Tag: large files

One Way To Work Quickly With Large Federated Revit Models

Luke Johnson

A federated Revit model is a model containing many Revit links, and they can be quite slow to work with. There are a few steps you can take to speed things up, and one of them is creating a set of fast view types and a related view template.

Here’s how:

  1. Make a View Template called “No Model” and untick all the Model categories in that Template
  2. Make a set of View Types called “Fast Plan“, “Fast Section” and so on
  3. Set the View Template for those Types to the “No Model” template you created

Now, when cutting sections or making new floor plans using these ‘fast’ view types, the view will generate quickly without any model elements. Then, you can decide if you want to switch view templates / types to something more useful for coordination or documentation.

uTorrent 3.0 beta with Drop Files to Send

Luke Johnson

It looks like uTorrent is really coming of age. You can now easily create a torrent to Share large files with other people very quickly and easily – just drag and drop files into the ‘Drop files to send’ area.

Just make sure you give some consideration to the privacy, copyright and intellectual property implications of doing this (depending on the content you intend to share).

Download link to the current Beta (Release Candidate 5):
http://download.utorrent.com/beta/utorrent-3.0-latest.exe

Release notes:
uTorrent 3.0 (32-bit) Release Candidate 4 (Page 1) / Announcements / uTorrent Community Forums

Large files and emails…they don't mix

Luke Johnson

Revit makes it very easy to produce a LOT of drawings. This can result in a large deliverable. In one recent case, our Tender Issue of drawings consisted of 132 A1 sheets. Using CutePDF (with a couple of handy tweaks), we printed these to a PDF file of around 48 MB.

Depending on your email size policy, a file of this size would take anywhere from 5 to 16 emails to transmit.

To avoid this eventuality, I have explored various options for uploading large files and making them available to our colleagues. FTP seemed to be the answer, but one of our Clients is behind a proxy or firewall system that doesn’t allow FTP access – even with an anonymous account! So it was back to the drawing board…

Therefore, I decided to setup a HTTP server for file access. I downloaded Apache 2.2 (for Windows, without SSL). I took the following steps:

  1. Allowed a port through our firewall and directed it to the PC running Apache. We have a static IP, so I could now access Apache by typing in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:portnumber.
  2. Ensured that the opened port setting matched the Apache port in the httpd.conf file
  3. Disabled the ‘Indexes’ feature for a subfolder of the Apache ‘root’ folder (in my case this was C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationApache2.2htdocsFILES).
  4. Created a password for this folder using htpasswd.exe
  5. Enabled password access to the same folder using the following text in httpd.conf

    directory>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName “Restricted Files”
    # (Following line optional)
    # AuthBasicProvider file
    AuthUserFile “C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/password/.htpasswd”
    Require valid-user
    directory>”

Now I can login to the PC running Apache, copy any file I want to serve via HTTP to the password protected folder, and then send a link to any of our colleagues that I want to gain access to this file.I also setup Filezilla FTP Server on another PC in our network, and forwarded port 21 through our router to this PC. I setup a user for a folder on this PC, and disabled all rights apart from ‘read’.I can now send an email that contains two hyperlinks to any large file we wish to transmit, one for FTP and one for HTTP. Both of these links are password protected.And all of this is done using free, open source software!