IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Cross Pollination

Oy… it’s been a busy couple of weeks. All good, but it also means that I wasn’t able to get anything up to this blog recently.

I’m sure it’s been eating away at you too. :)

One of the things I’ve been noticing over the last few years is just how much software is starting to cross what we thought at one time were “boundaries”. As an example, it’s not uncommon now to see people using Autodesk Inventor to make parts for buildings that are directly used within a Revit building model. It’s one of those things where we always knew that manufacturers were building things that were used in the construction of our building projects, but we never bothered to integrate their models into ours on a regular basis.

Or maybe you did, but I didn’t. Which might make you better than me, and I don’t like that idea… so in my own little world, you didn’t do it either.

With the idea of cross-pollination in mind, here are some recent posts from our Manufacturing Blog that are relevant to the building design world.

http://blogs.rand.com/manufacturing/2010/11/autodesk-inventor-autodesk-revit-bim-exchangewith-parameters-and-component-structure.html

http://blogs.rand.com/manufacturing/2010/08/autodesk-digital-prototyping-providing-bim-content.html

Enjoy!

Combining Revit Content Libraries

Here’s another post from your friend and mine, Chuck Jolin. :)

When deploying Revit Architecture and Revit MEP in a multi-discipline firm, one of the questions that often comes up is, “How should we (or should we even attempt to) combine the content libraries from Revit MEP and Revit Architecture?”. The rest of this post will deal with Revit Architecture and Revit MEP, but the answer to the question is the same if you are talking about Revit MEP, Revit Architecture, or Revit Structure. To get to the answer, the first thing you need to do is to determine how the content will be configured and where it will be located.

As you might suspect, creating a combined library located on an accessible network share is the recommended best practice. If you look at the two libraries, you will see that Revit MEP has the more comprehensive content library, seen in the left side image below. Your first step will be to copy this data from what is likely your computer’s hard drive to a secure network share. This data needs to be accessible to all users, but should be protected with Windows security settings to protect against unwanted changes. Next, you can copy over the content folders from Revit Architecture that do not exist in the Revit MEP library.

 

This provides a good repository for approved, completed content – but you should also be sure to provide a Sandbox (a user accessible and editable network share folder) for users to store new content to be reviewed and incorporated into the standard combined library.

Customized content should be organized and stored in a similar folder structure as the default Out Of The Box (OOTB) content, but separate from the default content.  Standard Autodesk content can be stored in a sub-folder (something like “_Default Content”?) to provide users with a uniform browsing environment giving them access to company standard content at the top level while giving them the option of drilling down to the default Autodesk content when necessary.  When migrating to the next release you can then copy the company standard content to the new combined library location and place the “new” Autodesk default content in its sub-folder.

 

BIM 360 – coming to a computer near you!

IMAGINiT will be hosting an online event that could prove to be pretty interesting… yeah – I’m biased, but you should expect that, right??  :)

If you take a look at what you’re doing with your chosen BIM software, what are you getting out of it? What started out as a desire to use BIM to help complete work of varying complexities has (in places) grown into a desire to have a sustained effort to refine overall business and design processes. Do you know what you’d like to change or even what’s possible in the world of BIM today or tomorrow? What possible solutions exist out there beyond Autodesk and Revit? During this event, we’ll look at BIM from every angle and examine – from design through facilities maintenance.

These sessions will be for software users and managers alike - BIM 360 has sessions that speak to business goals as well as helpful information on software programs. Join us for an hour or the entire day.

Sessions will include topics covering design, analysis, documentation, virtual construction, facilities management, and model sharing.

Sessions for software users will be one hour and include demonstrations of various software platforms.
Sessions for managers will be a half-hour and focus on the business issues for each area discussed.

Special thanks to our exhibitors and presenters:
ARCHIBUS
Offit Kurman
SmartBIM
Trelligence

 To register, click here:

https://presentations.inxpo.com/Shows/IMAGINiT/02-11/Registration/registration.html

Custom Annotation Scales in AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD MEP

Well, this is just annoying - it's based off of a support call we received recently... If you look inside plain ‘ol AutoCAD options, you have a button on the "User Preferences" tab from which you can customize the default annotation scale list in your drawings.

 

However, if you look for that same button in AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP, you won’t find it.  :(

 
 

Here’s one way to get those scales edited.

WARNING: THIS SOLUTION INVOLVES EDITING YOUR COMPUTER’S SYSTEM REGISTRY. IF YOU ARE NOT CONFORTABLE WITH THIS, PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING EVERYTHING ALONE. UNINTENDED CHANGES TO THE SYSTEM REGISTRY CAN LEAVE YOUR SOFTWARE OR COMPUTER INOPERABLE. CONTINUE ON AT YOUR OWN RISK! Please back up your registry before editing.

From the Windows Start button, run “regedit”

 

Navigate to the following registry key: “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R18.1\ACAD-9004:409\AEC\6.5\AecBase60\Scales\Inches”

 

If needed, you could edit Feet or Metric here instead. Your computer may have a different number that “ACAD-9004:409”, depending on the particular software you are looking to modify.

Using the same patterns as what you see in this registry key, add in (or delete) the registry strings on the right as needed. To add a new value, right-click on the right side of the screen (or go to the Edit pull down menu) and choose New | String Value.

 

In my case, I added in:
15.ScaleName  1:80
15.ScaleNumber  1
15.ScalePerUnits  80

 

Launch AutoCAD Architecture / AutoCAD MEP. When you go to set the annotation scale, choose the “custom” option, and then reset the scale list to imperial defaults.

 
 

The new default scale list with any custom edits should now be there.