To become a true master of Revit is to know What Revit Wants.  You need to have the right Revitude.

When you know what Revit wants, you can combine your skills and work effectively.  You can use the software to create something both functional and beautiful.

In every field, knowing just one specialty or having just one good workflow is usually not enough.  You must apply the knowledge and experience you have gained after years of trial-and-error, peer assistance, reading, and doing.

For example:

I recently put together a large rendered walkthrough.  I had to combine a number of skills and workflows to make this happen:

  • I had to accurately apply materials to objects in the model.  Using physical paint samples, I had to generate accurate Revit colours – and this technique helped me.
  • When I wanted to quickly duplicate materials between different objects, I used this technique.
  • Because the walkthrough rendering was going to be very resource heavy, I used this method to distribute the rendering between different PCs in the office (without having to use Max)
  • Once I had a bunch of BMP files, I used this tool to rename them appropriately, then
  • This method to join the BMP files into an AVI file
  • Because I wanted to make the most of this walkthrough, I opted to extend it by introducing extra ‘computed’ frames.  I used this method.  Doing this meant less rendering time for more overall impact.
  • To compress the AVI sufficiently to upload to Youtube, I could have use this method, but I used a 3rd party tool instead.

The result of combining all these skills?  See below:

To find out more about this project, check out the link below:
Dimond Architects – Theatre and Performance Centre

“EasyBCD extends and revamps the Windows Vista/Windows 7 BCD bootloader, and with EasyBCD, almost anything is possible. Setting up and configuring a dual-boot between Windows 7, Windows Vista, older versions of Windows such as XP & 2003, Linux, Ubuntu, BSD, and Mac OS X is a breeze. You just point & click and EasyBCD does the rest. EasyBCD is free for all private, non-commercial use.”

A non-breaking space forces Revit to keep two words together, but there is still a visible white space between them.

To do this, just hold down Ctrl and Shift, and press Spacebar.

EDIT:  If you are having troubles with this method in a Tag, use Alt+0160 to insert a No-Break Space. This effectively ignores any “width” of the Label and just keeps text flowing along the same line:

Video demo below:

This little re-quote has been sitting in my ‘Drafts’ folder for a while.  I find it quite challenging:

AEC is the only profession where the fabricators do not own the designers. Nike designs and then fabricates the shoe, Ikea designs and then fabricates the products and basically every element around us owns the fabrication and the design. When contractors figure out how to control the design, then the industry will be turned upside down.
via
Jason Grant’s Blog – Adaptive Practice by Jason Grant

What do you think?

In the right-click menu, select Orient to a View, Floor Plans, and then select the desired floor plan to orient to.

Image from Applied Software Blog

The view will automatically crop the view using the Section Box to match the View Range for the view that was selected. It will also rotate the view to view it from the Top direction. You can orbit the view any direction you want but the view is now cropped to match the floor plan’s View Range.

Image and content via this cool post:
Applied Software Blog: Setting Up 3D Views For Levels

scientific investigation demands repeatability of results that can only be achieved by sharing of experimental models. A common set of building models could reduce the time required for researcher data collection and facilitate associated research and education.

via
bSa Common Building Information Model Files | The National Institute of Building Sciences

Direct links copied from above page below:

Model 1. The Duplex Apartment Model (release 2.0)

The duplex apartment model was originally created by a student who developed this building as part of a design competition. This model was first used at the Dec 2009 COBie Challenge event. The model provided here is the second version of this model completed by designers at Kristine Fallon and Associates.

2011-09-14-Duplex-COBie-DesignStage
2011-09-14-Duplex-IFC
2011-09-14-Duplex-IFCAnalyzer
2011-09-14-Duplex-PDF
2011-09-14-Duplex-RVT
2011-10-04-Duplex-COBie-HandoverStage

Model 2. Office Building Model

The two story office building model was developed based on the published sample floor plans for a specific type of mid-size office building built in the United States.

2011-09-14-Office-COBie
2011-09-14-Office-IFC
2011-09-14-Office-IFCAnalyzer
2011-09-14-Office-PDF
2011-09-14-Office-RVT

Model 3. Clinic Building Model

The Clinic Model was developed based on an actual federal medical and dental clinic building at a location in the South-West United States. The model also comes with a set of redacted design drawings. A full set of operations and maintenance manuals are also available but have not yet been redacted, so cannot yet, be posted to this public repository.

2011-09-14-Clinic-RedactedDrawings
2011-09-14-Clinic-COBie
2011-09-14-Clinic-IFC
2011-09-14-Clinic-IFCAnalyzer
2011-09-14-Clinic-PDF
2011-09-14-Clinic-RVT



Heads up via:
CAD addict: Common Building Information Model Files from the BuildingSmart Alliance

AMD has released the first true 8 core processors. Current Intel i-series chips have up to 4 cores with Hyperthreading, which displays 8 cores to the OS. However, the new AMD architecture may ultimately provide some performance benefit in certain applications (such as rendering).

Initial benchmarks for the new ‘Bulldozer’ architecture show that they are roughly on-par with some of the midrange Intel offerings. However, the new processor architecture has the potential to offer significant gains as applications are optimized and as price points improve.

In Revit terms, more cores means faster rendering.  In day to day computer terms, more cores means you can do more things faster.

In terms of technology and competition, I guess we can be glad that there are at least two big CPU manufacturers.  If you want to read about their mutually assured destruction, check out this link.

More information about Bulldozer CPUs here:
Unlock Your Record Setting AMD FX Series Processor Today

and here
Bulldozer (microarchitecture) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia