Sometimes it can be difficult to get Autodesk Rendering lights in Navisworks to work properly. When doing services coordination, you don’t really want to have to deal with placing new lights just so you can see things in the federated model. In this situation, you could try using these ‘Baseline’ settings:
Options – Interface – Display – Autodesk – Shader Style, set to Basic
Viewpoint set to Shaded
Viewpoint lighting set to Headlight
These Headlight sliders seem to work pretty well:
Personally, I prefer using Gooch and Rendered with some nice lights if I can, but this can occasionally cause problems (depending on your Graphics Card and other material settings). That is when I fall back to the baseline settings above.
was covered in this recent paper: Building Information Modelling (BIM) Education in South Australia: Industry Needs by John C.H Gardner, M. Reza Hosseini, Raufdeen Rameezdeen, and Nicholas Chileshe
UR5 enhancements: Improvements made in Update Release 5 build (20141119_0715):
Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2015 Updates Improves resolving of the Revit Server saved paths.* Corrects the behavior of placing families in a project when the family type selector is expanded. Improves stability when loading families that contain data created by add-ins. Improves stability when ungroup a group. Improved stability when filter a schedule. Improved stability when opening projects with bad dimensions. Improves stability when making edits in the Sun Settings dialog. Improves stability when deleting parts while modifying division. Improves stability when canceling new label creation in family environment. Improves stability when editing materials in families in a workshared environment. Improves stability when clicking the Macro Manager tool in the Family Editor. Improves stability when multiple users load families and undo their actions in a workshared file. Improves stability when two users loaded families of the same name. Corrects an issue with ceiling-hosted lights that caused the lights to be deleted when the ceiling was moved or copied.* Corrected an issue related to placement of face-based families on certain part elements.*
Autodesk® Revit® MEP 2015 Updates Improves stability when editing a conduit temporary dimension in an elevation view.
Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2015 Updates Improves stability when exporting multi-rebar annotation into DWG format.* Corrects an issue with incorrect warning and error messages for groups in design options with a group containing structural framing elements or columns.* Fixed an issue with the generation of the analytical surface for a vertical floor and slab.
Autodesk® Revit® API 2015 Updates Allows the ability to offset the end of a wire when it is connected to other elements.
A360 Drive (previously known as Autodesk 360 Sync) is a file storage tool that syncs with your Desktop and makes your files accessible on the web, you can access your files here: https://360.autodesk.com
You can copy something from your A360 Drive to A360 by using this drop down list option:
You will then be allowed to choose an A360 project. This creates a copy, there is no real link between the A360 Drive version and A360 version of that file. Obviously, the viewing and discussion capabilities are more collaborative in A360, so you may wish to take advantage of that feature if you are an A360 subscriber.
The problem – Appending a given NWC creates hundreds of lights in your NWF, as they were exported with light sources from Revit:
Update: scroll to the bottom of the Autodesk Rendering, Lights pane and select the last entry. Press and hold the Delete key on the keyboard – it will rapidly delete lights out of the Navisworks model.
One way to get rid of all these light sources is to use a macro recorder to delete them all. This is because Navisworks 2015 does not allow you to delete multiple light sources at once (sadface), and it doesn’t allow you to “Clear Palette” like Presenter did.
The immediate workaround is to use Shaded mode with Headlight only, as this ignores Light sources. Not pretty.
You could also down-save to 2013, delete the lights in Presenter, then save-up to 2015, but that seems a little too hacky, even for me.
Here’s the clicky mouse macro method:
Install MouseController (I used choco install mousecontroller)
Open the problem NWF
When it “Can’t resolve external references” for each .ies file, just click Ignore All
Set up a macro to delete lights (see the Screencast below)
My best result was using Time Stretch 3.0x and Repeat every 0.8 seconds
Set it and walk away from your PC for a bit
Some other things to try:
Look for a light source subcategory in your NWC export view
Turn it off
Re-export
Append to a brand new NWF and see if the lights show up in Autodesk Rendering
Another thing to try:
Navisworks Exporter settings/File Reader/Revit
Untick “try and find missing materials”. Make sure that box is NOT checked.
Also turn off light source as in step 1 above.
Re-export
Append to a brand new NWF and see if the lights show up in Autodesk Rendering
Some of the bugs that might show up:
Missing IES file references
Regenerating thumbnail image …
The only real fix (at this stage) is to open each Lighting Family and untick Light Source. Obviously, this is not really an option if you are doing lighting analysis or using the lights for rendering in Revit or 3dsMax etc:
Why does this happen? Because the Bulk File Upgrader doesn’t work if it is trying to upgrade a Local and it can’t find a Central (I believe this is a Revit API thing)… and you may get this error: filename.rvt could not be upgraded: The file-based central model could not be reached, because e.g. the network is down or the file server is down.
The core problem here is that someone has probably given you a Local copy, when they should have given you a Central or Detached copy to link into your project.
If we want to upgrade lots of these “local-type” linked files, how can we get around this batch upgrade limitation? We will need to to use eTransmit – twice. Let’s say we are upgrading from Revit 2013 to Revit 2015:
Make a blank 2013 RVT project
Link in all the 2013 version files you want to upgrade
Save the host file in 2013 and close it
Transmit the host using Revit 2013, including Links and tick the ‘Open and Save models in the active version of Revit’ option (this places the newly saved linked models into a transitory state, where you can choose to save as central or work with this model temporarily)
Open Revit 2015
Addins – Transmit a Model
Choose the output eTransmitted 2013 host file from step 4
Make sure to tick the “Linked Revit models” and “Cleanup” boxes
Click Transmit Model and wait for all of the files to be upgraded (yay)
Remember to discard the host file before transmitting or copying the files
Note: using the “Add Files” option in eTransmit and adding RVTs manually will not upgrade them.
OneNote is becoming a bit of an obsession lately. Its one tantalising step closer to a paperless life.
My latest project was to feed a large RSS reading list from Inoreader into OneNote (for offline use, archiving, searching etc). Inoreader has a paid version that can do this, but I’m always search for the free option…
The short version:
Subscribe to an RSS feed with your Microsoft account
Set up a rule to forward to me@onenote.com
The longer and more powerful way:
Set up a new Microsoft account (so we can use Quick Notes default notebook freely)
Make a Google account (if you don’t already have one)
Burn the RSS feed you want with Feedburner (I am using a large list from Inoreader, so I take that folder and burn it so I can use Email Subscription)
Subscribe to it via email with the Google account
Set up forwarding from the Google account to the Microsoft one. (I use the Google account so that I can do another thing later…)
Forward emails matching Subject line of subscribed RSS feed to the Microsoft email address
Make sure the Microsoft account is an approved alias for OneNote (step 3)
In Outlook email rules, forward emails matching the FROM address of the Google account to me@onenote.com
Share the default notebook from this newly created Microsoft account to your ‘real’ one.
Now, why do we use the Google account (step 6)? So that we can use this Google script to grab lots of stuff (from that Google account) and forward it to the OneNote Notebook and populate it with lots of interesting data. In my case, I had a few years worth of these daily RSS digest emails, and I applied a label to them in Gmail and then used the script to forward them to the Microsoft account. As the rule was set up in step 9 above, these are automatically forwarded to me@onenote.com and then added to the OneNote Notebook.
Slowly but surely, this Notebook is filling up with thousands of pages of research that can be searched, taken offline and shared.
