After spending lots of time with Point Clouds lately, making heaps of section boxes and then manually rotating them to match walls, I finally decided to shoutout to the Twitterverse for some help…

Following a several-days-long Twitter exchange, Harry Mattison has created a cool add-in and provided it for download at:
http://gdurl.com/Hmdo/download

(also on Boost Your BIM product page)

And yes, it automatically rotates the Section Box!!  Essentially, this produces a box that is “aligned” to the Wall.  Conversely, the Coins version currently only produces aligned section boxes when you produce a section box around a scope box or around a section line.

Evox Linkator will give you access to a new toolbar that contains all the commands necessary to create links to web sites or files from your PC.
Everything is possible through two simple buttons with which you can connect the elements or the whole family to a Web site, to data sheets in PDF, dwg of detail and everything you need to integrate your project.
From Manager you will be able to monitor all links anytime, in order to control those to be repaired or to eliminate unnecessary ones.

Download at:
eVox Linkator TRIAL | Autodesk Revit | Autodesk Exchange Apps

Last night I posted about a new 3Dconnexion product, which was launched alongside new drivers:
3dxWare 10 for 64bit

As a SpacePilot Pro user, I was tempted to download and try these new drivers (despite the fact that the Release Notes indicated the SPP was unsupported).  Guess what?  The drivers work with the SPP, and now I have Radial Menus.
These things are amazing.  Just click a button on the SPP, and a customizable menu appears, centred over the cursor of my standard mouse.
After installing the new drivers, open Revit, and do this:
  1. Go to 3Dconnexion Properties.. (see image below) (you can also rightclick the black icon in the taskbar, while Revit is active)
  2. Click Buttons
  3. Click the arrow next to one of the buttons
  4. Expand Radial Menus, and click new Radial Menu
  5. Type the Radial Menu name, and then add 4 commands using keyboard shortcuts to the 4 entries (click in the box and type)
  6. To change the command alias, click the arrow next to the keyboard shortcut, then click the pencil.  When you change the Macro Name, this is what will appear on the screen on the Radial Menu. (You can also add a series of keypresses using this dialog, to set up T-R- for trim etc).
When setting up your menus, you could either use:

or

to determine the most “important” shortcuts.

There are at least three reasons why this is a great product:

  • the new driver package, which provides an onscreen display for the quick selection of shortcuts using the SpaceMouse Wireless.  They call it the “Radial Menu”.  You can customize the Radial Menu to take the place of traditional keyboard shortcuts (but there is a still definitely a place for the higher end pro devices, as you cannot use “multi-selecting” keyboard modifiers like Ctrl or Shift (which you can find on SMP / SPP) via the radial menus as you can’t “hold” them on the radial menu while navigating with the cap)
  • wireless tech combined with 6 degrees of freedom for 3D editing
  • the competitive price point (more accessible to many users than the SpacePilot Pro)

Let’s just say that I have already ordered mine…

Documentation:
Press Release

Q&A document

Drivers:
Release notes

3dxWare 10 for 64bit

According to the release notes, 3DxWare64:  includes  all  x64  (64-bit)  Windows  driver  and  plug-in  software  for  all currently supported 3D except SpacePilot Pro. 

Note: if the above underlining was too subtle, you can download and use this new driver package and get the “Radial Menu” with your current 3Dconnexion device! 

You can also use the driver page at:
http://www.3dconnexion.com/service/drivers.html 



Product Images:

Most of you probably know that you can use a Decal in a 3D view set to Realistic for 3D masterplanning.  The annoying part is that you have to somehow scale the Decal properly.

You may also know that Vasari has a nice built-in method of grabbing Google Earth imagery and unlike Revit, Vasari is happy to show this image in 3D views.

Now, Philip Chan has combined these two methods to make a decent workflow for Revit:

  1. Grab the image in Vasari first
  2. Open that Vasari file in Revit
  3. Import the same image from Vasari into Revit as a Decal and place it on a flat workplane
  4. Use the “borders” of the Vasari image to properly scale the Revit decal
Its a bit fiddly, but until Revit supports images in 3D views, it will have to do.  Or, you could convert the image to a DWG and use that (I’m mostly kidding).

In Philip’s words:
use a trick to get it scale properly. I actually used the Vasari file that I made earlier, I drew some model lines at the boundary of the image, copy the model lines to the clipboard, and then paste them into my site file. Now that I had the actual size of the boundary, I could use the same image export from Vasari and placed it as a decal.

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