Surveyor come Modeler

As Builts… Existing Conditions… Field Verify… All of these require at best a Professional Surveyor (at best, unless it comes out of your pocket) at worst a couple of schmucks with a Tape Measure. Hey, I’ve been on both the "smart" and “dumb” ends of that tape and the whole process can be a frustrating, error filled, slog to get as much information as possible.

Wouldn’t it be an awesome fairytale land if you would just use a device (like a laser or ultrasonic “tape” measure) to grab measurements from a space and have it start to populate a BIM with that information?

Well, it’s no fairytale. POINTKNOWN emailed me today with an update on the surveying-to-BIM software PKNail. While PKNAil isn’t quite ready for commercial consumption, this video on YouTube is quite promising. Amazing actually. I can hardly fathom the time savings of direct to model measurements. I hope there claims of 300% times savings pans out.

Drop by their website for more information.

Edit: Darn, I should check my Blog feed before I post. Steve at RevitOpED beat me to it. Curses, foiled again! ;)

Proper Properties Pallete (echo?)

In a slight echo (a fun house reflection maybe) of Steve’s post over at Revit Oped I want to offer up a behavior you should be aware of when using the new functionality of allowing the Properties Dialog to be available at all times.

First, I want to say that I LOVE this functionality. The ability to access a family’s properties with just a click of the object or the properties of a view at any other time is a true time saver.

However, be aware of how this can effect families that have different type-based default values for instance parameters. Ok, read that again. Sometimes a family will have an instance parameter that will have a default value that is used a majority of the time, and there are times when a different type of that family will have a different default value.

But what happens when you start to use these families with the modeless Properties Dialog?

Since the dialog is open when you switch from one type to another, AND… the types share a common parameter, AND… the parameter has a value (the default value of the previous type)… the OPEN DIALOG holds the value that is there. Huh? I think you will understand when you watch the video.

Note that you can override this behavior by placing an instance directly from the Family browser (see video.)

I don’t think that this behavior is a “Bug” or an issue. When you think about it, it behaves as expected. It’s just not what I want. Ah, well, that seems to be often the case with Revit.

Properties_and_Instances

Oh, and there is no sound, yet again. You can’t watch So you think you can Dance with your wife and narrate a video at the same time. ;)