Inside the Syetem Repost: Introducing the Autodesk Building Performance Analysis (BPA) Certificate Program

Repost from Inside the System

We’re excited to announce that Autodesk has launched the Building Performance Analysis (BPA) Certificate Program. This free online course for architecture and engineering students teaches the building science fundamentals for designing high-performance buildings. Through self-paced online tutorials, quizzes and Autodesk software exercises, the BPA Certificate Program gives students the skills to help drive an industry-wide transition to performance-based sustainable design.
 What’s in the BPA Certificate program?

• Seven modules that include climate analysis, sun path studies, building massing and orientation, solar radiation analysis, wind analysis, and more.
• Clear “introduction to software” section within each of the seven modules
• Small clusters of content and quizzes that students can complete in short amounts at a time
• Case-based examples and questions
• Content focused on energy fundamentals and modeling with detailed Revit models
• Application of Revit-based tools (including Revit, Vasari and Green Building Studio)

This program takes an estimated 20 hours to complete. Following successful completion, students are issued a Certificate and a Badge that they can place on their resume, LinkedIn profile or portfolio. Students will improve and prove their fluency in the strategies and tools of sustainable building design.
Students - register here: http://autode.sk/19ZTv7a

Workset Visibility in Revit 2011 - Inside the System

Workset Visibility in Revit 2011

From Inside the System

Has this ever happened to you?

"Frankly, I’m annoyed by having to turn on my workset every time I create a new view. "

When a workset is created, there is an option to make it not visible by default. If you've run into the scenario above, this box was unchecked when the workset was created.

One work-around is to create a new workset that is 'Visible in all views', and then delete the original workset. When you delete a workset that contains elements, you have to option to move those elements to another workset, so you can move them to the newly created workset. However, be aware that when you do this, those elements may be visible in views where they weren't previously visible (assuming their category is visible in those views). So, you may need to 'clean up' after yourself, to turn off the worksets where they're not needed.

New in 2011 is the ability to change your mind about the workset visibility default. In the worksets dialow, there is a new column titled 'Visible in all views' where you can toggle this setting.

This setting is then tied to the 'Use Global Setting' option in a view's visibility graphic overrides settings. The Global Setting will indicate Visible or Not Visible as appropriate. You also have the options of Show and Hide as in previous releases.

I have advised against unchecking the 'Visible in all views' option prior to 2011, because if a file had worksets marked as such, there was no way to turn on the worksets when linked into a host model. However, now with 2011, you have the ability to control the visiblity of worksets in linked files.

However, I would still advise to exercise judgement when making something not visible by default. Consider a scenario where roof drains are on a workset marked not visible in all views in the architectural model. The plumbing designer, not knowing any better, doesn't go looking for roof drains in toggled off worksets.. he just expects to see them if they exist in the project. IMO, it is better to have things visible, then turned off by the 'view owner' if/when not needed.

Better control of workset visibility, especially for linked files, is a great enhancement in Revit 2011.