Occasionally you may find that the Finish Sketch and Cancel Sketch buttons disappear from the Ribbon.

The easiest way to get out of this situation is to map a Keyboard Shortcut for these commands. You can do this at any point (even after they have disappeared from the Ribbon). Simply open the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ dialog, and type ‘Finish Sketch’ in the box.

Then just map a suitable shortcut, like ‘FS’, to the command. As soon as you press OK, you can now use this shortcut to get out of the editing mode.

Revit wants you to understand it. It wants to be logical.

Sometimes you need to give Revit a bit of a hand. You may need to take a few simple steps to make Revit more understandable. David Light has some great tips along these lines over at http://autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/2010/02/point-colour-in-revit-2010.html

This is all part of being a smart Revit user – a few simple changes in Object Styles can give your modeling environment a whole heap more clarity.

Once you have modifed the Object Styles to suit your tastes, save these settings to a template file – so you don’t have to make the same changes each time. Be smart!

“Ribbon Hero currently works with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (both 32/64 Bit) and it is only limited to Version 2007 and 2010 only. Once it is installed, there is a tiny green Ribbon Hero icon added in the Ribbon. When users start using the features in their Word, Excel or PowerPoint, they will start gaining points. Each feature and command available in the software has certain scores…”

Check it out at My Digital Life.

Found some very interesting information on Wikipedia about 32 bit and 64 bit processor architecture – check it out (italics by me):

AMD licensed its x86-64 design to Intel, where it is marketed under the name Intel 64 (formerly EM64T). AMD’s design replaced earlier attempts by Intel to design its own x86-64 extensions which had been referred to as IA-32e. As Intel licenses AMD the right to use the original x86 architecture (upon which AMD’s x86-64 is based), these rival companies now rely on each other for 64-bit processor development. This has led to a case of mutually assured destruction should either company refuse to renew the license. Should such a scenario take place, AMD would no longer be authorized to produce any x86 processors, and Intel would no longer be authorized to produce x86-64 processors, forcing it back to 32-bit x86 architecture. However, the agreement provides that if one party breaches the agreement it loses all rights to the other party’s technology while the other party receives perpetual rights to all licensed technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

If you want to read more about MAD, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction

Here is a brief how-to on creating a large, high resolution rendered Revit walkthrough (or sun study) and then subsequently compressing and uploading it to Youtube.

  1. Setup your walkthrough view.
  2. In Revit, Export – Walkthrough and divide the total frame count of the animation into parts that have a manageable number of frames (I recommend 100).
  3. Do this for each part of the Walkthrough (ie. create files with frames 1-100.avi, then 101-200.avi, 201-300.avi etc). Use ‘Full Frames (uncompressed)’ when creating these parts.
  4. Use VirtualDub to join the parts together. In VirtualDub, open the first part. Press Ctrl-Right arrow (this takes you to the end of the file), then go File – Append AVI Segment… and choose the next part. Do this however many times is need to append all parts to the original file.
  5. In VirtualDub, go to Video – Compression and I recommend using the ‘Cinepak Codec by Radius’ if you have it. Quality = 100.
  6. In VirtualDub, go to Audio and choose ‘No Audio’
  7. Choose Video – Full Processing Mode
  8. Now go File – Save as AVI and create your combined and partly compressed AVI file.
  9. Open Windows Movie Maker. Import the combined file into the collections.
  10. Drag the file into the storyboard at the bottom.
  11. Go to File – Publish Movie. Choose ‘This computer’ and click Next. Choose a filename and location and click Next.
  12. I recommend choosing ‘Best quality for playback on my computer’. This should reduce the file to a manageable size.
  13. Now, open your browser and login to your Youtube account. Choose ‘Upload’.
  14. Select the compressed video you have created, and upload it. This may take a while, so just wait patiently (or do some other work!)
  15. Once uploaded, you can now share the link code with Clients or others who may like to view the animation.

Below is an example of a 1000 frame rendered animation we recently produced at Dimond Architects. It started out at about 1.2 gb, then VirtualDub compressed it to around 225 mb, then Movie Maker compressed it to about 20 mb.It took about a week for one workstation to produce this:

Feel free to share links to any files you upload to Youtube by commenting on this blog post.

Let’s say you have AutoCAD file of unknown origin, and it has some wacky or imprecise units (like the distance between two walls is 8250.092234897). What you need to do is reduce the precision, such that all the decimal points get ‘chopped off’.

To do this:

  • Open the offending DWG in AutoCAD.
  • ‘Save As’ and choose a DXF format.
  • Go to Tools menu – Options (see below)

  • Choose DXF Options, ASCII Format and set the ‘Decimal Places of Accuracy’ to the desired value (choosing 0 will remove all decimal places):

  • Hit Save.

I recommend that you now open the DXF file you saved, and then resave it as a DWG file.Now you can insert your file into Revit, and you won’t have to deal with imprecise units.Please note that this process may result in some ’rounding off’ of values – you may want to double check the resulting file.

I found this process at the following link:
Forum Link