From there you may have to login before you can go to the Download page
Download and run installer (SeekForRevit150710Setup.exe)
The next time you run Revit, you will have an Autodesk Seek ribbon…
Click Browse Content
Type something in the search bar
Click ‘Revit Supported Files‘ and then
Click ‘Load Family to Design‘ next to the relevant RFA
Now is your opportunity to test this addin out and influence its development by providing feedback through the Beta site. As a simpler alternative to manually downloading, Loading and placing rfa files from Seek, it looks pretty good at this stage. What do you think?
I had the opportunity this week to spend a bit of time with Unifi. What is it? Well, in simple terms it is a way to store all of your Revit families in a secure location online. You just batch upload all of your current family library, and Unifi then goes ahead and indexes all of the important family related data. Then, you can do fast and intelligent searches of your entire content library whenever you want to find and load specific families into your Revit projects (using the Unifi addin for Revit).
However, it does a lot more than just ‘store’ stuff. It handles users and permissions in an efficient yet elegant manner, and guess what… because your cloud family library is now globally accessible, you can share it with project team members inside and outside of your domain or organization. You can set up different “libraries” based on their purpose (for example, the standard Revit Imperial/ Metric content can live in one library, while your “Essential” company content may be another, Healthcare families in another library and so forth). Tags can be applied to families, and the search function actually has learning algorithms, so it gets smarter as your team uses it.
What about different Revit versions, you say? Well, after you upload a Revit family from a given version (say 2012), the Unifi servers will automatically create 2013 and 2014 versions for you (automatic upgrading). In this way, there is a single point-of-truth for each family – you don’t get file folders full of different family versions with different functionality (a problem that BIM managers have been dealing with for years).
How many family professionals are in your team or company? Usually there are one or two users who are really at the top of the family tree, and they do your family development, content creation and the like. How can you quickly connect these highly skilled users with the actual day-to-day BIM technicians in your office? Unifi handles that too. Any user can “request” a new family if one doesn’t exist for a particular purpose, and this request is automatically passed onto the family creation people (by Unifi). When they login, they see a list of content requests, and can then handle them in a logical and methodical way. They make the family, upload it, and then the entire team has access to the new content.
Unifi is what Revit content management has needed for some time, in my opinion. You can easily download the trial, upload your content and see if you like it. Many Revit teams are struggling with a core set of challenges when it comes to content; Unifi provides solid answers to many of these questions.
I spent some time with Steve Germano (Director of Product Development) this week, and I was excited to hear about the plans to expand and upgrade the already-compelling feature set of Unifi (including branching out into the Sketchup realm). The development team over there clearly has a good view of what Revit users need, and they are already well on track to provide a solution that could easily become a key part of the Revit content management system in your organization. Additionally, they are listening to the current user base, and continuing to build the feature set with each new update.
If it sounds like these Unifi folk know what they are doing, it might because INVIEW labs is behind Unifi. And INVIEW labs does lots of Revit content development for Autodesk Seek. Are you getting the picture? (This is one of those times that you probably could just stop reading and go get the trial… or) Read on for a brief summary:
Unique, powerful features of Unifi:
your folder structure is automatically tagged onto your content when you Batch Upload it
batch user creation (is very fast!)
tracking of content requests – content creation can be centralised and distributed to key users
Shared Search Keywords (learning algorithm)
Smart Folders / Saved Searches
automatic upgrading of uploaded content (single point of truth for each family)
automatic versioning of changes to families (backup / rollback abilities)
extract any Revit System Family Type from an existing Revit Project and store them in the Unifi cloud – Wall Types etc (this includes complete MEP systems with required supporting families from Routing Preferences)
Steve mentioned that they have no server-side concerns with handling the bandwidth of company library uploads and downloads – the actual storage space is not an issue for them. Its interesting to consider really, because its something that might currently be a struggle for your company: trying to store and backup 100gb of Revit content on your local domain, and mirror that globally between offices, and keep it all in sync. That can be hard. But uploading it to Unifi and getting them to handle it all – much easier from an IT perspective.
A number of large firms have already made a commitment to the Unifi system. If it makes $$$ sense for the big guys, I think it will make sense for SMBs too.
There appears to be some validation in place, that will stop the upload of very bad Revit families (like the Room category family I made a while back) Video here.
You can open the Unifi pane in headless mode (without Revit) by using the shortcut, which will likely be installed to this path: “C:Program Files (x86)INVIEWlabsUnifiUnifi.exe” This will allow you to drag and drop from Windows Explorer to directly batch upload to Unifi without opening Revit.
Give it a go, and feel free to reply via comment to this post or tweet me @lukeyjohnson with your opinions!
Update 1: Some people have expressed concern with having to download their families from the web to insert them into projects. Consider the following points:
you never have to deal with the upgrade screen as Unifi always inserts the native Revit version of the family (a good time saver)
Unifi has a local cache of any family you’ve downloaded (it internally stores the last 50 families you’ve downloaded) so you insert these from local HD anyway.
if you’ve already inserted a family into your project from Unifi, the next time you use Unifi to “insert” that family into your project it actually knows if the family in your current Revit project is the same revision as the one on the cloud, and it simply starts the family place command, it doesn’t actually download again. No reason to as it is already in the project
office to office bandwidth may be extremely expensive compared to internet bandwidth. Multi-office AEC firm CTO’s may prefer the fact that Unifi uses internet bandwidth and not their network bandwidth.
Unifi provides monthly full database downloads for customers, meaning that a rare internet outage is likely a very low risk to affect workflow.
Update 2: If you want to clear your upload queue for Unifi, go to: C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalINVIEWlabsDiscoverClientSettingsUploadQueue
Close the Unifi Pane, then delete all of the files in this folder. After restarting Unifi, your upload queue should be clear.
There is a GetSatisfaction page for Autodesk Seek at this link. What is GetSatisfaction? it “is a simple way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers.”
It would be great if there was just one place we could go, and all content was searchable and downloadable from that one place. Seek is still promising, but it doesn’t really have enough content yet.
Recently RevitCity.com was the victim of a hacker who was able to successfully bypass the security measures we had in place. After discovering this security breach, we moved as quickly as possible to isolate and contain the problem. In order to best protect the server from additional harm and perform a full security examination, it was necessary to temporarily take RevitCity offline.
In order to protect your own privacy, it is always a good idea to change your password as frequently as possible. Although all passwords are protected using an advanced one-way encryption method, it is technically possible that your password was compromised during the security breach, especially if the password is a word that can be found in the dictionary. Therefore, we encourage you to change your password as soon as possible. You may change your password by logging in, and then clicking “Edit User Profile” under Member Options. Alternatively, you may elect to have a randomly generated new password sent to you by going to: http://www.RevitCity.com/forgotpassword.php
Despite our best efforts to protect the RevitCity.com community from this kind of attack, it nevertheless is a common risk we take by providing a valuable sharing platform, and you take by becoming a member. Although we cannot guarantee that this will not happen again, we have made extensive security upgrades to the system.
We are amazed at the resiliency and support of our members who, during the short time the website was down, began helping each other on our Facebook page. For this reason we endeavor to keep RevitCity.com running well into the future.
Okay, xxx means “insert your desired roof type here”. One of the best and easiest ways to find find the answer you are looking for is by downloading this file on Roof Forms from the Revit 2011 Content Distribution Center. From here, you should be able to figure out the ‘best practice’ when it comes to creating the various different roof forms.
Strangely, Autodesk Seek ‘knows’ about this file, but you can’t download it from there – yet.
Autodesk Seek is nearly coming of age. It references content from this site. You might prefer the interface of the Smartbim site over that of Seek at the moment.
