Back in 2008, I thought it might be cool to start a Revit and BIM blog – but I had no idea how long my interest in the subject would endure, or how many readers would actually be interested in what I had to say. I have certainly learnt a lot over that time, and I hope I’ve been able to help a few of you as well. Here are 3 things that blogging has taught me:
Writing forces you to distill and crystallize your thoughts, and often prompts you to challenge the very things you are suggesting your readers accept
Its more important to be consistent rather than prolific (people get bombarded with way too much information as it is!)
Attribution is key – if you always share your source, others will reciprocate
And one final thought: Share your unique knowledge and workflows. Once people know the basics of a thing, they are often only interested in the un-ordinary (like formatting their Autodesk USB drives).
Over 80,000 views to this page (and counting)
But I’m not giving up yet! Thanks for your continued interest and engagement.
This new keynoting addin from Kiwi Custom Solutions stores per-project Keynotes in a database to solve concurrent access problems. Revit 2015 allows some interesting pathing to happen for keynotes, that looks like this:
Using this addin, you can either create a new set of keynotes for each project (based on a template), or you can “link” projects to one common keynote definition (allowing an entire office to work collaboratively on one master keynote file).
Combining Revit Lookup and Sysexporter has a lot of potential for getting hard-to-reach data out of Revit in almost realtime. For example, in Revit 2013 there are limited options for scheduling Revit Links. But if we open Revit Lookup (Snoop Database), and then start Sysexporter, we can see this (find Snoop Objects in the list and select it):
From here, we can copy that list of Revit Links to Excel and do some LEFT and RIGHT operations to strip the Element ID:
Now, we can copy a group of element IDs to the Select by ID box in Revit (maybe need a trip to Notepad++ to remove linebreaks) to multi-select a group of Links, based on their Discipline or Level. Then, you can assign them to a particular Workset. See where I’m heading with this?
As part of meeting his RTCNA requests, Harry posted this idea for saving all groups to file:
API can be used to generate a text file listing all model groups.
this text file can be used as input to a journal file that saves each group to its own file
Its good to keep this general principle in mind when working with and around Revit – if it doesn’t seem possible, try and think about it from a different direction. Usually there is another way to attack the problem you are facing. Don’t give up… just find the unobvious answer, make it work, and then share it with the rest of us!
I was speaking to a surveyor recently and he indicated that he believes in around 2 years time, point clouds will be a “commodity” that almost anyone can produce. Devices to scan 3D spaces are becoming more powerful and more accessible, and essentially anyone can use them. For example, have you seen Google’s Project Tango?
Along with Recap 360 and other iOS apps for scanning rooms and converting to 3D models, the question soon will not be “how do we scan this?” The question will be:
What do we do with all of this scanned, real world spatial data?
