yes, it’s that time of year again - time to see what sort of goodies we’ve got waiting for us in our latest release of Autodesk software! Let me set something clear from the onset of this blog post, that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list of “what’s new” in the software. We will have plenty of time through this and other venues to review the technical aspects of the new software releases. Instead, the purpose of this post is to keep a broad view of things. As you pour through all of the various software offerings (especially if you have one of the Suites) and look to see what it means to you, here are some thoughts to keep in mind as you work through the evaluation process:

• Cloud services are growing, but not at the cost of reduced desktop solutions. The foreseeable future of the Autodesk Solution consists of a blend of desktop solutions (especially Suites) AND cloud services. Autodesk 360 is intended to extend the desktop, not replace it.
• There is a stronger push behind interoperability and workflow between individual pieces of software in the Suites. If you have the Building Design Suite, you’ll have better integration between Revit and AutoCAD, between Revit and Inventor… if we have access to all of these tools, why shouldn’t we take better advantage of their capabilities?
• Windows 8 support. ‘Nuff said.
• IMAGINiT had a webcast a few months ago that was all about “Evaluating the Upgrade” It’s available in our webcast archive and is worth a view. If you haven’t been there before, you’ll need to fill out a quick form to get access, but access is free. http://imaginit.com/knowledge-resources/webcast-archive Look for the one a little less than a quarter of the way down in the list called, “[Building] Evaluating the Upgrade”.

At this point, let’s go ahead and violate the statement I made earlier and mention a couple of features that I think stand out in some of the new releases – and even though this list is only a tiny fraction of everything that was put into the software, take a look at them within the context of the statements above – how do they help bridge the gap between individual pieces of software, how do they utilize both desktop and cloud technology, and perhaps most importantly – how do they matter to you and your firm when evaluating the upgrade process?

AutoCAD 2014

• Live map and geolocation in all suites
• Enhanced point cloud tools and features

Revit 2014

• Non-rectangular crop regions View this photo
• Alternate dimensions View this photo
• Building element energy analysis View this photo
• Enhanced point cloud tools and features View this photo

Autodesk ReCap (new software)

• Create 3D models from laser scans and captured photos – built into all 2014 suites

There are a few things for you to chew on – we’ll keep this blog going along with other webcasts to help your investigation and analysis of what is new and what it means to you and your firm.

As always, post any questions below or reach out to your local IMAGINiT office for assistance in this migration process!

Have fun!

joe

New Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Blog

If CFD means anything to you (and it should!) take a moment to pop over to our new CFD Blog, run by IMAGINiT's own CFD team - Ryan Stamm, Jason Pfeiffer, Rob Taylor, and Tommy Mello. Add it to your list of super-awesome-cool blogs to follow!

If you're not sure where and how CFD fits into your business or workflow, give us a call and we can help you get a better understanding of where it might improve your design process and building quality.

http://blogs.rand.com/cfd-analysis-consulting/

have fun!

joe

Airflow Analysis in Revit

It looks like Autodesk has a nifty new tool available in Autodesk Labs for basic airflow analysis on a building site:

http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/falcon

Project Falcon is available as a stand-alone product or as a plugin for Revit. As a Revit plugin, it appears to be the next iteration of the airflow analysis that we recently got in Autodesk Vasari. Project Falcon lets you put things of your choosing into a virtual wind tunnel and simulates air flow around those objects. Based off that description, it's not going to work for building interior CFD analysis - you can still reach out to us for that - but there certainly are some good use case scenarios for calculating wind in and around a building and its site.

Cool Tools to Have Fun With!

joe

Free Revit Add-on that organizes your families.

Hi, my name is Navid. I just joined the IMAGINiT Building Solutions blog. My background is mainly in Revit MEP and I hope to share with everyone with tips and tricks that I have learned over the years.

