Extreme Revit® Families
Amazing Arithmetic In Monster Models… That Performs!

Presented by Adam Pointer

If you didn’t pass Math-101 this class is not for you. You will learn how to use mathematics to overcome modelling issues, like how to place perpendicular geometries equidistant around a curve of changing angles and length, all within the Revit Family Editor. You will be taken through the higher levels of Revit formulae to achieve amazing parametric results without hindering large Revit projects performance. The what should and shouldn’t be done with formulas!

Extreme Revit® Families
Bring life to Revit with moveable families from medical equipment and cranes to humans

Presented by Adam Pointer

In this lab you’ll learn all you need to begin building highly complex moveable families form truck-based cranes to medical diagnostic equipment to people. Right through from the planning stages and pre-modelling analysis to armature construction and attaching/controlling the ‘skin’.

Extreme Revit® Families
Building A Restricted Bend

Presented by Tracie Sherlock

In this lab you will get hands-on experience building a manufacturer specific pipe bend with restricted angles containing over 100 variations! Including correct usage and integration of lookup tables and formulae. If you are a Plumbing Engineer, also sign up to our Extreme Revit® Families: How To Create Working Sanitary Fittings… Without Going Insane!

Extreme Revit® Families
Happy Families — Overcoming Issues in the Family Editor

Presented by Stefan Hergert

Have you ever felt dismayed by the quirks of Revit’s Family Editor? Ever wondered why your file size has leapt maliciously from a reasonable 300k to 1642k after you added a single model line? Have you ever had to build a family with moving parts and then had the armature fall to pieces for not good reason? Then this is the class for you. You will be shown all the tricks that we’ve accumulated over the two and a half years of working in the Family Editor on a daily basis. This class will give you the ability to identify problems and rectify them quickly, speeding up your Family creation workflow and eliminating costly reworking.

Extreme Revit® Families
How To Create Working Sanitary Fittings… Without Going Insane!

Presented by Jonathan Lloyd

Thanks to the popularity of last year’s Extreme Revit Families: Pipe Fittings I & II, we are returning this year with a lab to better cover this ever-necessary subject matter. In this lab we will learn how to convert a Restricted Pipe Bend into a fully functioning Sanitary Bend. We will also go from beginning to end building a Sanitary Tee. Both of these families will work with inclined pipes, unlike so many generic fittings available.

Extreme Revit® Families
Manufacturers… Get Ready to Publish!

Presented by Jose Fandos

This panel will discuss best practices for the creation, maintenance and publishing of manufacturer-specific content libraries.

Extreme Revit® Families
Textures & Mapping — Lighten the load in your projects

Presented by Tracie Sherlock

This class is designed to assist those Revit professionals out there who need to be able to minimize family sizes while maintaining high-levels of rendering and detail within their models for presentation purposes. Learn when, where and how to integrate usage of textures in Revit, minimise project overload and sharing of materials between your families.

Extreme Revit® Families
The Light Fantastic — Better, Lighter Lighting Families

Presented by Adam Morren

Learn how to take lighting fixtures to the next level. Understand how to choose exactly what physical features to model to get the look you need without the weight that you don’t. You’ll learn material manipulation tricks and how-to for photometric web placement to get the renders looking just right.

Extreme Revit® Families
What Do I NEED(LEED)? What and When to ‘BIM’ in Revit Families Schedules

Presented by Richard Armstrong-Wood

In this class you’ll learn to identify data from spec sheets for a variety of BIM-able products that can be integrated into the Revit suite. Many types of units cannot be used from lookup tables, an enormously useful data-source in Revit Family building, in this class you’ll see how to build lookup tables with all manner of data and convert it in-family into useable analysable units. Learn how to prepare your content to help you with LEED.

Extreme Revit® Families
Electrical

Presented by Adam Pointer

Learn how to create extremely useful, visually appealing, and schedulable electrical trays and ladder-rack families. In-depth, step-by-step instructions to create them from scratch, how to choose the right template for the job, when to use type catalogs and/or lookup tables, how to create formulas, and best practices for metadata, shared parameters, naming conventions, and content organization.

Extreme Revit® Families
Piping, Part I

Presented by Richard Armstrong-Wood

Learn how to create extremely elegant and performing fittings and accessories. In-depth step-by-step instructions to create them from scratch, how to choose the right template for the job, when to use type catalogs and/or lookup tables, how to create formulas, and best practices for metadata, shared parameters, naming conventions, and content organization.

