Category: Uncategorized

What is your opinion of BIM?

Luke Johnson

In a recent Twitter experiment, I posted three different opinions of BIM and have been monitoring the response through Retweets. Here are the results (as these are embedded tweets, the results will change over time).

The results thus far appear to be overwhelmingly positive – that BIM is indeed “awesome”. I guess the majority of my Twitter followers are, unsurprisingly, supporters of BIM.

I’ll keep this page live as a checkpoint for the statistics – it will be interesting to drop in from time to time and see if the results change as more people from outside my Twitter circle weigh in on this BIM thing…

Built In Parameter Checker updated for Revit 2015

Luke Johnson

Jeremy Tammik has kindly upgraded and released BipChecker for Revit 2015, you can download it at:
https://github.com/jeremytammik/BipChecker

Steps to get it going:

  1. Download ZIP
  2. Extract
  3. Open SLN in Visual Studio 2013 Express (free)
  4. Right click on BipChecker in Solution Explorer and open Properties
  5. Go to Reference Paths and add your Revit program directory
  6. Build Solution

It should instantly be visible in Revit 2015, Addins, External Tools – even if you have Revit open. While it has many uses, immediately obvious are the fact that it shows whether a parameter is read-write and it also displays GUIDs for Shared Parameters. You can choose whether to display Instance or Type Parameters. Cool.

Here is some sample output:

Intelligent Issue Tracking in Revit, with download.

Luke Johnson

Ok, lets say you have a large team working on a single Revit project, and questions fly back and forth. Some firms use a Clash box, which is then listed in a Generic Model Schedule. Unfortunately, these can’t be placed in drafting views or on sheets.

This is where an annotation family comes in. When associated with a Note Block schedule, it provides a decent “inside Revit” method for creating and tracking questions and answers. It can be used on sheets, in 2D views, plan views etc. It works in Legend views but will not schedule from them. It can’t be placed directly in a 3D view. You can work around both of these by placing them on top of Legend and 3D views that are placed on Sheets.

One big advantage of these is that you can select a Schedule Row, and then click Highlight in Model to take you directly to that issue, clash, or question item.

This particular version uses a saved selection based filter to override the leader colour and thickness by template. You just select all instances and save the selection, overwriting MQ as the saved selection set.

It also has adjustable attachment width using “right attach” instance parameter. Another tip – you can add as many Instance text Parameters as you like to the Note Block Schedule, and they will be instantly visible upon selection of the annotation family, ready for you to add data.

Revit Wants you to associate as much useful data to the model as possible – and intelligent, team-capable issue tracking certainly fits into that category.

For Revit 2014:
Download here

Some images:

Raster to Vector to DXF for use in AutoCAD, Revit or Navisworks

Luke Johnson

We often have to deal with data that hasn’t always “lived” in our CAD, BIM or Revit world. Take a hand sketch, for example – how can you get that into a format that can easily be used in AutoCAD or Revit? Some PDFs have vector information, which I have described how to access before. But the below workflow takes it one step further – how to get any raster image into a vector format, using a few free tools.

Here’s how to do it, without Adobe Illustrator:

  1. Make your source file (PDF / Scan etc) into bitonal TIFF image (I use Bluebeam and Irfanview in the video, but you could easily save the PDF to image using GSView)
  2. Open in Inkscape
  3. Vectorize using Path – Trace Bitmap… Brightness steps, set to 2.
    Untick: Smooth, Stack scans, Smooth corners and Optimize paths.
    (this step makes the black and white image into lines and outlines)
  4. Save as EPS
  5. Open in GSView (requires Ghostscript and pstoedit)
  6. Save as DXF (using Convert to Vector format). From here, you can get to AutoCAD or Navisworks easily…
  7. Open in AutoCAD
  8. NWCOUT and/or
  9. Append the DXF directly to Navisworks
  10. Scale and position appropriately

Here’s a quick video of the process:

The file sizes at each step look like this:

CADmep Object Enabler Downloads for AutoCAD and Navisworks

Luke Johnson

CADmep Object Enabler is a free downloadable collaboration utility that
enables ObjectDBX host applications (i.e. AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, Volo-View
and Navis) to view the enhanced objects from CADmep.

Read more:

Autodesk Knowledge Network

Downloads:
The Autodesk Fabrication CADmep Object Enabler applies to both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

Autodesk Fabrication CADmep 2014 OE — Build 3.02.600 SP2b (exe – 270334Kb)



Autodesk Fabrication CADmep 2013 Object Enabler (exe
– 246856Kb)

How To Load the Autodesk Navisworks Export Menu in an AutoCAD-based Application

Luke Johnson

You could use NWCOUT, or…

Steps:

  1. At the command line, type MENULOAD.
  2. Press Return.
  3. In the Load/Unload Customizations dialog box, click Browse.
  4. In the Select Customization File dialog box, change the Files of Type to Legacy Menu Template (*.mnu), and browse to the Autodesk Navisworks menu file.
    Note: For AutoCAD 20xx based applications, this file is located under C:Program FilesCommon FilesAutodesk SharedNavisworks2015NWExport20xxlwnw_export.mnu. So, for example, for AutoCAD 2015 based applications, this file is located under C:Program FilesCommon FilesAutodesk SharedNavisworks2015NWExport2015lwnw_export.mnu, and so on.
  5. Click Open.
  6. In the Load/Unload Customizations dialog box, click Load.
    The loaded menu is shown in the Loaded Customization Groups.
  7. Click Close.

Note: you may have to load this from a trusted location to avoid security problems.

From:
Help: To Load the Autodesk Navisworks Export Menu in an AutoCAD-based Application