Category: Uncategorized

My mate Greg Arkin

Luke Johnson

The online Revit community can be a pretty fun place. And yes, I know that sounds nerdy.

My mate Gregory Arkin called me via long distance Skype the other day – it was great to have a chat with him! He has really been a stalwart member of the Revit community for a long time now. But it is still fun to tease him occasionally 🙂 I have beaten him to press a few times lately – usually because he is bound by certain rules (as a reseller), that I am not bound by. As you can see below, he does tend to react to some of the teasing and banter…(bolded by me)

begin quotes

Luke posted about this a few days ago and only because his reseller, who will probably get in a lot of trouble for preleasing information, so let’s make this official.
http://bimboom.blogspot.com/2011/05/autodesk-is-giving-away-free-software.html

So, Luke, your technorati statistics mean nothing here. You may have the best blog in Porpoise Spit Australia, but here, in the real world, BIMBoom will always reign supreme.

Luke to make sure we don’t have this competition next year, I just want you all to know that Revit Architecture 2013 will be shipping on April 13, 2012. Yup. That’s release “13” releasing on Friday the 13th. I hope you’re not superstitious. I really don’t know when it’s shipping, but it’s always nice to be first or number one.
http://bimboom.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-other-bim-blogger-newsi-won.html

Thanks Luke. You unofficially beat me, but I’m not allowed to officially discuss the release date until it becomes available to everyone. Consider it a subscription benefit to get the software a few days early.
http://bimboom.blogspot.com/2011/04/revit-2012-downloadle-nowfor-some.html

…and then there’s Luke. Luke has a great blog, https://wrw.is/. Luke worries me a little. He writes almost as many blog posts as I do. Thankfully, his are all very technical and based on the use of Revit at his firm. Luke, keep up the great work. Luke, yes, I was double tricking you.
http://bimboom.blogspot.com/2011/04/about-that-revit-save-as-previous.html

end quotes

Keep up the good work Gregory! What would life be without a bit of fun?

Revit 2012 Materials and Property Sets

Luke Johnson

“information can be provided to the material by linking to a seperately defined property set (by Property Set), or can be input directly into the material (Independent). This allows several materials to share a single set of properties and changes to that property set to propagate to all those materials.“

Read the rest of this informative post at:
Revit OpEd: Revit 2012 Materials and Property Sets

Creating an Appearance Library – WikiHelp

Also from the WikiHelp on this subject:
Each material can have two types of properties referred to as aspects: appearance and structural. You can store appearance and structural property sets in their own library. Appearance property libraries adhere to the Autodesk standard Protein format and have the following file extension: .adsklib. 
 Structural property libraries are written in an XML format and have the following file extension: .adstlib. 

When a user appearance property set library is loaded, it is always available in the Materials dialog. Structural user libraries are available per project. They will not load unless you specifically load them into a project. 

You can create new property set libraries in Revit or by creating .adsklib files with an external editing application.
Managing Property Set Libraries – WikiHelp
 

Free Upgrade to Building Design Suite for Revit Suite owners!

Luke Johnson

Autodesk is offering a free upgrade to Autodesk Building Design Suite Premium.  I just got off the phone from our reseller (KarelCAD) and those who currently hold one of the Revit Suite subscription licenses (RAC Suite, RMEP Suite, RST Suite) qualify for this free upgrade.

According to our reseller, this is a limited time promotion for 2 months.

I’m unsure if it is going to be rolled out globally, or if it is just limited to Australia.

This is basically equivalent to Autodesk giving you a free copy of Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design to play with.

Here is the only catch – if you accept this free upgrade, your subscription cost will increase.  In our case, it will be an additional $375 (ex GST) per license per year.  In real terms, I guess it will take quite a few years of paying this increased subscription to actually ‘break even’ with how much it would have cost to buy 3ds Max outright.

Challenging article at Arch | Tech

Luke Johnson

Phil Read has posted a confronting analysis of the current state of the BIM software industry.

Here are some quotes I found particularly stimulating:

“When I demonstrated Revit during sales presentations, people were very quick to raise the numerous objections:
  • 3DMax was a better tool for modeling
  • VIZ was a better tool for rendering
  • AutoCAD was a better for detailing and documentation
  • Excel was a better for creating spreadsheets and schedules
And you know what? They were right. And they still right. Compared feature to feature, Revit can’t compete with those kinds of tools.”
” Applications create silos. Exported data means that the everyone is working in separate versions of the truth;”
“…I don’t believe that Revit is capable of evolving beyond it’s designed intent as a tool to resolve coordinated documentation.”
 “Revit isn’t the center of this ecosystem of geometry and data; it seems to orbit other applications (Navis, ProjectWise, etc) that in turn attempt to integrate data across domains.”

Read the entire article:
Arch | Tech: Why Can’t We Be Friends?

Something that isn’t mentioned here is monopolization.  At times we feel that an all-in-one Design/BIM/Documentation/Presentation tool would be awesome.  But where is the competition?  If we all end up using one powerful piece of software (ie. Windows), who makes the developer accountable?