For my first post I'd like to tell you about a neat tool for Revit that organized your Revit Families. Developed by Kiwi Codes Solutions Ltd. it’s FREE to download from the Autodesk Exchange site. I tested it myself running it right inside of Revit and it categorized everything based on the Family Category.

enjoy ;)

Fixing the Revit 2013 .ies render glitch

If you are a Revit lighting fixtures power user, you have possibly come across this issue before while rendering in Revit (if you haven't yet, thank us later...):

This happens when rendering a scene with some lighting fixtures that use .ies files. At it's highest level, the issue is that the Mental Ray rendering engine found in Revit does not fully support the .ies file format at this point in time.

In this specific case, that rendering glitch happens because the .ies file uses "absolute" lighting values. Here's how to fix it:

1) Open the .ies file in question  (which on Windows 7 should have been saved in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\RVT 2013\IES\) in Notepad.

2) Scroll down to find the line right after the last line of the "header" that starts with a keyword in brackets (ie.: [OTHER] or [LAMP], or [_INFOLINK]) and then go down one more line past "TILT=NONE". The following screenshot describes this better:

If that second number I have higlighted is set to "-1", then you are using "absolute" lighting values.

3) To fix the bug, change the -1 to whatever the true lumen output of your lighting fixture is.

4) Reload all of this in Revit and hit render. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results:

Now keep in mind that you have just messed around with an .ies file... I wouldn't trust our modification to hold up in a realistic lighting analysis environment (such as a point by point lighting analysis), but from a rendering perspective it works great.

IMAGINiT Clarity and Revision Schedules

Revit has a process by which you can track revisions to a project – create a Revision, cloud and tag it on a sheet… the process has been reviewed many times and that process is not the purpose of this blog post. What I’m working toward here is how IMAGINiT’s Clarity works with revisions in Revit. The background to this capability starts with a bit of client feedback in a presentation I was doing a while back – in that conversation, they asked if Clarity’s reporting tools could do anything with revisions. At the time, the answer was “no”, but it is something we were able to work into our 2013.1 release of Clarity.

If we step back and look at revisions in Revit, as was mentioned above, you have just a couple of things to work with – the dialog to enter and manage overall revisions, and placing revision clouds and tags. In the Revision dialog box, you can see all of the revisions that have been added, but you don’t have any insight as to where those revisions have impacted the model or sheets within the project. If you look at revision clouds and tags, they are considered annotations and cannot be scheduled in any way to show what sheets they have appeared on.

We set out to improve upon that in Clarity. (Duh. I mean, why else would I be writing something here if it wasn’t going to be something super spiffy-cool-neato-wow?)

In Clarity, we have a number of default reports that are automatically generated when you create a new Clarity project – and one of the new reports we create is appropriately called “Revision Info”.

After bringing a project into Clarity and running the dBExport task, this report will become populated with all sorts of good information. Initially it might all look a little bit unorganized but the question becomes, “How do you want to see this information?"

Not only do we have revision information for ALL Revit files that are a part of this project, but we can see revision numbers, descriptions, dates, sheets that the revision appears on, issued by and issued to information, and what model the revision came from. To see some of those fields later in the list, there is a button below the report called “Column Select” that will allow you to add or remove columns from the report as you see fit.

Once you have the columns in place, you can drag any of them to the list of columns or into the header area to start sorting by that field. Suddenly, we can see all revisions sorted by date, model name, revision number, or any combination of fields.

 

The key to remember with all of the information in even just this one report, is that all of the data is available from within a web browser to anyone with login permissions to that project. Approved project team members can easily and quickly see what sheets have been impacted by a revision – or potentially also identify which ones need to still be impacted by placing a revision – from here. No Revit skills required, just the ability to point and click… or on a tablet, point and tap.

Hopefully this was of interest to you – let us know in the comments below if you have any questions about Clarity or anything else that might be bugging you.

Have fun!

joe

New IMAGINiT Utilities for Revit! and Excel!

