IMAGINiT Building Solutions Blog

Twinmotion 2020 Tutorial - Animators

Make your objects move in Twinmotion 2020.2.  The new Animator objects can link any object to a rotation or translation widget to animate your custom objects such as doors, windows, and elevators. Take advantage of included presets like a children’s roundabout, a lifting barrier, an industrial gate, and a retractable bollard. Watch this video to learn how to animate different objects using the new animators, such as doors, windows, fans, and sliding screen.

 

 

Twinmotion 2020 Tutorial - Phasing Tool

Create phased videos of your project's construction schedule faster and easier with the new multi-track, timeline-based Phasing tool in Twinmotion 2020.2. Illustrate the project's progress and present different variations sequentially.  Watch this video and learn:

• The new interface of the Phasing tool
• How to create a construction animation
• Phasing tool settings

 

 

Twinmotion 2020 Tutorial - Interactive & Parametric Doors

Introducing an extensive range of new door assets in Twinmotion 2020.2.  The new parametric doors auto-adjust to fit existing openings and can be set to automatically open based on the proximity of the camera or characters. Watch this video to learn:

• How to add a door to an opening
• How to change the style of the doors
• How to add a door to multiple openings at the same time

 

 

Twinmotion 2020 Tips & Tricks - Working with Reflection Probes

Learn how to gain control of your reflective materials and gain best practices working with reflection probes in Twinmotion. 

 

 

Revit for Landscape Architecture: Scheduling Floor Paving and Understory Planting Areas

Katrina Vea Rodriguez | Senior Application Expert

The floors tool in Revit can be utilized for modeling, and scheduling, both paving and understory planting areas.

In the example below, floor elements were used as paving areas, and assigned Type Marks with a prefix ‘P’. Floors elements were also used as understory planting areas, and assigned Type Marks with a prefix ‘U’.

The difference in prefixes allows separate schedules to be created for Paving and Understory Planting areas. This can be done by assigning schedule filters based on the Type Mark prefix. See images below.

Twinmotion Deep Dive Webinar Series

Immerse yourself in Twinmotion by joining IMAGINiT's visualization experts as they go in-depth with a different topic each month. Check out the three topics featured in August, September, and October. 

Light Up Your Project with Twinmotion

Beginning August 27th, join us for Light Up Your Project and watch how lighting features in Twinmotion can bring a new level of illumination to your projects.  

Topics Include:

• Global Illumination – create realism as light bounces off surfaces and affects others, even reflecting color from particular materials.
• Volumetric Lighting – enhance the ambiance with sunbeams and streams of light, also known as “God’s Rays.”
• Omni & Area Lights – lighten dark areas with light rays cast in all directions from a single source.
• Specialty Lights – achieve different lighting effects with colors, materials, and neon options.
• Physically-Based Sky – view the most realistic lighting in the context of the project’s location.

Register here to attend Light Up Your Project with Twinmotion on August 27th!

Bring Your Project to Life with Twinmotion

Bring your project to life on September 22nd with interacting characters and reactive materials. Ever wish you could see into the future? See how your project appears today compared to 20 years from now with aging vegetation, season changes, weather, and time-lapse options. 

Topics Include:

• Animated Characters
• NEW Parametric Objects like doors, windows and retractable screens
• Aging Vegetation, including new vegetation available in Twinmotion 2020.2
• Reactive Materials, including new materials available in Twinmotion 2020.2
• Seasons, weather, and time

Register to attend Bring Your Project to Life with Twinmotion on September 22nd

 

Contextual Project Review with Twinmotion

Decrease RFI’s and enhance communication between stakeholders by conducting Project Reviews in the context of the real world. The October 13th webinar features, annotation, phasing, and project review tools with real-time visualization. 

Topics Include:

• Annotation options to communicate with stakeholders
• X-ray materials for underground utilities
• Phasing
• Section and measurement tools

Register to attend Contextual Project Review with Twinmotion on October 13th!

We hope you're able to attend one or all of the Twinmotion Deep Dive webinars. You can also learn more about Twinmotion in the IMAGINiT Resource Center.  View past webinars, tips & tricks, tutorials, and more. 

Five Efficient Ways of Cleaning AutoCAD Drawings

If you are thinking that your drawing does not need optimization then think again, maybe you are missing great benefits of having a clean drawing.

An optimized drawing with a minimum amount of unnecessary data tends to perform faster, the drawing load time is significantly better and chances of drawing corruption also reduce to a great extent.

In this article, I have compiled a list of six efficient ways of cleaning and optimizing your drawing. Let’s start with the most common Purge and Overkill commands.

Purge and Overkill

These are probably the first few commands which are used by almost every draftsman to clean their drawing. Purging a drawing cleans all redundant or unused entities like layers, blocks, line types etc. from your drawing.

To use purge command type PURGE on the command line and hit enter, a new purge window will pop up. Click on Purge All button from this window, you may need to click on Purge all button several times to remove all redundant objects from the drawing.

When the drawing becomes completely clean the purge all button grays out, click on close button to exit purge window.

Overkill is another such cleanup tool, by using overkill all the overlapping or duplicate drawing entities can be removed and merged together.

To use overkill type OVERKILL on the command line and press enter, the command line will now prompt you to select objects from drawing area. Type ALL and press enter, this will select complete drawing in our selection set for applying overkill. Press enter again and click on OK in the delete duplicate objects window.

Write Block

This may not look like a straightforward drawing cleanup tool but it is very efficient in cleaning all useless clutter from your drawing.

This method should only be used when you have no other option of cleaning your drawing as this method causes loss of data from your drawing including layer assignments.

