A couple weeks back, I attended a meeting of the London Revit User Group where Paul Fletcher from ZBP and Through Architecture presented Beyond BIM: Cooperation for a sustainable future. Paul seemed to be a man of strong convictions who had no qualms creating some controversy when discussing where we’re heading with BIM and the tools we’re using to get there. I very much enjoyed his talk and especially liked his focus on the Information in BIM.
Big Picture Revit Families
We recently finished some retractable projection screen Revit families for Stewart Filmscreen, based in southern California. These are the kind of screens installed in the ceiling of a conference room or auditorium, where you might barely notice the screen is there until someone hits a button and it gracefully descends from a sleek minimalist enclosure. Since the screens are recessed products, the bulk of the work was in modeling all of the different canvas sizes and image areas available for each of the two models.
Family Feedback Mechanisms – Part 2
Wouldn’t it be nice if your manufacturer-specific fittings would highlight themselves if they are set outside of the product’s catalog specs? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if they were highlighted without stopping your workflow as you lay your pipe runs? Then your manufacturer-specific fittings could even be used as generic or custom fittings as well.
The Revit Families Frontier
Earlier this week I was reading a blog post by Steve Stafford on the state of Revit content, specifically content available from Autodesk Seek. The post is framed as a critique of Seek contents’ usability within a Revit project – bloated file size, incorrect category assignments, overly detailed visual modeling, etc. – and it ends with a statement that we’re still living in “the wild west” when it comes to Revit families.
Family File Naming Standards
A few days ago I gave a talk at the BIM Show Live in London. The title of my talk was Considerations on Family Creation. It was an update to a talk I gave this past summer at the LRUG (London Revit User Group) about key areas to review and define when creating or managing a Revit family library.
The Death of the Family Types
As most Revit users know, a family that has types can be created in one of two ways: you can create the types within the family (which I’ll call “built-in” here) or you can create the types in an external txt file called a type catalog. For quite some time now, I have been pondering over the use and future of built-in family types. The more families I do, the more built-in family types just don’t seem like the right way to go. They feel more like a shortcut.
Shared Parameter Standards Part 2 – What’s a Manufacturer to Do?
There are a number of standards offering a list of shared parameters for manufacturers to make use of when developing families for their products. But which standard should a manufacturer follow? I will argue that none should be followed, but that all should be taken into account.
Shared Parameter Standards – Part 1
Revit adoption keeps on growing. There is no denying the benefits of having an integrated project model that holds all related information. But as more and more companies move from using Revit solely for coordination to using it as a project tool encompassing all disciplines, the level of information management required from the application continues to grow as well.