Autodesk User Research - Call for Participation

We are looking for Architects, Drafters, Designers and CAD Managers who use Revit Architecture or other products to design stairs or railings, to participate in a usability study of some Autodesk software concepts. The sessions are approximately 90 minutes long. If you are interested in participating, please take a few minutes to fill in this short questionnaire. Participants who are a good match for our study will be contacted within a few days.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/stairs_railings

Your involvement helps make our products better.

Thanks,

The Autodesk User Experience Team

Howayda Affan
UX Recruiter
User Research
AEC Industry Group           


 

BIM Apps - Repost

Ran across this post on the blog BIM Apps that as the name suggests details BIM Apps and related topics.

Ashrae Viewer - Plugin of the Month on Labs

Hi folks, I was just notified of a new Revit MEP add-in that works with both Revit 2011 and the upcoming Revit 2012. You can find details on Scott's blog and you can download it from the bottom of this page. Take a stab at it and tell us what you think.
Also what are your thoughts on other Plugin of the Month that we should look into for Revit, Navisworks or any other BIM products?

Revit OpEd: Dept. of Subtle - Illegal Characters

Revit OpEd: Dept. of Subtle - Illegal Characters: "I'm not referring to characters in a play, novel or movie but the characters we use in filenames. Revit will complain if you attempt to use ..."

Real-Time web based rendering for Revit

Have not used the product, but I received a call from a colleague mentioning the RevUp Rendering application.

Revit OpEd: Tip - List of All Levels via Grid Generator Extens...

Revit OpEd: Tip - List of All Levels via Grid Generator Extens...: "This tip is courtesy of Daniel Stine, author of several Revit books (listed in previous post). If you are familiar with the Grid Generator e..."

MEP-BIM-Guru: Pipe Volume Schedule

MEP-BIM-Guru: Pipe Volume Schedule: "I will go over how I set up a pipe volume schedule in Revit MEP. Pipe Types: For this example I have the pipe types set up with one pipe ..."

Revit 2012 Network Deployment Issues

With the release of the Revit 2012 platform, the first issue I found was with network deployments. The issues I found were that there is no method to define the Default Project Template. After installing the Deploy, the New Project Template it points to is 'Default.rte'. There is also not a method for altering the various library locations.

A few emails to the factory and I was provided with the following information. This is procedure is definitely a work-around and hopefully the actual network deployment is corrected soon.

Customizing Revit.ini

Rick Foster 4.22.2011

The Document

Revit.ini is created at install time using data from an xml document. By modifying that document you can distribute customizations with your deployment.

Identical copies of this document are potentially located in four places in your admin image:

\x86\RAC2013\inifile.xml

\x86\RAC2013\Program Files\Autodesk\Root\Program\Setup\Cache\inifile.xml

\x64\RAC2013\inifile.xml

\x64\RAC2013\Program Files\Autodesk\Root\Program\Setup\Cache\inifile.xml

You probably only have two of the copies in your admin image, either x86 or x64. That is fine.

Copy one of these locally and open it up. You'll notice that inifile.xml updates more than just revit.ini. Ignore the other ini files - those are mine.

It should be apparent what's going on. The elements are structured File->Section->Data. Knowing this you are ready to do some easy tasks. You can:

·       Change a value by updating an existing Data element

·       Add a key to a section by creating a Data element

·       Add a section to an ini file by creating a Section element

Example - Pointing to a custom Family Templates path

1.     Locate this Data element:

File Name="Revit.ini"

  Section Name="Directories"

    Data Key="FamilyTemplatePath"

2.     Set the text of that element to your custom Family Templates location.

(An important note about editing XML)

Ok, I sense a few of you have already started searching for DefaultTemplate and encountered some oddities, like Product attributes and Condition elements, and that the values are set to bracketed properties. Not to mention that there’s a bunch of DefaultTemplate elements. Well, it’s about to get interesting.

Product	Ties a setting to a specific product
Condition	Evaluated as a Window Installer condition – beyond the scope of this document
[PROPERTY]	Windows Installer property. These properties are the internal state of the install

The Short Story:

You can delete all of those DefaultTemplate elements except for one. Remove the Product attribute and Condition element and set the value to wherever your template resides.

The Long Story:

Inifile.xml serves all Revit products, which the Product attributes reflect. Additionally, each product serves multiple disciplines. In order to point the DefaultTemplate to the correct file we created multiple DefaultTemplate elements tied to specific products, each with a condition that further binds it to the discipline selected at install time.

Whether you find that confusing or empowering will be determined by how well I communicate the next topic.

Using Properties in Revit.ini

Properties are the variables passed around in the install. Inifile.xml uses them to respond to user selections. Content Packs use them as well, and even have the ability to set them. Additionally, there is syntax for reading environment variables. Here is how you can leverage both.

Environment Variables

You can use environment variables in inifile.xml by using the syntax [%ENVVAR]. Danny, please test: The practical upshot: You can create a script to call setup.exe. If you set environment variable before doing so then those variables can be used in inifile.xml.

This is quite powerful, and may be all that you need for your customizations. But wait, there’s more…

Custom Content Packs

Revit distributes content using the Content Pack framework. Check out the sample below. Content Packs have an ApplicationDefaults section for setting properties. You can create your own Content Pack and add it to a deployment (or install). The install will process it and set the properties for you. The sample will set YOURCUSTOMPROPERTY to Your Custom Value. You can now use that in inifile.xml by referring to [YOURCUSTOMPROPERTY].

Add this custom Content Pack to your deployment by clicking the Add Content button in the Revit panel on the Select Products page. Then ensure that your Content Pack is selected in the Default Content combobox.

Is that useful? It may be if you have one admin image supporting multiple deployments. Each deployment can integrate a different custom Content Pack to set unique properties for inifile.xml to use. Or you could even use the stock inifile.xml and just create a Content Pack to manipulate the properties that you are interested in.

The End

That’s it. The power to greatly complicate a deployment is now yours. Enjoy!

Supplemental information

Editing XML documents

XML documents are highly structured. If you goof this one up then none of the ini files it defines will be created. Fortunately inifile.xml has a DTD, which is a formatting definition that instructs validation tools on how to check the consistency of a document. To operate on inifile.xml with confidence do one of two things.

·       Use an XML editor. Google up a free one. It will highlight your mistakes. (witticism placeholder)

·       If you don’t use an xml editor, but prefer Notepad or some such, validate your efforts here.

Custom Content Pack sample

Cut and paste the following into a blank xml file. Be sure to change Identification->ContentPackId and Identification->Name. The document.xsd referred to in the second line is a schema that will help you edit and validate this xml document. You can find it on the disk in Content/Revit/en.

xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>

<DocumentRoot xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="document.xsd">

  <Identification>

    <ContentPackId>TemplateCPContentPackId>

    <Name>Content Pack template for custom settingsName>

  Identification>

  <ApplicationDefaults>

    <Property Name="RVT_PATH_LIBRARIES" Value="\\Server\Share\Custom Libraries"/>

    <Property Name="RVT_DEFAULTTEMPLATE_ARCHITECTURAL" Value="[C_TEMPLATES]\Custom Templates\default.rte" />

    <Property Name="RVT_DEFAULTTEMPLATE_CONSTRUCTION" Value="[C_TEMPLATES]\Custom Templates\Construction-Default.rte" />

    <Property Name="RVT_FAMILYTEMPLATEPATH" Value="[C_FAMTEM]" />

    <Property Name="YOURCUSTOMPROPERTY" Value="Your Custom Value" />

  ApplicationDefaults>

DocumentRoot>

Revit OpEd: Tip - Control Visibility of Image via Size Paramet...

Revit OpEd: Tip - Control Visibility of Image via Size Paramet...: "You can't control the visibility of an image file like you can other elements in a Revit family, such as mapping a parameter to the 'Visible..."

a [BIM] New World - Repost

Teresa Martin of a [BIM] New World blog has a good post on Search and Selection sets for Navisworks.

 Thursday, April 14, 2011

Search and Selection Sets Part II

Alas! It has been a month or two since Part I. Here is part II, of the long awaited sequel!

As I mentioned in Search and Selection Sets Part I (Post Dated 1-31-2011), Search Sets are the gold in Navisworks. This is where you get to drive. This is where you have all the control. Search Sets, as mentioned are based upon common data properties such as size, name, type, file, units, etc. This is why they are so powerful! If you know the common property to search for, you work here is done! And most importantly, you can re-use searches in different projects if they search for similar properties.

As an example, imagine a file imported from Revit (via *NWC Export). Revit, being the wonderful property based BIM format that it is, contains loads of property data (both instance and type). Now, envision some of the common properties in every Revit file, such as walls, ducts, beams or windows. You can set up a search in Navisworks to find all the walls or windows in the file (see image below).



In the data set shown above, I created a Search Set based upon the Revit Type Property: Wall. When I change this data set in Revit by adding a few additional interior walls, you can see that the Search Set automatically updates. Notice how there are now 9 walls, as opposed to 7 in the previous search.

Thinking outside the box, once you have these searches saved, they can be exported and imported into any other project. To export the Search Sets from a project, simply go to the application menu and choose Export>Search Sets The file will export your searches as an *XML file. You can then import the searches into another project using the import option from the application menu.


From a project perspective, Search Sets can be taken a step farther if you consider file and folder conventions as well. For instance, I can load data from a folder on my desktop named "Demo Files".

As I add additional data sets to this folder and append the *NWF file, the Search Set updates. For those of you seeing the big picture here, your job of updating the project from week to week just became a whole lot simpler if you took the time at the beginning of the project to create a tidy file and folder structure. If your current filing system looks anything like the storage system in my basement, you might need to do a little spring cleaning here to smite your errant file/folder conventions to alleviate the issue.

The image below shows how I set up my search to find a particular folder on my desktop. Of course for your office, you will want to path this to a server location and not your desktop for company wide use.


As a final thought, for those using Revit, you could put some custom shared parameters in the file to easily track in Navisworks, such as a FM parameter for items that need to be tracked for Facilities Management, etc.

Next month, I will be discussing the Appearance Profiler. Stay tuned!

Apr 14 - Autodesk Offers Europe BIM Survey Report

Apr 14 - Autodesk Offers Europe BIM Survey Report

Happy Birthday Steve

If you use Revit, there are are probably a few names that come to mind like Steve Stafford of RevitOpEd. Well, today is his Birthday! Happy Birthday.

Help Steve celebrate by attending the Revit Technology Conference and making him buy you a drink.