IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

SketchUp is Google No More

I don't know if you have heard about this yet, but yesterday Google announced the sale of SketchUp to Trimble:

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2012/04/new-home-for-sketchup.html

Overall I think this is a good fit, but I find it interesting that Google is selling off what has been a successful product - it certainly has a strong foothold in the building design community. If Google was determined to sell SketchUp, Trimble - who is well established in surveying and mapping - is a good destination as far as the building design world is concerned.

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Joe

2013 Subscription Software Download

Can all of you stop downloading so I can get my stuff? :) When I go to my Autodesk Subscription site to download the new Building Design Suite software, I see the following notice:

Back in reality now, it's nice to see that there are a lot of people eager to get to their new 2013 software from Autodesk. Come on around to meet with us virtually at our Know It.All. event on May 2nd for some good information on these new products!

In the meantime, make sure you have some fun!

joe

Revit 2013 and Video Cards

UPDATE:

NVIDIA Driver 296.35 (or maybe a complete system rebuild... take your pick) has resolved this issue for me. I no longer have transparent materials bleeding through my walls.

Original post below:

Revit 2013 and Video CardsI’m playing around a little with Revit 2013 and have been finding an issue with my video card, 3D views, and transparent materials. Any surface that has a transparent material on it (like glass) shows through the model, even if it should be hidden from view:

To verify that it was truly transparency and not some other material or object setting, I modified the glass material’s transparency setting to make it… well… not transparent. :) As you can see in the image below, that fixed the issue for the blue glass, but other transparent materials bled through just as before.

So what now? You can’t go through and turn off transparency in all materials for many reasons (including graphic display, energy analysis and the fact that you really just shouldn’t need to do this at all!). There are a couple of things at play here. First and foremost, as I go into Display Options in Revit, my video card is not a certified video card, and it tells me straight up that if things aren’t working right, to turn off hardware acceleration.

Well, OK, turning off hardware acceleration fixes everything – material transparency is back on and it all looks good on screen, but darn it, I want to have hardware acceleration!

At this point, if you have a similar issue to me, you probably have two options:

1. Wait for NVIDIA to update their driver to fix this issue
2. See if a different, older, driver fixes things.

I have a colleague that has a slightly different video card that was showing the same issue. He was able to go to the Autodesk site and find a certified driver for his video card and Inventor 2012, installed it instead of the most recent one on the NVIDIA site, and it resolved his display issues. Not so much luck for me. I’ll deal with no hardware acceleration and wait for an updated driver to hopefully fix the problem.

... and in all honesty, I'm OK with that...

smell the roses

joe