Back in 2010 I was asked to create a face-based lighting fixture that, when placed on a wall, would display a symbol in plan view. “No problem,” I thought, and happily set out to work on it. Little did I know that it couldn’t be done. Had I “known,” I might not have even tried. But as it turns out, it was possible after all.
RTC and the best Revit conference you could attend
I’m back from a two-week trip to the US where I attended and presented at RTC (Revit Technology Conference) in Stone Mountain, GA. It was the second North American RTC conference, with last year’s taking place near Los Angeles. Since this was my first RTC conference I didn’t know what to expect. I was pretty much convinced to attend after hearing how good it was from people who attended last year. Then at AU 2011, Steve Stafford prodded me to submit a talk about content creation and I was all set.
What’s the Point?
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.
Nested Families and the Case of Disappearing Connectors
When a family with connectors is nested into another family, the connectors get ‘lost’ in the host family. They have to be recreated in the host to appear in a project. This is the case even if you are nesting a shared family. This behaviour is akin to a project being linked into another one, where the connectors from the linked project won’t be available to the host project.
System Parameters Vegas Style – Type or Instance?
Since both Gary and I are here in Las Vegas at Autodesk University, I thought a post with a little bit of “now you see it, now you don’t” magic would be appropriate.
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.
Family Feedback Mechanisms – Part 1
Revit families are by nature pretty flexible. Even if you build a family to work with only a given range of sizes or in particular positions, a user can often find ways to use the family outside of those intended contexts. So sometimes it’s desirable to have a way of highlighting the fact that a family is outside of an acceptable range, or that it is positioned wrongly, e.g. a face-based family meant for walls that’s being placed on a ceiling. If you can’t stop a user from using a family “incorrectly” —and it may not be incorrect, just not recommended or optimal —then the next best thing is to provide some feedback to the user to indicate what is happening.