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.

Direct download:
http://up.autodesk.com/2017/LIVE/Autodesk_LIVE_V1_EN_Win_64bit_dlm.sfx.exe

Help page

Online release notes:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/live/downloads/caas/downloads/content/autodesk-live-10-release-notes.html

New features:

Feature
Description
LIVE Service
  • 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  • The handle used to move and rotate the Minimap has been replaced by using the Controller Grip buttons.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.
Revit LT support
  • LIVE is available for Revit LT.

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:

collections.png

And here is some information on renewals and floating license provisioning:

 

You can get an idea on pricing from the Autodesk UK Store.

Main page:
Industry Collections | Autodesk

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.

You can register for the UNIFI Connect webinar here.

unifi-content.png

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?

Feel free to reply in the comments.

Read more:
Connect Hosting – UNIFI

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.

https://wrw.is/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/status.png

Check it out here:
https://health.autodesk.com/

UPDATE: Metamorphosis Installer for Revit 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018

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.

Installing Metamorphosis

  1. Clone or download from the Github page
  2. Copy the files to your ProgramData Revit addins folder
  3. Restart Revit
installing.png

You should get this on your Addins ribbon:

snapshot.png

Using Metamorphosis – Taking a Snapshot

  1. Open a Revit model
  2. Click the Snapshot button
  3. Choose a location for the snapshot SDB file
  4. Click Start

Using Metamorphosis – Comparing with an Updated Model

  1. Open an updated Revit model
  2. Click the Compare button
  3. Browse for the snapshot file you created
  4. Tick all of the Categories you are interested in

    compare.png

  5. Click Start
  6. On the resulting dialog, you can browse through the Categories
  7. Select a line item to take you to that Revit element

    jumpto.png

  8. Re-group the list by different criteria like “By Change Type”
  9. Click Color Elements to apply a colour to all changes

    colourAndRemove.png

  10. Click Remove Color to remove the colour

This is a great little addin, it works quickly and it has a definite application in the real world. Full credit to all those involved in building it.

And judging by the Github updates, it may be developing further in the future…

Video:

Original post:
AEC Technology Hackathon 2016 — Kyle C Martin

Github:
https://github.com/mattmas/Metamorphosis

Devpost:
Metamorphosis | Devpost

Revit doesn’t like big numbers. There, I said it.

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…

simplified.png

Ok, with the simplified source data in hand, I followed these steps:

  1. Index a new RCP in Recap using the simplified data
  2. 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.
  3. Link this modified DWG into Revit, Center-to-Center
  4. Acquire Coordinates from it
  5. Link the Point Cloud RCP By Shared Coordinates
  6. Everything lines up now that the large coordinate shift error has been avoided!
  7. Link in the original DXF and align it with the modified temporary DWG we were using
  8. You may need to temporarily neutralize coordinates (here or here), and…
  9. 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 🙂

Previous post:
What Revit Wants: Using a DXF to Locate a Point Cloud in Revit with Very Large Coordinates