IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Happy Holidays!

IMAGINiT will be around through the holidays for any questions or assistance you may need, but what is your office's schedule through the holidays? A previous firm I worked at had a 7:30am meeting every Monday and we balanced that out by always having the week between Christmas and New Years off with pay.

I'm always looking for input on what sort of content you'd like to see in this blog - post a comment below and let's see if you can help direct where this blog goes in 2011!

Revit Architecture Extension now available

If you have not seen it yet, log into your Autodesk subscription site and there is a new extension available for Revit Architecture - "The Roombook Extension".

The Roombook Extension for Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011 software helps calculate the surface area of walls, floors and ceiling elements, room circumferences and the total number of furnishing elements within a project.

In addition to the automated detection of room areas and surfaces, this extension helps users configure these elements manually to local requirements, as well as achieve more accurate model take-offs. Quantified results can be exported to Microsoft® Excel® software and Autodesk® Quantity Takeoff (QTO) 2010 software.

Currently it is available in English and German, and includes the International Project Standard and the German VOB Standard measurement systems. There's a pretty good ReadMe PDF available - let us know if your subscription is up to date and you can't seem to find the extension.

Revit MEP - Element Placement Behaviour

Rob Goetze from our Edmonton office pointed out to me that Erik from the “Inside the Factory” blog had an interesting Revit MEP post this week – I thought I’d echo and link to it here.

In Revit MEP 2011, element placement behaviour changed in that the Properties Palette remembered the previous settings rather than using the default instance values embedded in the family. This is generally fine for Revit Architecture and Revit Structure but causes a big headache in Revit MEP where, for example, the same the same Fire Alarm Device tool is used to place Pull Stations at 4’ above the floor and Fire Alarm Horns at 7’ above the floor. There is a setting that will return Revit to its pre-2011 behaviour.

Browse to wherever you have Revit installed and open Revit.ini with your favorite text editor. Search the file for the term "UserInterface". If a string of "UserInterface" is found it should be in brackets, and if it is, somewhere below that (but before another bracketed term) enter the string, "ResetInstParamsPerTypeFor2011DummyInst = 1" (sans quotes) on a blank line. If the term, "UserInterface" is not found then at the end of the file paste in the following:
[UserInterface]ResetInstParamsPerTypeFor2011DummyInst = 1

The full post with some additional detail is here: http://insidethefactory.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/12/perfecting-the-palette.html

Enjoy!

Circuit Overloads in Revit MEP

Here's another guest post from Chuck Jolin on electrical loading in Revit MEP... he's making my life easy with these!

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When the True Current of an electrical circuit reaches 80% of the circuit's Rating, Revit MEP will display the following warning:

 

While helpful, an electrical designer would prefer to know the load percentage of a circuit before adding additional devices and avoid this warning altogether. A simple Electrical Circuit schedule can provide this insight.

Adding a column to this schedule that uses a calculated value of (True Current / Rating) we can easily see if a circuit has room for an additional load. If you change the unit format of the field, you can see the circuits loaded percentage:

 

... and when circumstances dictate a circuit overload rating of something other than 80% a little Conditional Formatting can be applied to help identify and evaluate those alternatives.

 

AU Class Recordings Update

As an update to the last post, if you haven't been to the AU web site (http://au.autodesk.com) here's a highlight on their front page:

AU 2010 Conference Classes Available Online Soon

Starting December 8, all AU 2010 conference classes will be available via the Online Classes tab on the AU website. Meanwhile enjoy some of the highlights of this year's conference.

AU Virtual 2010 Classes are Available

Until December 8, AU Virtual 2010 class content plus the keynotes are still available in the AU Virtual environment, or via these links:

Classes on Demand

View the General Session

AU Show Floor Report videos and podcasts

Autodesk University, Days 2-3

Wow… I was all set to keep on posting every day from AU, and then life (and business) got in the way. I’m sure that’s never happened to anyone here reading this. :)

It was quite an eventful few days at AU – I was able to be a Lab Assistant or co-presenter for seven classes over three days, with a number of meetings with clients, internal IMAGINiT staff, and partners like Smart BIM. During any of my available time, we were all at our booth on the trade show floor and had great conversations with any number of people passing by. The greatest points of interest seemed to be with questions about our new Scan to BIM software (http://imaginit.rand.com/scantobim), the 3D display from Infinite Z (http://www.infinitez.com), and fun with getting a 3D picture of yourself being chased by a T-Rex or other background images.

The worst part of it all for me was that I didn’t have any time to wander around the exhibit floor and I found out too late that Autodesk had a Tesla Model S on display. When I first heard about the car a few months ago, I sent an email to my wife with a photo/link to the side and the comment, “I want one!” Unfortunately, this also goes into the list of “things that are not in our budget”.

:(

A guy can dream, though…

http://www.teslamotors.com/models

I could go on about the different keynote addresses, but why do that when you can see them for yourselves? If you have not already, sign up for a free AU account here:

http://au.autodesk.com

… and then take a look at all of the different recordings:

http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=keynote

Adding salt to my wounds – about half way through that main stage opening keynote (roughly 42:30), Autodesk rolled a Tesla Model S onto the main stage. I was elsewhere in the complex getting ready for delivering a class on running Revit in a private cloud and was completely unaware of what was going on as we were connecting various computers across the US. :( :( :( Expletive, expletive, expletive.

To see more, sign up for AU Virtual – the Standard version is free to anyone – and go to the Keynote sessions.  Among others, there’s one called “Industry Keynote: New Technology and Industry Innovation for the Entire Building”. There’s a number of places where the presenters talk go through “Imagine if…” scenarios. I actually made it to this session and there are some pretty neat ideas and potential visions of the future.

AU was all these things and then some – I hope to see you there next year!

Autodesk University - Day 1

Every day is a long one at AU… today’s events started with the opening keynote address, but I wasn’t able to attend. Instead I was working with Beau Turner (IMAGINiT), Ken Flannigan (IMAGINiT) Lonnie Cumpton (BIM9) and Bill Debevc (BIM9) on setting up for a class where we did a live presentation of running Revit in a “Private Cloud”. It really was quite an interesting setup – in a conference center in Las Vegas, we used Remote Desktop to run Revit on a remotely located computer, collaborating in real time with another person (Ken) who was located in Dallas. We also used an iPhone to share live video of Beau using an iPad to run Revit in a Remote Desktop. All in all, it ran flawlessly and was well received by our ~200 person audience.

Next it was off to a quick lunch and then I had the opportunity to be a lab assistant in an Ecotect Analysis class. It seems that every time I see Ecotect in action, I find some other neat feature or use of the program and today was no different. On this occasion, the lead presenter had some nice ideas on ways to present comparative data created by Ecotect in an Excel spreadsheet. From there I was able to head off to a meeting room and interview Autodesk about building component manufacturers and fabricators and their fit into the BIM process (more on this later in another post).

For the last class of the day, I was able to be a lab assistant in an AutoCAD Architecture / AutoCAD MEP class, going over the basics of the project navigator. The class was smaller than in previous years – perhaps indicative of the trend toward Revit (at least among AU attendees?) or the possibility that those who are using AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP already know the Project Navigator well enough and don’t need the class so much anymore.

The day ended with an evening of meeting people on the trade show floor and at our IMAGINiT client appreciation event. It was really nice to meet some people face-to-face that I’d previously only talked to on the phone and to see others that I had not seen in a while. Tomorrow will bring some more labs and a number of meetings… another long day, but soooo worth it!