Extreme Revit® Families
Piping, Part II

Presented by Jonathan Lloyd

Learn how to create extremely elegant and performing fittings and accessories. This session will provide In-depth, step-by-step instructions to create them from scratch, how to choose the right template for the job, when to use type catalogs and/or lookup tables, how to create formulas, and best practices for metadata, shared parameters, naming conventions, and content organization.

Extreme Revit® Families
Parametric Family Building in Revit for Beginners

Presented by Jonathan Lloyd

You know you need to get in to Revit, you’ll also know you’ll need a lot of content to use the software to its fullest. In this lab you’ll learn how to build fully parametric Revit Family from absolute zero. You’ll gain insight into the form creation tools and how to constrain the geometry so that it re-sizes and flexes smoothly. You’ll also go away knowing how to get the technical data that you and your team needs from the spec-sheets into your families so that you can run calculations on your systems.

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Topics can be looked up by product, speaker, or industry. You will be able to read the entire submission (unedited) and vote on several criteria. Please limit your votes to approximately 20 sessions.

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We first created Revit content for TME back in 2007. Below you can see a recent sample of our work in an MEP project involving the renovation of the Central Energy Plant at The Medical Center — part of the Columbus Regional Healthcare System:

The Revit family shown is the York Model CYK Compound Centrifugal Liquid Chiller. As with all of our models, the York CYK includes all relevant metadata, allowing users to take full advantage of Revit’s powerful testing and calculation capabilities.

We hope you agree that it looks the part too!

Once installed, this will be the third York Heat Pump Chiller in the United States, with TME responsible for designing two of the three systems.

TME began their Revit MEP implementation in the spring of 2007 and have quickly seen significant benefits, including improved coordination with fewer errors, increased speed of delivery, decreased costs with fewer change orders, greater productivity, and higher quality work. They currently have two people dedicated solely to Revit MEP – BIM Manager, Tim Nix and BIM Development Coordinator, Mark Mergenschroer – with a further 53 trained designers using the program. They have issued 16 projects for construction and presently have a further 22 in various stages of development. As a leader in the consulting engineering industry, TME see BIM as a key component for fulfilling their mission of client advocacy by finding improved solutions to the challenges of today’s building industry.

Many thanks to Mark for these images — we look forward to seeing more of them.

Tim is a CADD Technician in Larson’s MEP department, where the firm is looking to build on its existing use of Revit Structure and begin implementing Revit MEP in 2009. Talking to Tim about Larson’s use of Revit confirmed what we feel is probably the biggest value proposition of BIM and Revit: product specification. According to Tim, he and his colleagues at Larson “are specifiers, so having the manufacturer-specific content is essential to [using] BIM accurately.” We’re excited to have the chance to work with Tim and Larson as they get started on their path to adopting Revit MEP, and look forward to creating Revit content that can help them achieve their goal of fully-integrated product specification.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who participated in our Revit content survey at AU 2008. The feedback we gained from your responses has been extremely valuable in helping us shape our plans for the coming year, and we greatly appreciate everyone taking the time to share their thoughts. Congratulations again to Tim, and we look forward to offering additional opportunities for direct input (and free stuff!) through our site in the near future.

For those of you who we missed at AU or who we haven’t been in touch with lately, we also wanted to make sure you knew about our new company and website. The team behind Broutek is now Andekan. Our focus, as always, continues to be high quality Revit content done quickly and affordably. We invite you to get a free quote for your Revit content needs by filling out our detailed and user-friendly request form.

Finally, for those who might find it useful, we’re approaching the first free release of Anders Kan, our fully parametric Revit human. We’ll be giving away free copies on January 1st, 2009, to anyone who signs up on Andy’s Page. It’s been a great year for all of us at Andekan, and we look forward to 2009 being a banner year for Revit content. Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season.

Best regards,

Jose Fandos
Founder & CEO

We’re thrilled to be speaking directly to Revit users about how to get the most out of their families, and to have the opportunity to meet and learn from so many others in the Revit and BIM communities. If you’re attending Autodesk University and would like to say hi, feel free to stop by one of our talks or drop us a line.