Until Revit comes up with some kind of advanced and granular permissions management for workshared files, we are left with a situation that requires best-practice Revit use combined with 100% obedient staff. If you would like to take matters into your own hands in the meantime, you can use this somewhat scary hack to check out worksets using a concealed user name. As with many posts on What Revit Wants – use at your own risk!
In short:
Copy the username into Microsoft Word and change it to a different font in this example the font called AIGDT. (which is just associate symbols to letters).
Copy the username (AIGDT font) back into Revit and as you can see Revit just shows it as bullets.
Worksets checked out to that user will appear to others like this:
Scenario – you have a TV that only has a LAN port (not wireless), a Netbook that sits in the corner (has been replaced by a tablet), and you want to share Internet to your TV. You can use the Netbook as a wireless repeater … but not if it is running Windows 7 Starter.
Instead, just use JoliCloud OS Express. You can install it from within Windows (which will create an additional Linux based OS to boot your netbook into), and once installed it is incredibly easy to share internet.
To share your Internet connection, whether cellular or otherwise,
right-click on the same Network Manager icon and select “Edit Connections…”.
Click the “Add” button on either the Wired or Wireless tab, depending on which way you plan to share your Internet connection. Give the new connection a descriptive name like “Shared Internet Connection”.
On the IPv4 tab, select “Shared to other computers” as the Method. Click “Apply”.
Reboot your netbook. After you sign in, activate the Internet connection in the Network Manager menu if it is not automatically activated. It might also be necessary to manually activate your “Shared Internet Connection” by clicking on the corresponding Network Manager menu entry. You should now be actively sharing your Internet connection with your home network.
Nasty little bug picked up by Jason Kunkel. Basically, you make View Template based on a Schedule View. Then, when you go to delete that original Schedule View, Revit will prompt you with a “View:ViewTemplateName will be deleted” message. Pressing OK deletes the View Template and therefore leaves any Schedule views with the Template orphaned…
I also discovered that if you Duplicate the Template you made as discussed above, and then delete the original Schedule View, it will prompt to delete BOTH the original Template and the duplicated Template!
I tested this using latest update of Revit 2013.
From Jason’s blog: When you go to delete it, Revit tells you that it is going to delete them. And then it does. Poof. Gone. Any schedule that had that View Template assigned is now set to NONE. On top of that, any View Template that was copied from the prior ones are “linked” as well, so this could be pretty disruptive to your schedule View Templates.
Interesting aberration that you could use to your advantage – reposted from SARUG:
I had Sam override the visibility setting for the masked region and make it transparent, in the linked file, and then update the link. For some baffling reason the ceiling could now be seen and the ACAD file was properly masked where the ceiling was. The only thing I can figure is that the override to transparency was carried through to the active project revealing the ceiling but the masked region was still seen as a masking element as it related to the ACAD file.
Most of you already know that VEO is very smart when it comes to document handling – for example, you can easily attach PDFs to elements in the model. You may have seen my Revit eStorage post, which allowed you to “store” any file on any element in a Revit model. Now…
The source code for a Revit add-in project allowing you to “Generate QRcodes within Revit 2013 using native Detail objects (filled regions) and group each instance together” has recently been released.
Can you think of some file handling and document management tricks that could be implemented here? Links to an FTP site, for example, mapped to QR codes in the RVT model?
Sometimes, its good to take a breath and think about where Revit and BIM have led us. One case study, recently presented at SARUG by Andrew Abernathy (in slideshow form) included the following interesting points:
Mindset change needed to succeed
Work became standardized and reuse from project-to-project greatly increased
Marketing was transformed from “Let me show you my great design.” to “Let me show you how I deliver more value.”
studied old document sets from over 50 years ago. We found multiple views of the same assembly all together…
Revit is transformative software tool for both designers and builders
I have previously posted about MIT OpenCourseWare. There is actually a site that essentially aggregates courses from all over the web and from a number of different learning institutions, and then provides a link for you to access that particular course and the related resources. Check it out at: Online Courses Directory
Here are a couple of examples of courses that you can access (Blender, and programming in C):
The key difference is that this add-in allows you to physically type in Element IDs before the tool runs – I think that this could be very useful for tracking down your Revit Errors / Warnings.
Many legal questions are getting asked in and around the BIM community. From “Who owns the model?” to “Who is responsible to track changes?”, we find ourselves in a new and somewhat scary world of legal consequences to our modelling action.
Some of these issues are captured in the following downloads and quotes, which in turn were taken from a post on Out-Law.com, a legal news site run by Pinsent Masons.
Here are a few interesting quotes: The Protocol published by the Construction Industry Council (CIC) is to be incorporated into existing construction contractual arrangements, although its terms can then be amended to set out particular rights around intellectual property ownership. It sets out the obligations that the different contracting parties would have to adhere to under the terms of individual projects…
“…it is a clear step forward and should accelerate the up-take of BIM across the UK construction industry, particularly on public sector projects.” (quoting Infrastructure law specialist Khalid Ramzan of Pinsent Masons)
As might be expected, the definition of BIM is perhaps a little naive, or maybe just utopian? A BIM system uses a computer generated model to collect and manage information about the design, construction and operation of a project centrally. It is especially useful where many parties, such as different sub-contractors, provide input on the same project. Any changes to the design of a project made during its construction are automatically applied to the model.
Free download of PAS 1192-2:2013 Specification for information management for the capital/delivery phase of construction projects using building information modelling at:
