Revit Users do a lot of funny (and sometimes quite terrible) things. BIM Managers have spent years trying to control the chaos, through training, documentation, standardisation, model auditing, Big Brother techniques, and a mixture of carrots and sticks. And that is why I really like the idea of Guardian.

Ultimately, people just can’t quite be trusted to comply with all the constraints you think are valuable. But if you have a ‘virtual firewall’ for Revit, it should take the human element out of the equation, right? The idea is that your Revit model is a secure and safe place – a lot of important work happens in there, so you don’t want it to get infected with junk. It is harder to remove the junk later, than it is to programmatically STOP the bad stuff from entering your model. Enter Guardian for Revit…

Have you ever wanted:

  1. To restrict users from exploding CAD, modeling in-place, etc.?
  2. To prevent users from creating duplicate properties?
  3. To automatically clean content that users bring into projects?
  4. A better ‘purge unused’ tool that cleans object styles, patterns, etc.?
  5. To translate content to meet different requirements / standards as it enters projects?
  6. To quickly align your library and details into complete conformity with your template?

I recently had the chance to interview Parley Burnett, the creator of Guardian. Parley has had a lot of experience with Revit and content management over the years, and he offers some great insight below as he describes the ‘journey to Guardian’.

  • LJ: What motivated you to create Guardian? ​PB:
    • Revit can be so fun to work with and… not so fun.  We understand the issues that cause inconsistencies in data and graphics and believe we should tackle them on a fundamental level before we can REALLY benefit from all that BIM can offer.  We need a ‘new class’ of cloud powered assistants in our BIM environments as the old approach of adding complication (most other add-ins) to solve complication isn’t working.  I have also tired of “standards” discussions never materializing and have come to believe that we can do this in smarter ways than maintaining spreadsheets and documents.
  • LJ: What key problem does Guardian currently solve? ​PB:
    • Cluttered properties in projects!!
    • Without Guardian, anybody can do anything at any time in any Revit project anytime and, as a result, administrators are forced to react rather than anticipate the resulting damage.  Without intense oversight, Revit projects can quickly become a quagmire of properties such as materials, patterns and parameters. This causes confusion and friction as projects progress and deliverables can be messy.
    • Revit offers little assistance as many of the property types cannot even be purged if they are unused.  Worse yet, administrators have no way of knowing WHERE these properties are used so and if they did, the cleanup would take far too much time.
    • Guardian allows complete transparency into incoming properties including whether they are used or not used.  It then allows properties to be mapped to existing properties or removed.  These decisions can be saved as rules and enforced silently across an entire firm.
  • LJ: What is coming up on the Guardian feature roadmap?PB:
    • We have hit several releases already since launching late last summer and are only picking up the pace even more!  We expect to add more ways that Guardian can be extended to existing projects and more flexibly across project teams and user roles.

 

Here are some new things in Guardian 1.4.0:

  • Ability to detect duplicate properties
  • New Suggestions Framework
  • User prompts when duplicates are made or modified

 

Below I have included some how-to guidance information in the following sections:

  • Installation
  • Configuration
  • Using Guardian

 

Installation:

In the download package, you will get an MSI and current Release Notes:

Just double-click the MSI to install.

You can install for Current User or All Users:

And choose from supported Revit version:

License activation is achieved by entering your Company ID during installation:

When launching Revit, you can press ‘Always Load’ at the normal security prompt:

Configuration:

To manage your Revit content standards in Guardian, you use the ‘Admin Login’. Following this, you will see more features in the menu:

In Projects, you can define mapping files for each project, and you can create Project Templates:

The Mappings dialog provides the real ‘nuts and bolts’ of Guardian, you can individually configure constraints around the following items:

  • Materials
  • Family Types
  • Shared Parameters
  • Fill Patterns
  • Line Patterns
  • Object Styles
  • View Templates

 

It basically works by taking some incoming data from whatever source, and mapping it to the ‘project template’ or standard Revit libraries that you have implemented in your firm.

There are some really interesting features in the ‘Company Settings’, and this is where it really starts to take control of the human element I mentioned earlier:

When do you want Guardian to take action?

In ‘User Behaviours’ you can actually stop or restrain certain commands from executing. Evidently, Guardian makes a distinction between ‘normal users’ and admin-level users:

Using Guardian:

It will appear in your Add-Ins ribbon like this:

 

This is what happens when you load a new family:

And this is what happens if you select “Let me choose which properties to keep”:

As you can see, you then have the opportunity to enter the Mappings dialog.

“Suggestions” will dig deeper into the content and let you know if certain things are similar or identical (very cool, it feels a bit like AI):

We have come a long way at Virtual Built Technology through building our VirtualBuiltApp federated project-wide data platform in recent years, and Guardian is an excellent accompaniment to it. As a company-level control mechanism, it aims to prevent the problems that can be detected later through our analytical methods.

If you are in a situation where you would like to really improve the overall quality and consistency of the Revit modelling in your firm, I recommend that you check out Guardian.

The Preview Image Generator (PIG) is a new Revit addin produced by Parley Burnett, a guy that has been in and around Revit and BIM for a long time.

Out-of-the-box Revit has been producing family preview images of varying degrees of quality for some time now. I think you would agree that a good preview image can assist in selecting the right family, right? Also, the preview image shows up with ‘vanilla’ Revit right in the Load Family dialog, so it can be immediately useful for your team – if the image is good. This app aims to automate that process and give you better preview images everytime.

Through this new free app, you can not only save your family with a better image in a single click, but control the appearance settings automatically by category every time. You can get the free version here:
Preview Image Generator (P.I.G.) Free Version

There is also a paid version called PIG Batch that allows you to batch process your entire library with a single click and it runs automatically every time you save a family.
Preview Image Generator (P.I.G.) Batch

Here is a link to download the current version of P.I.G. Batch. You will need a purchased license key to activate.

www.thepig.io/Preview Image Generator.zip

 

 

You can create some custom rules for how you want each category to look:

 

And you can batch process using those rules:

 

Feature Overview and Comparison:

With one click, P.I.G. Free will create a consistent & clear preview image for your open Revit family. This free version offers limited functionality compared to the more fully featured app. See below for a comparison.

Free Version Features:

  • Choose your own default appearance settings & Revit category specific settings.
  • Options to hide connectors, host elements, reference planes and more!
  • Your settings are automatically synchronized with your cloud account.  Activate on up to two computers.
  • Very simple licensing system
  • Automatic notification of new feature updates

 

P.I.G. Batch Features:

  • **All users at your company can be set up to use the same settings.
  • **Automatically regenerates the preview image every time families are saved!
  • Batch process new preview images for thousands of families at a time!
  • Upgrade files from previous versions of Revit in the process.

 If you would like P.I.G. to silently run on every workstation at your firm, virtually eliminating the future need to monitor or batch through files, a site license is available. You can contact info@thepig.io for more information.

Video:

Updates:

Here are some of the changes in a recent update:

  • Your settings will now be stored in the cloud and appear on any machine you have activated with your Batch account.
  • We can group users together by ‘Company’. Users of the same company share the same settings automatically.
  • Added a new license type called ‘Desktop’. Desktop users can’t change company settings (only Batch users can). These users can run pig on individual families – either by clicking the button, or automatically when saving the family if that is enabled.
  • Improved the ‘Folder Picker’ dialog for choosing which folders of families to run P.I.G. Batch on.
  • Other minor UI improvements.

Slightly over 6 months ago, I was approached by one of my associates over at Unifi with an idea. They wanted to engage in a detailed competitive research project focused on content management systems for Revit. I was pleased that they approached me, because I obviously love Revit and I also love helping people to improve the whole ecosystem of software tools that surround Revit and BIM. In fact, I often provide too many suggestions to software companies I think 🙂

In this case, I was particularly interested in the topic as well. Having used Revit now for around 10 years, I had started to observe a trend in how Revit gets implemented into firms. Typically, they:

  1. Buy some Revit licenses
  2. Teach their people to use Revit
  3. Look at ways to standardize their use of Revit, perhaps through standards and template files
  4. Try to maximize the impact and benefit of BIM through some vertical products, such as Enscape
  5. Start thinking about how to deal with the many gigabytes of ‘content’ they have now gathered and that is sitting on the file server in their office…

Having seen this over and over again, I knew that evaluating, choosing, and setting up a Revit content management system is no easy task, yet it is a hugely important one. It is something that often gets neglected for too long, and results in many wasted hours as people go blindly looking for ‘that family’. As you know, I willingly share time-saving knowledge, tips and workflows here and via Twitter, so this competitive research project really ticked a lot of boxes for me. I would be able to:

  • do a deep analysis of content management products for Revit
  • observe the strengths and weaknesses of each
  • be better informed and able to assist people who often ask me about Revit content management
  • provide some feedback to Unifi about how their product and offering could perhaps be improved (and as I said above, this is something I often do for free)

In this particular case, I knew that there would be a lot of time involved. I was going to have to obtain, install, test, benchmark, and document a whole lot of information about various Revit content management systems. As a father of three, a technology blogger, and someone who works almost daily for different companies delivering various projects, time is extremely hard to come by. So I felt it was quite appropriate in this instance to be commissioned by Unifi to perform this research task. I had never been part of a commissioned, competitive research project before, so I knew there may be some challenges. However, given the amount of time that would be involved, I would only be able to do a proper and thorough job if I was reimbursed for the time I would need to dedicate to it.

You might say that being commissioned for the task introduced some bias, but I’ll tell you why that cannot be true. Unifi wanted to know how to improve their product, they basically wanted to know what could be improved so that they could remain competitive with their competitors. For me to somehow do a biased job would have been way off-base. I needed to be honest, and brutally so. I had to show the Unifi people if and how their competitors were stronger than they were. I admire the fact that Unifi undertook this whole project. Evidently, they wanted to make sure their product was the best it could be. Personally, I would have an avid listener, someone who would be happy to hear all of those software ideas that I come up with!

So I accepted this project as a commissioned, competitive research task. I would record my results and provide a number of comprehensive deliverables back to Unifi. How would I go about this job? There were a few logical steps:

  • establish the list of products that would be researched
  • obtain the products
  • install them onto a test workstation
  • evaluate the features available in the product and fill out a detailed comparison matrix
  • perform benchmarks to establish speed, performance, and capability of each product
  • use some large sample content datasets to really put the products through an intensive test to check for problems that may occur with huge content libraries

Looking at the above steps, you can see how much time would be involved. But I also thought it would be a good idea to involve the developers of the competing products in the research. I thought that if I could be better informed about the other products, my research output would be more complete and accurate. And I still think that this was the right approach. I spoke to some of the competing companies and described the fact that that I was doing a detailed research project and would like to discuss their product with them. Most of them knew me as a blogger and technology professional, and so they were pleased to meet and discuss their content management product.

And then I made a mistake.

I should have started those meetings by saying that I had been commissioned by Unifi to do the research project. But I did not mention that fact. We had informative meetings each time, that helped me to get a better understanding of each product. But I can see now that I should have simply told them how the research project came about. I actually don’t think it would really have influenced the discussion a whole lot, because I still think it was in their interest to assist me in understanding their product. However, I do feel like I should have been transparent at the time. I would like to publicly apologize to those competing companies for not initially disclosing that I was commissioned to do the research.

This was a lesson learned for me, and one I won’t make again if I undertake a similar research project in the future.

I do not apologize for taking on the research project, because it was simply the best way that a task like this could be handled, and I do believe I was the right guy for the job. I understand that it is quite common for companies to engage 3rd party professionals to perform market research, but for me it was my first time. As stated above, my thought process was basically that:

  • I would receive some reimbursement for my research time, that
  • I knew the research output had to be complete and accurate and honest, and that
  • It would be beneficial to speak to the individual developers about their product.

Following the consultation phase and data gathering phase of the project, I had quite a substantial amount of data to work with! How would I filter through all of this and truly make it comparative?

To begin with I put a lot of information and notes into a detailed OneNote notebook. I then started an Excel document where I would store most of the comparative results. I had a few key worksheets where most of the raw data was stored:

The Matrix worksheet contained a whole lot of data, over 150 rows and 15 columns. I broke the testing and comparison up into some major categories:

Note: the UX2 value above refers to things like bugs or user interface problems, and in that case a higher score would be worse (more bugs).

For feature comparison, I used a weighting value and a formula. Here is a sample of some of those weighting values:

So, in the case above, I viewed Parameter Searching as more important (5) than Uniformat Filtering (2). These weighting values are based on my experience and my association with other BIM professionals.

From this point, I reviewed the capability of each product and used a Yes / No value to determine if a given product would ‘score’ for that feature:

If a product achieved a Yes value here, it would also obtain the Score for that Feature.

I used a set of PivotTables and Charts to break down and review that feature data.

I also performed some performance and speed benchmarks, and stored these in another worksheet:

Ultimately, this data was all collected and provided in combined form along with some Powerpoint slides. The slides cover topics like:

  • What is BIM Content?
  • What is Revit Content?
  • Why Content Management?
  • How is Content Managed?
  • How do I choose?

