IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

The 3 Habits of Great Creative Teams

If you're like me and working this week, you might be experiencing a fair amount of down time where you can take care of general administrative work. During this time, I also find myself looking at places like Ted.com for inspiration and things to make me think. Well, this time I've got a video for you that is from a different site - 99u.com. A person I am linked to in LinkedIn shared it (thanks Angelo, if you follow this blog) and after watching it I wanted to share with everyone here. It is about 23 minutes long, but is well worth it. Enjoy and have fun!

  

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

Ken Flannigan Interview at Sustainabuild

IMAGINiT's own Ken Flannigan was at Sustainabuild in Vancouver recently, and while there he gave this interview - take a quick watch and listen, there are some nice thoughts and good insight:

http://www.journalofcommerce.com/article/id53263/--video-ken-flannigan-at-sustainabuild-vancouver-2012

Enjoy and have fun!

joe

Revit output formats in plain English.

Revit exports to many different file formats. But what do they all mean? We've put together the following table to help you navigate this extensive list of formats.

Logo	Format	Extension	Details
	DWG	.dwg	Industry standard for CAD-based drawings. DWGs are the native filetype for AutoCAD. Other non-Autodesk software can also open and modify this filetype.
	DXF	.dxf	An "open" CAD filetype developed by Autodesk. It's goal is to allow interoperability between different CAD vendors. Essentially, it's a watered-down DWG.
	DWF	.dwf/.dwfx	The Design Web Format is a lightweight file format you can use to exchange Building Models. Think of it as a PDF for Building Models.
	GBXML	.xml	An XML schema defining a structure to exchange energy Analysis Model data. Used by many Building Information Modelling software packages on the market.
	FBX	.fbx	File format used to transfer model data from Revit to 3ds Max without any information loss. It's great for sending a building model to a rendering specialist. If linked into 3ds max properly, it can be easily reloaded by the rendering specialist when a new model is sent his way, preventing re-work.
	DGN	.dgn	The native file format for Bentley's Microstation CAD and BIM platforms.
	PDF	.pdf	Portable document file. Supported in Revit via 3rd party printer.
	IFC	.ifc	Industry Foundation Classes. An open-source building information modelling file format maintained by the BuildingSmart alliance. Revit 2013 now exports to version 2x2 and 2x3.
	ACIS	.sat	A 3D modelling file type that combines wireframe, surface and solid modelling in one file. Common among CAM (Computer Aided Modelling) software vendors.
	ADSK	.adsk	Autodesk exchange is Autodesk's attempt at making their software talk to each other better. It allows you to bring in Inventor models as Revit families for example.

In addition to all of these file formats, the suites also have direct exports to other Autodesk software. See the Revit Wiki for more info.

Another important note is that Revit exports to SDNF and CIS/2 via the Autodesk Extensions. These file formats can be used for exchange with structural analysis and detailing programs.

If you notice that we've missed one, please let us know in the comments below!