Month: May 2012

Taking geometry from CATIA into Revit

Luke Johnson

CATIA (Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application) is a multi-platform CAD/CAM/CAE commercial software suite developed by the French company Dassault Systemes.


Commonly referred to as a 3D Product Lifecycle Management software suite, CATIA supports multiple stages of product development (CAx), from conceptualization, design (CAD), manufacturing (CAM), and engineering (CAE). CATIA facilitates collaborative engineering across disciplines, including surfacing & shape design, mechanical engineering, equipment and systems engineering.

So, how do we go from CATIA to Revit / 3dsMax?

A couple of videos for this workflow were recently posted to Rethinking BIM here.  One method seems to go Catia to IGS to Rhino to SAT to Revit.  Embedded below:

Export DWG Dimensions problems from Revit 2013

Luke Johnson

Revit au Quotidien has picked up a few mildly scary issues when exporting to DWG from Revit 2013, one seems to be related to dimensions with Text Below, the other to EQ display of actual dimensions.

Have you been experiencing any of these issues?

Read more at:
Text below
Google Translate of http://revitauquotidien.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/revit-2013-bug-l-vers-autocad-dwg.html

EQ display
and Google Translate of http://revitauquotidien.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/revit-2013-bug-l-vers-autocad-dwg-n2.html

Think you know everything about Links and Groups?

Luke Johnson

Aaron Maller is one of the top Revit guys in the world.  In a recent blog post, he provides some handouts for download – this is basically stuff about Links and Groups for the Advanced user – very interesting!

So here they are!
Sample Data Sets
Class Handout

via
Malleristic Revitation: Class Materials- Autodesk TA event- Dallas

Faster Revit application load time for free

Luke Johnson

Cool tip from The Revit Convert on how to skip the splash screen and speed up the loading time of your Revit.exe.  Just right-click on your Revit shortcut icon and go to Properties, then:

From the Properties palette and in the Target box, go to the very end of that long sequence and add {spacebar}/nosplash  (after the ” marks, not inside them) (please do not type {spacebar}, that is just my indication that you use the space bar) 

Read more at:
Want to (slightly) speed up Revit? � The Revit Convert

When Undo will not Undo

Luke Johnson

Every now and then, Revit will remove everything from the list of things you can Undo.

It’s called ‘flushing the undo stack’.

Various things trigger this scary behaviour:

  • Making a Workset editable WITHOUT using the Worksets dialog box
  • Deleting a View, from a workshared project that is not ‘checked out’ (editable, see first point)
  • Deleting a Family via the Project Browser, from a workshared project where the Family is not ‘checked out’ (editable, see first point)

An interesting workaround – if you check out the View workset manually (using the Workset dialog), and THEN Delete it, you can still Undo from this point.

This leads to some seriously scary possibilities – if you plan to delete a view with a 1000 detail lines and text elements, make extra-certain first!

i-model plug-ins for Adobe Reader + Revit = time for 3D BIM PDF ?

Luke Johnson

I previously posted about the i-model plugin for Revit here which ultimately allows you to export from Revit to the Bentley i-model format, and then subsequently Export to a 3D PDF file.

A couple of days ago, Bentley released version 01.00.01.51 of the i-model plug-in for Adobe Reader.

This allows you to:

  • View/interact with i-models using free Adobe software
  • Pan, zoom, rotate, and search embedded i-models

This presents a possible solution for Revit to actually produce 3D PDF files that have legitimate BIM intelligence, through the Bentley i-model plugin for Revit.

FTP download link  for Adobe Reader plugin

Project Vasari SDK Software Development Kit for download

Luke Johnson

In addition to Project Vasari itself, you can now download a Software Development Kit (SDK). This kit is intended for power users who wish to use the Application Program Interface (API) to work with Project Vasari.
The API allows a programmer to:

  • Create add-ins to automate repetitive tasks in the Project Vasari UI
  • Enforce project design standards by checking for errors automatically
  • Extract project data for analysis and to generate reports
  • Import external data to create new elements or parameter values
  • Integrate other applications, including analysis applications, into Project Vasari
  • Create Project Vasari project documentation automatically

// Download Project Vasari SDK via Autodesk Labs

via
Project Vasari Software Development Kit Now Available – It is Alive in the Lab

Some direct links:

Vasari Software Development Kit (SDK)
Project Vasari 2.5 offers an API designed to allow power users and external application developers to integrate their applications with Vasari. It is strongly recommended that you become familiar with Project Vasari and its features before attempting to use the API. Training can be found through the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN).
// download
// more

via
http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/vasari/

Stairs Representation During Upgrade to Revit 2013

Luke Johnson

Awesome post to Wikihelp by Ping Jiang, Software Quality Assurance Engineer, Autodesk.

The short version:
basically when the old stairs upgrade to Revit 2013 and mix with new stairs in the project, we just need to simply uncheck the visibility of ‘above’Riser Lines and Riser Lines, then the representation for them will be almost exactly the same [as pre-2013] in all the views.

Read the complete and detailed guide at:
Stairs Representation During Upgrade – WikiHelp

Hack for Revit 2013 emulated Hardware Acceleration in Parallels or VMWare Fusion

Luke Johnson

From Gordon Price on RFO:

Go to the Revit program folder (C:Program FilesAutodeskRevit Architecture 2013Program for RAC) and look for a file called AdskHardwareCertificationReport.xml. Rename this file AdskHardwareCertificationReport.xml.OOTB and accept the warning about changing file extensions. You will now be able to enable Hardware Acceleration just like you did in 2012. Performance will not be as good as direct graphics hardware, but it will be much faster than WARP.

via
Revit on the Mac (OS X) – Page 6

Read the whole thread if you want to understand some of the limitations and risks of this method.