Friday, July 28, 2006

Sports Fan?

An opportunity to combine your love of sports, architecture and Revit is waiting for you. HNTB in Los Angeles is looking for talented Revit savy architects to do sport (and Aviation) projects.

Interested? Search available positions ONLINE. Alternatively you can contact the Los Angeles office directly.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Face Off

A new family template doesn't get much attention. It is called Generic Model Face Based.rft. From Autodesk Revit's help file:

A face-based family must be created from the Generic Model face based.rft template. A face-based component can be placed on any surface, including walls, floors, roofs, stairs, reference planes, and other components. If the family contains a void cutting the host, the component will cut its host, but only if the host is a wall, floor, roof, or ceiling. When a component with a void is placed on any other host, it will not cut.

Interestingly, a void family, when nested in another, will cut a solid that hosts it.

Take a closer look at this kind of family and see if it might be useful? This image is a face based void applied to various faces of hosts.

This image is a face based family void placed on a solid in another family. Then used an array in two directions. A glass solid was included in the array groups to infill the hole. Some possibilites?


Here's another example using a Face Based "window" hosted in another family to create a "confetti" wall or a seemingly random arrangement of windows. Design belongs to HOK.

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Which Came First? The Solid or the Void?

...and the other short story...why did the solid cross the road? Sorry I digress.

So you're making a family and you made this solid and then you made this void and Revit cut away the solid just fine. Now you make a new solid and the void acts like it doesn't know it is there even though they intersect. Voids only automatically cut solids that came before, not those that followed. So...when a void doesn't cut a solid because of the order you created them, just use Tools > Cut Geometry and tell Revit to cut em!Worth mentioning, if you create a void and it doesn't intersect with the geometry of the earlier solid(s) when you finish the sketch, when you drag the void so it does intersect with the solid, it won't cut automatically either. Even if the solid was made earlier than the void. So again, Tools > Cut Geometry to the rescue.aaah...all better now...

Phased by Your Exports?

When you export your project to dwg files do they lack the reference to the phases of your project? The default dwg/dgn export files do not include the information that Revit needs to specify the layers according to phase. It just so happens that there is a Autodesk Knowledge Base article that explains how to resolve this. If you want to search yourself, try the words "phase export" to get a link to the article. Too tired to click the link? Here's the text from the site:

Issue

You want to know how Demo, Existing, New, and Temporary layers are included when a file is exported to DWG and DGN.

Solution

The default export files, Layers-dgn-AIA.txt and exportLayers-dwg-AIA.txt, do not include appendices for -DEMO, -EXIST, -NEWW, or -TEMP layers for demolished, existing, new, and temporary objects in the model.

These definitions can be added to the templates by adding the following lines to the exportlayers-dwg-AIA.txt file (located in the Data directory):

Demolished -DEMO -DEMO
Existing -EXST -EXST
New -NEWW -NEWW
Temporary -TEMP -TEMP

The following lines can be added to the exportlayers-dgn-AIA.txt file (also located in the Data directory):

Demolished 50 1 50 1 -DEMO -DEMO
Existing 51 1 51 1 -EXIST -EXIST
New 54 1 54 1 -NEWW -NEWW
Temporary 58 1 58 1 -TEMP -TEMP

You can download [Link: RF111d01.txt] exportlayers-dwg-AIA.txt and/or [Link: RF111d02.txt] exportlayers-dgn-AIA.txt and copy them to your [Revit_install_directory]/Data directory.

Sorry you'll have to visit the site to get the files. The date published for this article says 20060405 but I know that I read it earlier than that this year, perhaps it's been modified? I seem to recall it being a couple years old.

Hong Kong Anyone?

Eric in Hong Kong has a blog that I stumbled on tonight. He's civil professional who has joined an Autodesk distributor called Synnex. His blog is found at CADBeyond. He's blogging about more than just Revit but he has dedicated quite a few articles to Revit topics. Cheers!

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Revit Build and Downloading Errors

If you recently experienced problems downloading content or help files for Revit Building 9. Try again, they have posted a new build that worked fine for me just now. The build number is still 20060619_2300 but the download file has "a" added to it like this:

Revit Series = ARS9_20060619_2300a.exe
Revit Building = RevitBuilding9_20060619_2300a.exe

Download it HERE! Choose your language first.