This command transfers all drawing elements to another clean and blank template leaving all clutter behind. To use this feature open the affected drawing then type WBLOCK and press enter.

This will open write block window, select Objects radio button from source panel and then click on pick points button and specify a base point in drawing. Then move to objects panel and click on select objects button and make a selection to include all drawing entities from your drawing

Although you could have also used Entire drawing radio button from source panel to include all drawing entities in your selection set, but I prefer making the manual selection because it helps in avoiding selection of invisible drawing entities which are generally present in your drawing outside your work area.

From the Destination panel specify the path where you want to save the exported drawing and click OK. The cleaned drawing will now be saved on the specified path.

Audit and Recover

These commands are generally used to remove errors from AutoCAD drawings, a drawing containing errors can unnecessarily become bloated up.

To clean this kind of drawings type AUDIT on the command line and press enter. Command line will now prompt you to specify whether you want to fix detected errors or not, type Y and press enter to find and fix all detected errors.

Recover command can be used at places where the drawing is corrupt to such an extent that it can’t be opened. For these situations open a blank drawing type RECOVER and press enter then browse affected drawing from select file window and click on open.

AutoCAD will attempt to recover your drawing removing all errors from it and then it will open it in a new session.

Sometimes AutoCAD drawings file size becomes too bloated up with seemingly no data in it.

This error also leads to other issues like lagging cursor when selecting annotations like text and dimensions, copy paste not working in AutoCAD and file taking too long to open.

This issue also spreads to unaffected files if data from the affected file is copied to an unaffected file. This issue starts in a drawing due to improper data import from DGN files resulting in huge drawing database.

Autodesk offered a hotfix of this issue for versions older than 2014 but with AutoCAD 2015 and later version they implemented DGN purge feature within the standard PURGE command.

To remove this kind of orphaned data from AutoCAD 2015 and later versions type PURGE and press enter then select Automatically purge orphaned data radio button from purge window as shown in the image above.

Cleaning Unreferenced Regapps

With the excess of unreferenced Registered application ID’s the drawing starts to show larger than normal size and performance issue creeps in.

To clean unreferenced Regapp Id’s type -PURGE on the command line (don’t forget to add a dash before PURGE) and press enter. Then select Regapp from the command line and press enter when command line prompts you to specify the name of Regapp. Keep pressing enter till all unreferenced Regapps Id’s are purged.

Although you can use -PURGE command for purging unreferenced Regapp Id’s in a single drawing but for multiple drawings it simply becomes a time taking task and for those cases you can use Regapp ID cleanup utility tool to batch process unreferenced Regapp Id’s cleanup.

You can also use -PURGE command to clean other entities like zero-length geometry and empty text objects that otherwise cannot be deleted from standard PURGE command.

Drawing Purge Add-in

This free add-in is available for download on Autodesk app store, download it here.

I tried this app and it worked perfectly, this tool can take the pain of applying many commands to clean your drawing out of your workflow. Using this tool you can purge almost all redundant and unused entity in your drawing including unused DGN data.

If a drawing contains an X-ref then it will scan for DGN data in referenced files as well and prompt you to select whether you want to clean DGN data from Xref also.

To use this tool download it from the link above and install it. Then restart your AutoCAD software and go to add-ins tab and select Purge from Drawing Purge panel.

The tool can also perform bulk cleaning task for multiple drawings. To perform batch cleaning operation click on Batch Purge icon on Drawing purge panel of add-ins tab. A batch drawing purge & settings window will appear, click on Select drawings or Select Folder icon in the top left corner of this window and select a folder containing all your drawings or select multiple drawings manually.

When all the drawings are listed in the window click on Purge button on the lower right corner as shown in the image below.

It will perform purge operation on all selected drawing’s and it will show file size before and after performing purge along with a list of items purged for each drawing.

Reference Resource: https://thesourcecad.com/clean-autocad-drawings/

Just launched, Twinmotion 2020.2 is now available!

Exciting news! Twinmotion launches the newest version 2020.2 today.  Users of Twinmotion will see the update appear in their Epic Games account over the next couple of hours. Remember, updates are FREE until December 2021 for those who purchase before September 1, 2020 or who have already purchased Twinmotion. 

Twinmotion 2020.2 comes with an array of stunning new features!

• interactive parametric doors that open automatically as you approach
• animate the translation and rotation of user-owned objects such as doors, window, and retractable screens
• improved water materials for lakes, ponds, and streams
• simulate rainy days with improved puddle effects
• access a library of new East Asian trees
• customize aircraft with your branding including colors and logo
• add more realism to your construction site with a new selection of construction vehicles
• multi-track timeline-based tool for fast, easy visualization of the project and construction schedule

 

 

Create a New Service in Fabrication CADmep Database

To create a new service in Fabrication CADmep database:

1. In the Sections and Services Palette, click on Edit Service Database button to open the Setup Services dialog box.

2. When a new Service is created it is a copy of an existing Service. In the Setup Services dialog box change the Service drop-down to a Service similar to the one to be created.

3. In the Setup Services dialog box, with “Services” highlighted on the left, click on New Service button. Click Yes in the New Service dialog box. This will open the Edit Service Template dialog box.

In the Edit Service Template dialog box you can assign a new Service Name, Service Abbreviation, Group appropriately, and Assign a Service Template.

• Service Name: Gives the name of the service
• Group: Organizes which header the service is organized under within the database. A new group can be created by typing in a new name.
• Abrv: Provides an abbreviation that can be used in tagging
• Use Service Template: Provides the parts used in the service. The Service Template is the organizing element for what parts are used in a service. If you edit the Service Template, every Service that uses that Service Template will be edited.