AU 2009 Classes available online…

At least according to the email I recently got from AU. I haven’t double checked, but here is the link if you want to see for yourself.

AU 2009

Yep they are there... Just checked.

Autodesk Design Review Usage and Features Prioritization Survey

Take the 10 mins and give your feedback on Design Review.  This is your chance to influence which way the product develops and help ADSK understand who uses the product and how they are using it.

Can’t hurt, might help.

Link to Survey

AU afterglow… aftermath…

I suppose it depends on your viewpoint, but no matter who you are, another AU is in the bag…  While I haven’t heard any hard numbers yet, the estimates I heard run from 5900-6800, but I think that those are all hearsay.  Even as a newcomer, I can tell that it had been scaled back.  From stories of hotel suites with sunken living rooms and free top-shelf booze last year to the reality of this year’s standard King or Double rooms and no “hard stuff” at all at the exhibit hall or parties.  Add to that the “technical difficulties” the sound tech was having during the string concert at the AU Bash and the slightly (ok, seriously) cheesy Karaoke, and you have a formula for some disappointed AU-ers.  That said, in this down economy I think Autodesk did a wonderful job.  I think they kept quality classes and a reasonable price.

As far as I’m concerned, I thought the whole event was great.  I feel so lucky to have been able to meet some of the hardest hitters in the industry face-to-face in an environment of sharing and collaboration.  Isn’t that the point?  Folks at AU freely share content, templates, ideas, processes, etc.  It’s so exciting to be part of our industry right now. 

I don’t think it was the glitz and glam of Vegas (it has more to do with the weekend spent with my family after the fact) but I am re-charged and re-energized by great conversations and information exchange with awesome people.  The weather over the next few days looks promising for a couple of in-depth blog posts. Gotta love blizzards!!!

AU 2009 Day 3 Part 2

While I have been a fan of his blog for awhile, I didn’t expect the sheer amount of personality that David Butts posses (as was evidenced by his Gold 2010 shaped glasses, his Mardi Gras bead prizes for audience participation.)

In his class MP314-1 Revit MEP Powerful tips and tricks is a must watch for anyone in the beginning to intermediate stages of using Revit MEP.  When this is posted online be sure to watch and download the accompanying material.

Bonus: He usually posts a Kick @SS MEP Systems Project template to the class site that will go a long way towards helping you create an office standard template.

Also, check out his new instructional books for Revit MEP Basic and Advanced

AU 2009 Day 3

One thing I didn’t expect (I probably should have) is that having all of this dialog with other users and managers involved in the BIM/VDC/IPD process has given me NUMEROUS ideas for future blog posts.  I HAVE been taking notes and hopefully I will be able to get these ideas out here for everyone to share in the upcoming weeks.

One of the stand out sessions (for me anyway) from yesterday was put on by Joshua Kanner from Vela Systems, INC I posted about VELA a few months ago, and I was very excited to see the product a little closer and be able to have a conversation with Joshua in the exhibit hall after hours.

What a neat tool.  It allows your field personnel to interact with the BIM using a very friendly interface (one that is probably not far removed from what they use now, even if they are using hard-copy forms) that is task/process based. An example would be the staff commissioning the facility can use a barcode (or even RFID) scanner to track equipment (Received, damaged, ready to install, installed, prepped for functional test, etc) using a simple procedure that is familiar to them.  The barcode/RFID tag can add data directly from the Vela database when scanned.  That data (manufacturer, model, whatever the supplier decides to add) can then be automatically added back into the NavisWorks model the GC is working in.  Read that again… Automatic bi-directional information transfer.  WE ARE THERE!!!!   This IS BIM!!!!!  The sky is the limit.  Color code views to show equipment status (delivered, damaged, etc)  Pan back and see your major pinch points visually. 

Can you tell I’m excited?  Geesh….

Thought  provoking idea of the day:

How can I use the model to not only maintain my building, but control it as well?  With automatic control and sensing systems out there, are we really that far away from this?

Still Alive and Well in AU

Contrary to what my wife may think, I AM alive and doing well here in the vast Nevada desert.

Today is shaping up to be quite busy and full of information, but I wanted to take a moment and give some quick props to Laura Handler (Tocci Building Corp) and David Epps (Holder Construction) for there presentation of the different ways Contractors can arrive at a BIM. They talked about the pros and cons of doing 2D conversions in house, outsourcing the creation of the model and receiving the model directly from the designer. Very well done and worth checking out at AU online when available. CR118-1 (I will provide a link when it becomes available on AU Online.) Be sure to check out Laura's Blog for more about using BIM from a contractor's point-of-view.

