Plugs

No, this is not about Revit MEP. I just have a bunch of announcements/news items that are probably of interest to the Revit community and want to condense them into one post. I’ve been a bit busy and frankly don’t want to fill your inbox with a ton of infomercials. I receive a lot of “press releases” but don’t want to turn this blog into more spam so, since this is my blog, I get to decide what to post and when! And probably most of you have already heard those from other sources, so here we go…

Apps/Plug-ins/API

Kiwicode’s Family Browser has received some really great upgrades recently (thanks Phillip!). The browser window can now be re-sized without having to enable borders and we can now link families from various folders. I cannot wait to set aside time at work to assemble some custom palettes (favorites of sorts). There is also a Favorites tab where you can add/link families so they are literally at your fingertips. Say you are detailing for the rest of the day: you would use this tab to place the most needed components so you can be fast and productive. It’s a brilliant idea! The search function is also quite snappy now. The first time you click into the box, it indexes the families (takes a few seconds) and then, subsequent searches are almost instant.

As you can tell I’m really excited about these improvements, but in my opinion the best one yet is the revamped insert behavior. Now when you click on a family in the palette, it automatically previews with no need to click in the canvas. A single click places an instance, just like native Revit behavior. And if you click on another family while actively placing other instances, it automatically switches to the new clicked family and you can continue placing the new instances. This is also native Revit behavior and makes this plugin feel like it’s part of the software. These were real sticking points for users in the previous version (from personal experience) and now it feels completely seamless.

Kiwicodes really listens to user feedback. Check out my previous post on this topic and note the list of wishes; they’re almost all implemented and then some!

Steve Faust of Revolution Design has some really great apps too. I just want to mention Keynote Manager and the recent Selection Master. Steve has graciously given me a license for the latter and I plan on writing in more depth about his tools, but wanted to plug them now so you can check them out.

Have you ever had to delete unwanted levels in your project and couldn’t because it would have taken a lifetime to find all the families hosted on them? Thanks to the re-host feature, now you can with Selection Master. This tool is a must-have in every BIM Manager’s arsenal. More on these tools in future posts.

Digipara’s Elevator Architect is another tool I’ve been aware of for a while. Unfortunately I tried using it in a recent project but it has failed me. Due to time constraints I have not had time to troubleshoot in depth, although the authors have been very responsive in trying to collect data. Hopefully in the future we can get to the bottom of the problem and use it successfully. As always I might write more in depth in the future.

Learning Revit (and Vasari)

Renowned author Paul Aubin has a new Revit family building course on Lynda.com. You can read all about it here. If you want to sharpen your family building skills (and you know how important this is), you cannot go wrong using this great resource!

What!?! You don’t know what Vasari is? They are up to version 2.1 on Labs and I really wish I had an extra 10 hours a day to play with the cool features that are not in Revit. If like me you’re finding it hard to keep up with everything and don’t have time to test yet another application, you can go to the newly launched Vasari Talk (yep, another link for your bookmarks!). You can participate in live webinars after signing up, or you can watch past recorded sessions.

Navigating Revit

By now you all know that 3Dconnexion’s devices work with Revit. I have not had a chance to try one yet but it looks like it would be a great tool. In the meantime, they are having a drawing for a trip to Autodesk University in Las Vegas on Nov. 29 – Dec. 1, as well as airfare, accommodations and a SpacePilot PRO 3D mouse. You can click here to enter. And speaking of AU, I was lucky enough to make plans for attending this year (thanks AUGI and PhiloWilke!) and am looking forward to meeting up with some old buddies. See you at the AUGI booth!

Evangelizing Revit (and digital simulation)

Abstract submissions for SimAUD 2012 (the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design) are fast approaching. The upcoming symposium will be in Orlando, Florida and you can find more about it here. You can also go to this link for the proceedings from the past two years.

Plugs

Creating 3dViews FAST!

One of the things I find myself doing frequently and feeling frustrated about, is setting up 3D views cropped to specific areas, such as around stairs, main reception areas, hallways, etc. I’ve always wished that Revit had a faster way to achieve this. A little less than a year ago as I was daydreaming (happens often), an idea struck me. So I wrote it down and emailed an API proposal to several programmers to see whether this was possible and how much it would cost.

To my disappointment I only received one reply the following morning, but I fell off my chair as I realized that the email response contained an actual proof of concept tool! It worked like a charm but we were close to release date for Revit 2011 and the tool was written for 2010. April went by and I got too busy to follow up with trying to have it updated for 2011. Then I lost my job and priorities changed.

So I recently managed to get in touch again with my European colleague at b.i.m.m, Jochen Reichert, who graciously sent me an updated tool for free and is letting me share it with everyone. How nice is that??

Oh, I guess I need to tell you what the tool does eh? Very simple…you make a selection of objects in any view, launch the tool (I set my shortcut to “bb”) and are given the option to create a new 3D view or update an existing one (which can be your active view) based on the bounding box of your selected objects plus an optional margin. Once it finishes, you simply open/switch to the modified 3D view. No more dragging those pesky little section box arrows! Nice, simple and elegant.

So thanks to my tiny contribution in spec’ing the tool and to Jochen’s great courtesy in whipping it up fast & furious for free, you can go to this page to download and learn how to install & use it.

DISCLAIMER: I obviously cannot guarantee that your requests will be incorporated since I’m not the coder, but if you have any ideas to enhance it, feel free to share them. It works almost exactly like I want it to, so I really don’t feel like much needs to be added. Hope you find it useful and obviously, use at your own risk!

So as a token of appreciation, head over to b.i.m.m to see what services and tools they offer. Their site is mainly in German right now but they are frantically adding English content to appeal to a wider audience. They sure impressed me with their turnaround time and follow-through. On behalf of the readers, thanks Jochen!

Creating 3dViews FAST!

Filtering application - now works on 64 bit!

Back in September, I wrote a post about a third party filter tool for Revit, called FilterTool 2009 by Jochen and Shenqiang from Toolbox4Revit.com. As a few of you found out, this version did not work on 64 bit XP or Vista. Well finally, the new version is out and they have added some great enhancements!

Remember two of my suggestions about grouping and distinguishing between model and detail lines of different styles? Guess what...that functionality is now in! This is a great little addition that I'm sure lots of you will find very useful. I know we needed to filter by line style and type several times in the past. And now that we can build selection filters, this tool will get used very often. Give it a try! I think it's great value for the money.

Filtering application - now works on 64 bit!

Custom application - Filtering

In a post last month, I suggested several enhancements to the filter tool in Revit, namely being able to view the family types and quantity of each category. A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by Jochen Reichert of Toolbox4Revit.com, who has developed such a tool utilizing Revit's API. I was very excited that my wish was granted in such a short time ;) Note to Autodesk: Users STILL want this to be in Revit's core functionality.

Jochen graciously gave me a license to test out and I really like this little gem. Installation was a snap and I didn't have to edit the Revit.ini file manually to get it to work. As with Revit add-ins, you can access it under the External Tools in the Tools pull-down. Now if only we could disable Revit's filter tool and make it point to this application, it would be awesome!

The application comes with a nicely explained and illustrated pdf document, which will install in the Program folder of your Revit Architecture directory. The application is very simple to use and quite self-explanatory. A feature I really like is the ability to save selection filters in your project which can be used later (persistent). Note that these filters don't save the actual selection set. So for example if you save a filter for Generic - 8" walls and you add more instances of this wall type to your project, when you use this filter later on, all Generic - 8" walls are selected.


Another really handy feature is how the filter tool groups objects by their associated/hosting level. This can be a huge time-saver when trying to clean up a model with objects hosted to the incorrect level and positioned "properly" by using lots of offsets. I had to do this manually not long ago and let me tell ya....it wasn't fun.


As always, I came up with a list of suggested future enhancements:

• What if the Selection Filters could be saved as view Filters? Building them through selections is a nice, interactive way and they could serve a dual purpose by also being used in the V/G dialog.
• It would be nice if lines are grouped by style. Currently we cannot do a "select all instances" for lines, so this feature would come in handy, especially if we could save selection filters.
• We cannot select detail lines independently from model lines, so if detail lines would group under "Not level based" or "View specific", while model lines would go under a "Workplane based" group (or if the workplane is set to a level, then perhaps they go under that level), that would be a huge asset to this tool.

I don't intend to uninstall this tool and I'm sure that if you check it out, you'll want to have it installed permanently. I'm sure Jochen doesn't like to hear me say that this should be standard Revit core functionality, but I truly believe it and in the meantime, it's great to see that 3rd parties can fill this gap and make some money in the process. Once we get this functionality in Revit, 3rd parties can continue focusing on other, more important plugins ;)

Custom application - Filtering