Last week, we issued our third release of “Andy”, Andekan’s fully parametric human Revit family. The announcement and link was sent out to anyone who signed up to receive Andy on our Meet Andy page. For those of you that were on the list but haven’t yet downloaded, you still have until the end of today to get your copy! 
Generic CCTV Monitor and Entourage Families Bug in Revit MEP
I recently finished a project where among the families I did there was this CCTV monitor with a nested symbol. Starting from a face-based template, I created the base and the arm of the monitor and then created a couple reference lines to host the geometry for the screen. The family was generic and so I decided to allow the screen to be set to whatever size might be deemed necessary by the user. To that end, I figured the best way to set the size would be by entering the screen’s diagonal length in inches in an instance parameter. You can also tweak the ratio between height and width, but I left that as a type parameter. These are the parameters I created:
A Case of Casework
One day out of the blue (because any good case begins with something unexpected) , we received an order for a refrigerated display case from a manufacturer. Right away Chris created the True Manufacturing family shown below. The family is a TMV-400 Glass Door Merchandiser, and includes the light fixtures as well. The family, we learned, was for our customer’s customer, as any manufacturer’s families should be.
Advanced Medical Equipment in Revit 2011
On a recent trip to San Francisco, I finished some medical equipment families for a customer that also happens to be based in that fine city. The families in question are among what I like to call “the fun kind.” The first was a scanner from Siemens, the Artis Zeego. This wasn’t the first time we’d encountered such a family. Back when we were still using Revit 2008, we created a similar family for the Artis Zee Biplane System. Now as then, the new Zeego family allows all the movements that the real Artis Zeego scanner supports. According to the customer, the family is intended for presentation purposes as well as for reviewing the main positions of the robotic arm, the doctors and the windows overlooking the operating room. This time around we used Revit 2011 to create the family, and a number of improvements over the years allowed for more realistic shapes without an increase in file size. The old Artis Zee was 3.8MB. The new Artis Zeego family is “only” 1.7MB and includes a few extra touches, like dealing with the cable tubing and rotating parts. A few types were created within the family to speed the selection of the most common positions.
Carriers – Tyler Pipe
I recently finished and delivered a set of six toiler carrier families for Tyler Pipe. Three of the families (horizontal carriers) have two types each, standard and extended lengths. The vertical carriers have only one type, standard.
You can have your Revit Pi() and eat it too
I’m currently in Kuwait in a short consulting trip. This morning Miles Walker just pointed out a blog entry by David Light about the pi() function in Revit. Alfredo Medina first posted about it in AUGI forums.
Saving Revit Families
Unlike Saving Private Ryan, here no lives are being lost, just time.
Manitowoc 888 Ringer – A Revit family
As promised, here is a look at one of the more challenging models we have been asked to produce, the Manitowoc 888 Ringer crane.