IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Creating Revit Families, Part 1

Sherry Pittman from our IMAGINiT support team has started a series of posts on family creation in Revit - great if you are just getting into it or want a quick review of the essential fundamentals. Check out her first post on our support blog here:

http://blogs.rand.com/support/2012/01/revit-families-part-1.html

Enjoy!

Joe

New Updates to Autodesk Vasari

Somewhere, somehow, I really want to learn Dynamo.

Vasari has been updated (as per the Autodesk "It's Alive in the Labs" blog:

Automatically Update Export for Solar Radiation

This WIP adds a check box to the Ecotect Solar Radiation tool to allow automatic update of an exported .csv file when analysis results are updated.

Dynamo for Vasari

Build parametric functionality on top of Vasari with a graphical user interface. Autodesk has extended the open source effort of Ian Keough by adding some additional nodes and packaging it in an installer for Vasari to make it easier to get up and running. The download also includes some sample workflows.

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

Enjoy!

joe

Just How Accurate is 123D Catch?

Do you remember Autodesk Lab's Project PhotoFly? Well, it has recently graduated into 123D Catch. And it's still free!

http://www.123dapp.com/catch

The idea behind it is that you can use a digital camera to take pictures of something, load it into this software, and it uses all sorts of black magic and cloud computing to convert these pictures into a real honest to goodness 3D mesh with texture. I used the Labs version to take pictures of a small statue on a co-worker's desk using just the camera on my cell phone and the results were astonishing. You can then take a known dimension on the object to convert it into something that has real size and scale.

But just how accurate is the resulting model? A model generated from nothing more than digital photos.

Well, to help answer that question I thought I'd pass along an article that I recently ran across:

http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~cvjhc/OtherFiles/Accuracy%20of%20123DCatch.htm

It's a pretty interesting (technical) read. If you've never seen 123D Catch or PhotoFly before, here is a video overview: