More API goodies

This is yet another subject I’ve been meaning to write about for some time now. Advanced Solutions’ BIMAssist is another set of tools made possible through the ever-expanding Revit API. I got very excited watching the video of the new feature “Room Surface Parameter Extractor”, which is not part of the tools available in IMAGINiT’s Utilities for Revit. It’s nice to actually see different tools packaged by each of these companies. Their main target audience however is their subscribers, and from what I’ve seen over the last years, pricing for non-subscribers could easily make Anderson Cooper’s The RiDicULiST.

The BIMAssist page contains video clips of each feature, which is probably what convinced me to try it. It was a period when I was struggling with finding an acceptable compromise (recently, the word of the day in politics) to documenting finish materials in Revit. Which reminds me that I really need to post my wrap-up thoughts on the subject from almost a year ago, but back to the subject…you can go and see each one for yourself.

My testing experience was somewhat conflicted. It took forever to get the 30 day trial license to function. And tanks to a busy schedule, it expired before I finished my testing, however they were extremely helpful in extending the license, so thanks a lot for that!

Unfortunately I was not as excited once I found out exactly how the room surface parameter extractor worked. Rather than bore you with a lot of writing, here is my list of notes I jotted down:

• Door Mark Manager: Numbers doors based on the To/From Room number;
• Project Cleaner is a very nice tool to have. Useful when sharing a 3d model and you want to make it lighter or remove sheets, views etc. without having to do it the manual way (such as grouping and saving out the group or linking the project into a new file and binding it);
• Sheet Number update: Also quite nice when you need to renumber sheets without having to do it the long way (we usually have to rename it twice if the final sheet number is already in use: append a suffix, renumber the other sheet and renumber again by removing the suffix);
• Fire Rating Coordinator: I was excited at first about this tool, but as I read the help, all excitement faded and turned to disappointment. This tool is making the wrong assumption that the door fire-rating will be the same as the partition fire-rating: Wrong! Take a look at (for example) IBC 2009 Table 715.4 and you'll notice only a handful of situations where that holds true. Also notice the importance of the partition/wall type: The fire-rating alone does not tell the whole story. So a 1 hour wall can mean a 1hr, 45min. or 20min. door depending on whether the wall is a Fire Barrier, a Shaft Enclosure/Exit Passageway, and Exterior wall or a Smoke Barrier. Clearly this tool does not address any of these issues;
• Room Surface Parameter Extractor: I had really high hopes for this tool and was very excited. Unfortunately
  I'm a bit disappointed after testing:
• Painted materials are not recognized. This is a big issue because creating unique wall types just to designate different colors is just not the way to go. This tool should be able to read the materials on the surfaces around the room and not just the ones in the definition of the element;
• Only the material name is reported; why not give the user the ability to report certain material parameters instead, such as Type Mark? I also tried doing a thin finish floor above the floor slab and it worked if there was only one floor (finish) in the room. However if you had 2 floor finishes, there's no way to list only the finish materials of just those floors. The option "Comma Delimited List" in "Surface To Use" ends up reporting all the floor layers, which is not what we would expect of a “surface extractor”. I also found it to be a bit slow when running, even if I selected just one room.

Anyway, if you want to see these tools for yourself, you can participate in a free webinar coming up this Wednesday 10th August.

While we’re talking of tools, make sure to visit the ADN Plugin of the Month page at the Autodesk Labs site, where various tools are made available for free in exchange for user feedback. For example there is a Door and Room renumber tool that I find very easy to use, and recently they released another handy one called eTransmit. Finally, Jochen of b.i.m.m released the updated tools for the Revit 2012 version, so be sure to check those out too. So many tools, so little time to keep up with them all!

More API goodies

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!

My first "negative" post

I'm a pretty positive person, but when I smell an odor I don't like, my face will show it. So please accept my apologies for this somewhat negative post. It doesn't have to do with Revit, but it has to do with the direction that the marketing engine within Autodesk seems to be taking.

Autodesk is hosting World Press Days and thanks to the wonders of blogging, you can see exactly what is going on almost in real time. Take a look at this post and judge for yourself. I love fish, but I don't like the smell of this.

Now I don't know about you, but it seems that Autodesk is going to take the route of pushing other products into our industry and this makes me very pessimistic regarding the improvement of Revit's modeling tools. The beauty that most of us see in Revit is the fact that it brings together a lot of people within a firm that are talented in varying parts of project delivery. I find that the use of Revit helps to build a better team, a wholistic work environment. When we allow a practice to be fragmented in departments and separate disciplines (design separate from documentation for example), it gets to be quite destructive in the long term. BIM is not an easy thing to implement. Learning Revit or any other BIM capable software is a monumental task. I shudder at the idea of having to learn/teach/support more complex programs in order to find the forms that create great architecture (ps: most of us don't really need fancy tools as we don't design blobs). I'm not advocating the use of only one tool: always use what's best to craft the idea that's brewing in your mind.

Now you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that the larger the number of products you own that can be sold separately, the more money you can make. I honestly hope I'm wrong, but this marketing strategy doesn't bode well for making Revit do a lot more than it currently does. What's the incentive if Autodesk can sell you more software? Keep in mind how hard it is to learn and teach complex tools and use them at full capacity....now multiply that by 3 or 4.

I would rather learn a complex software so I'm able to use every single tool available properly and produce at 98% efficiency, than learning 4 different softwares that have different interfaces and lots of different tools to achieve different things, and be lucky to hit 40% efficiency. I'm not so sure it's "healthy" to have desigers becoming specialists of designing in one software versus another one. By the way, I know that already happens, but now if we introduce more packages into the mix, we start losing the fidelity that we're all striving for in a BIM environment, requiring us to hire a lot more software expertise within firms, because you need even more specialists to understand the complex behaviors and interactions between different software packages.

At the last AU, one of the big points that Autodesk made was that they were going to focus on interperability between their software. I actually chuckled when I heard that: partly in disbelief that such comment was a key hot topic of Autodesk's strategy (hmmmm, what have they been waiting for to make this happen?!) and partly because of a dose of cynicism that this could actually be achieved. And as I said, if the key goal is to sell us software, our industry will get tools that aaaaaalmost get us there: "But hey, if it doesn't fulfill all your needs....take a look at what other wonderful tools we can sell you to get you there!"

Ok, I'll put an end to this. I promise to be more positive next time :) I would really like to hear your points of view. I hope I'm dead wrong about my perceptions.

My first "negative" post