Along the way, we had to do a few interesting things. We were finding that the Australia internet speed was not really a good place to start with cloud benchmarking. So we obtained a cloud based virtual workstation that more closely reflected the type of internet speed you would experience in the USA, and I then had two sets of ‘cloud speed’ benchmark data, the Australian and the US versions.

An example of how some of my research was used may be seen in the recent new offering by Unifi. The research identified some differences in the pricing models of the various products, and this information assisted Unifi in the creation of an additional pricing model.

Where can you learn more about this research? A couple of weeks back I mentioned that the details and results of the competitive research project will be shared in a global webinar.

You can register to attend the webinar here.

In summary, I really enjoyed doing this research project and I think the results will be useful to Revit users and BIM Managers who are trying to evaluate different content management tools. It is true that they each do have certain strengths, so which will you choose?

 

 

PS. It is interesting to look back, to where almost a year ago I asked you all:

Update:

Link to webinar here

We all know Revit is the best, right?

But … there are a handful of people using other platforms 🙂 And I guess even the most dedicated Revit user has to use other content creation tools from time to time. That is why UNIFI has decided to develop and release multiformat support, initially for these platforms:

multiformat_support-1-9274348

Also, UNIFI are offering a free copy of their “How To Create and Maintain BIM Standards” guide to everyone who registers for their upcoming webinar. Here are the details:

  • full title is:  “Accelerating ROI from Your Firm’s BIM Investment By Leveraging Analytics To Effectively Implement and Maintain Your BIM Standards
  • date and time:  May 3rd at 11amPT

Find out more and register here

Jon Buerg recently posted his ‘top tips’ for content on Shoegnome. Here are three I particularly liked:

  1. If you can actually afford to invest the labor and time into producing a complete library all in one shot without interruption, you’ll be rewarded with a lower overall investment cost and time frame.
  2. Future-proof your library… follow IFC protocols for embedding data, like manufacturer and model number, into your library element. Do this from the start…
  3.  visit 3D Warehouse (https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com),
    BIMcomponents (https://bimcomponents.com),
    BIMobject (https://bimobject.com/en),
    NBS National BIM Library (http://www.nationalbimlibrary.com),
    Revit City (http://www.revitcity.com/index.php),
    KCL CADalog (http://www.kclcad.com), and
    SmartBIM Library (http://library.smartbim.com)

via
Building Better BIM Libraries – Shoegnome

Also, don’t forget I have a (somewhat old) content list at:
https://wrw.is/p/this-is-temporary-content-table-link.html

 Here’s how you can get it:

  1. Go to https://beta.autodesk.com/callout/?callid=%7bA06CC6BE-3ADD-4789-AC64-CE5B1D9C8254%7d 
  2. Click Join Now
  3. From there you may have to login before you can go to the Download page
  4. Download and run installer (SeekForRevit150710Setup.exe)

The next time you run Revit, you will have an Autodesk Seek ribbon…

  1. Click Browse Content
  2. Type something in the search bar
  3. Click ‘Revit Supported Files‘ and then
  4. 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?

via
Get the Autodesk Seek for Revit Plug-in | Autodesk 360

Unifi 1.6 is out today, with support for Revit 2016. If you want to automatically update Unifi before you open Revit, simply add a Unifi shortcut to Windows Startup, like this:

Note: depending on your currently installed version, it may be more appropriate to launch from:
“C:UsersUSERNAMEAppDataLocalINVIEWlabsUnifiLauncherUnifi.exe”

The next time you open Revit, Unifi will already be nice and updated and ready to go.

If you are wondering “What is Unifi anyway?”, check out my review at this link.

I’ve been waiting for this one for a while…
Admin Automation Features, Batch Delete, & More

This release added several Administrator related functions for managing hundreds of users with ease. A new warnings section has been added to assist Admins with identifying users without access to libraries. New batch delete feature added to enhance library management duties.

You can read the full release notes here: https://www.discoverunifi.com/release-notes.html#version-153

via email…

Alan Moylan has posted a Star Trek Enterprise 1701 Revit family for you to download. I, for one, am glad to see a Trek vehicle added to the current interstellar Revit line-up, mostly from that ‘other’ franchise, including the Walker by Dave Light and something else that wasn’t a moon.

Download here

View it in 3D here

Source page

(Note: I have been working on a 1701D (TNG) for a while, but have just never got around to finishing it…)

via
@BIMgeek
USS Enterprise @AutodeskRevit family’s all finished. Be careful, it’s full size! Download here:http://t.co/4Iz2YZVGn6 http://t.co/zeCUWNEtZQ

https://twitter.com/BIMgeek/status/573120141808025601