Autodesk’s answer to realtime rendering from Revit is continuing its steady development. Now known as Autodesk Revit Live (formerly Autodesk LIVE), the new features include being able to choose visual styles for RPC, and support for Revit LT.
Level of Details geometry generation and material instancing have been added to the LIVE Service to enhance performance when working with large models and/or virtual reality.
Virtual Reality
The handle used to move and rotate the Minimap has been replaced by using the Controller Grip buttons. This provides a more natural and instinctive way to move, rotate, and scale your Minimap model.
People Styles and Animation
You can choose between three visual styles for the RPC characters imported from Revit as part of your scene.
Characters have subtle animation that can be turned on or off.
Characters can be hidden or made visible.
Header
The view name is part of the default header.
The scene’s header is editable.
Textures
Texture orientation and offsets are consistent with what is set in Revit.
Customer texture files placed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\Materials\Textures folder are used in LIVE service to generate the LIVE models.
Publishing
Presentations published from scenes prepared from the same Revit file but different 3D views no longer overwrite each other.
In case you missed it: Autodesk Suites are gone, you can’t buy them officially anymore. Instead, you can buy into an Industry Collection. Here are products in each Collection, from the FAQ:
And here is some information on renewals and floating license provisioning:
I’m wondering if 2017 will be the year that BIM content management stopped being hard 🙂 Maybe that’s going a bit far, but the fact is that there are some great content management tools out in the market now. In fact, I have spent the last few months doing some detailed analysis and comparison of these. But more on that later…
In the meantime, how do you go about integrating Manufacturer content into your Company BIM / Revit library? Its an interesting question because usually your company content may be high quality, audited, approved, and regularly updated. But the manufacturer content can sometimes leave a lot to be desired. With those thoughts in mind, the upcoming webinar about UNIFI Connect could prove to be quite helpful. Unifi are looking at ways to share manufacturer content through their already awesome platform.
This all plays into a larger conversation about BPM. Think about the recent merge of the Autodesk Seek content over to BIMobject. It is one thing to collect a lot of manufacturer content, but quite another to ensure its quality and applicability to a given user. How are you going about solving this problem? Do you use BPM at all, or do you use generic in-house content?
Have you experienced a blank and somewhat non-responsive Print dialog in Revit? Pressing Setup does nothing in this situation:
What’s going on here? Well, there is something in the Microsoft Print to PDF driver that Revit doesn’t like, possibly to do with paper sizes or something. How do we fix it?
Just set your default printer to something else, like Bluebeam or CutePDF. Then, Close and re-open the Print dialog in Revit:
As you can see, now the dialog is happier and you can proceed to setup your sheet print settings.
As we move more and more information and services to the cloud, 100% uptime becomes more and more necessary. In our BIM world, if you are running a project on C4R (Collaboration for Revit), and that cloud service goes down, the project could be severely affected.
If uptime is important, so is monitoring and reporting. You can now view the latest “health” status and history of Autodesk Cloud products using the Autodesk Health Dashboard.
This is a very useful addin coded by Matt Mason during a recent Hackathon. Basically, it lets you take a Snapshot of a Revit file at a point in time and save that info to a small database file. It is not saving pure geometry, but a lightweight set of all the useful information about the model, including parameters. Then, when you get a new file, you run the Compare function to compare that snapshot against the current model. Very cool.
This has been a ‘best practice’ rule for a while now, but it still applies, even in 2017. You should not mix Revit 2017.1 and 2017.2 on a single Central File.
So when dealing with ‘world’ coordinates in a point cloud, sometimes things just don’t work too well. I thought I had this all solved recently by using the DXF, Center-to-Center, Acquire Coordinates workflow. However, I discovered that somewhere along the line, Revit still does break down with the large coordinates. I think this is happening in between Recap and the Revit point cloud rendering engine. I was getting something that looked like this:
As you can see, the shared coordinate system is very large. In this situation, you can’t even move the point cloud into the correct location in Revit, it jumps in large increments when moving. Interestingly, Navisworks and AutoCAD both handle these large coordinates ok – appending the same data does not have the error shown above. So…
How do we fix this and make Revit happy?
Basically, we do a temporary truncation of the source data, get it into Revit, and then reinstate the appropriate coordinate system.
To truncate the data, have a look at your source point cloud information. In my case, I could identify 4 leading digits for the X and Y coordinates that were not significant:
Using EmEditor (which handles large text files very well), and its Vertical Selection feature, I was able to delete the 2781 and 6181 digits from my source data.
In effect, this transformed everything by 278100m and 6121000m. Keep these numbers in mind for future reference…
Ok, with the simplified source data in hand, I followed these steps:
Index a new RCP in Recap using the simplified data
Open surveyor DXF file in AutoCAD and manually Move all the geometry. Move the objects by the values above (278100, 6121000) towards the origin. Save As – a new DWG file with modified coordinates.
Link this modified DWG into Revit, Center-to-Center
Acquire Coordinates from it
Link the Point Cloud RCP By Shared Coordinates
Everything lines up now that the large coordinate shift error has been avoided!
Link in the original DXF and align it with the modified temporary DWG we were using
You may need to temporarily neutralize coordinates (here or here), and…
Now you can Acquire Coordinates from the original DXF and you will have reinstated the ‘world coordinates’, but the Revit point cloud rendering engine is now much happier.
Hope this helps you if you face a similar problem 🙂