IMAGINiT has recently released an updated set of Utilities for Revit (2013). If you renew your Autodesk software subscription through us, you can get these for free – everyone else?... sorry… but they are still available for a nominal fee…

We have three significant new tools for 2013:

Parameter Concatenater – Using this, you can assemble multiple parameter values into a single text parameter using a custom expression. 

Dim Text Update – Easily override the text in multiple dimensions using user-specified options.

Revit Excel Link – Export Revit project data to Excel and Import data from Excel to a Revit project.

Looking at these, changes are that the Excel Link is the most appealing one in the mix, so here’s a quick rundown on how it can work for you.

It’s an easy find in our IMAGINiT toolbar, with two commands, one to export information to Excel, and another to import from Excel.


Once you’ve started an import or an export, you’ll be asked to specify a template to control the process. This template defines what category of objects and related parameters get exported or imported – we have a few defaults built in, but you can create your own templates too. Make sure you have one field that provides a unique identifier for the objects you are exporting – we use that to map the data to the correct objects when we import from Excel later on. (Element ID can be a good one for this)


From here, you can filter what object information gets exported by specifying all objects, a selection set, a phase, or more.


Once the information is in Excel, edit to your heart’s content, save the file, and start the import process in Revit. You'll get a preview of the import during the process you can ensure that all of the information appears correct - green highlight data can be imported, greyed out information will not be imported.

If there are any errors on import, we let you know what has happened so appropriate actions can be taken. In this case, it looks like someone may have been borrowing a room object, so for me it was set as read only.

But looking a little deeper, aside from general text field changes, we can also make edits in Excel that cause geometric changes in the Revit model. In the example below, you’ll see that we export a Door Family and Door Type parameter to Excel and can make a change there – effectively changing a single door to a double door through Excel!

Doors before:

Door Parameters before and after edits:

But while this can be really neat, you also need to be careful – changing an object’s Type setting or dimensions might change the geometry in unanticipated ways. In this specific case, the single door grew into a double door, but also grew into the neighboring wall.

This utility provides you with a lot of power, but you must use it with caution and only for good.

Have Fun!

Unique Volume Calculations in Revit

Here’s a good one for you – we have a client who asked if we could get volume calculations out of Revit, and after our initial answer of “sure”, they followed it up with, “OK, how about giving us the volme of water it will take to fill up this pool.”


Ummm…
My first reaction is that to get volume from an irregular shape like that we’d need to generate a mass that had the overall shape of the water area of the pool – taking lots of voids out of a basic mass to get the volume information. The short answer for that solution is that it would be no fun at all! Not to mention it’s not flexible as the pool design changes. Chuck Jolin from our Denver office looked at it a little and said, “Why don’t you just use a room object?”

Duh

It’s just one of those things that becomes completely obvious once someone else makes the statement. Here are a couple of items that make it work a little better:

Make sure that all of the items that form the 3D perimeter of the Room are all set to be Room Bounding in their properties. Should be obvious, but it needs to be stated.

Create a unique level for the water line (usually a little below the top of the pool, right?) and place your room on that level. In this situation Revit does better projecting down than projecting up, so we don’t want the room to be placed at the bottom of the pool – and by creating a unique level for the water line we’re able to better control how the volume is calculated.


Another one that should be obvious, but be sure that room volume calculations are turned on in your room settings


To make the room volumes easier to see, in Visibility / Graphic Overrides, turn on the visibility of the room’s “Interior Fill” and potentially “Reference” sub-components.


When you’ve taken care of all of the above tasks, place a room on the appropriate level and check out its properties. Set the room’s upper limit to 0’-0” and lower limit to something below the bottom of the pool. In this case I set it to -20’.


If you create a section and look at the before and after shots of the Room within the pool’s boundary, you can see how it fills in the available volume of space. It even looks a little like water.

Now, for the question about rendering the water in Revit since Rooms don’t show in 3D views and there really isn’t any physical geometry associated with Rooms. Make a solid with a water material – it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t match the pool outline since you won’t see the stuff that is outside the pool boundary.

And use 3DS MAX Design. Just sayin’.

Have fun!

joe