I'd also like to congratulate Heapy Engineering of Dayton Ohio for having an Upper Management that totally "gets" what BIM, VDC and IPD are all about. They are technologically savvy and looking to stay on the forefront of the industry even in a down economy (rumor has it they may even be hiring, unheard of right now.). They understand (at every level in the organization, it would seem) that VDC/BIM is not a software implementation , but rather, a complete reorganization of the current project delivery process. Using the new BIM authoring tools (namely Revit) to deliver the same old deliverables with the same tired process is a recipe for disaster. Their successes should serve as an inspiration to anyone making their first steps down the road to BIM and integration. Check out their class MP122-2 (link to come.)

Alive and well in Vegas...

Touched down around Noon yesterday and had a pretty laid-back afternoon. Took in the "daytime" Strip (the place is so over-the-top,) watched part of a disappointing football game (C'mon Pats, you're killin' me) and checked out the AEC Mixer.

Somehow I missed the invite to the Blogger mixer, heck I didn't even know there was one. Ah well, guess that's what I get for not posting much in the days and weeks leading up to AU.

Looking forward to awesome day of classes and meeting some of my blog-o-sphere friends and acquaintances.

More to come...

AU's a comin'....

I'm a goin'. Are you? I hope so.

Although attendance is projected to be down considerably from last year, it looks to shaping up to a great event.

This will be my first time attending, and I am open invitations to share an adult beverage of choice and shoot the .... Revit.

And contrary to popular belief, I'm pretty sure when it's your first time that the rounds not on YOU, but on everyone else. But, I've been wrong before. ;)

Revit X- files

Mechanical and Electrical Reflected Ceiling Plan (RCP) Strangeness

There is a strange behavior, when a RCP’s Discipline parameter is set to either Mechanical or Electrical, that has caused a problem for us on a couple of occasions.

Normally the view parameter Underlay Orientation is grayed out and not available when there is no Underlay selected. However, when a view (any view) is set to Mechanical or Electrical, that parameter becomes active and can be changed. This hasn’t caused a problem with floor plans yet. But I see how it could.

While it’s bad enough that a user could change this parameter to plan in a RCP (or to RCP in plan even) what makes this truly sinister is that the default for a NEW REFLECTED CEILING PLAN is PLAN for this parameter (that’s why it hasn’t caused issues for plans, it’s the default there as well.)

We have had occasions where the ceiling just no longer shows (as expected when set to plan) or in a linked model it was just showing the ceiling grid in the wrong place. Which is far worse, as we found when we went to coordinate light fixtures, air terminals and ceilings. YIKES!!!!!

So, it’s imperative that anyone who makes a new ceiling plan that is to be used for one of these disciplines needs to change that parameter to read Reflected Ceiling Plan.

To make matters more difficult, Revit has decided that this parameter is not something that you would want to set as part of a view template, even though you can set it’s Underlay (hmmmmm, that makes sense. I can’t count the times I’ve wanted to have multiple view have the same Underlay. Well only because it hasn’t happened.)

And to really confuse the user, when the same view (with the incorrect value for Underlay Orientation) is set to COORDINATION or ARCHITECTURAL for it’s Discipline… of course it displays correctly (exactly as you expected, right?) Now, don’t be silly and think that it has somehow magically changed the incorrect value. No, Revit has just decided to ignore it.'

Have I logged this as a support request? No. I probably should, but I’ve been busy fixing my own issues…

All aboard the Boolean Express

Today's post is by a guest blogger. Eric Shappe is a BIM Content Administrator in our office. A Revit Family Guru. He's going to take us on a journey on the Boolean Express.

We have lots of fun with conditional statements in our office. There's no "ifs, ands, or buts but there are plenty of IFs, ANDs, or NOTs.

We have done a lot of experimenting with using YES/NO parameters (Check Boxes) to drive length and visibility parameters. We use IF statements to change multiple aspects of display and size in several of our families.

In this case, the plan was to have a TEXT parameter report one of THREE conditions. Reporting TWO conditions is elementary. I have to hand it to Eric, three was a real challenge.

So yesterday I was trying to figure out how to get glazing in a door to be either “clear”, “wire” or, and here is the kicker “n/a” (or - - as I used). Before I explain how I finally accomplished this I will give you a little background on my existing conditions. First I have a door family which has a nested door panel family inside of it. This door panel has a void that is controlled by 4 yes/no parameters that describe how to cut the door panel and to what dimensions. These 4 yes/no parameters are as follows:

HALF LITE

FULL LITE

8" X 33" LITE

3" X 33" LITE

Then I had created another yes/no parameter that controlled the glazing type from “CLEAR” to “WIRE” named

DOOR WIRE GLASS

Now onto the fun stuff, my first pass at getting this equation to work only yielded two results which were “WIRE” and “CLEAR”. Now that would be fine and dandy if all my doors had some sort of glazing in them, but that isn’t the case. So at first I tried to wrestle with some conditional terms, which basically brought the BIM studio to a screeching halt trying to figure out how to do this. But after an evening to myself and 4 other people trying to take a walk around conditional statement park, our brains had been mugged of any more ideas. All we had ended up with was the following

if(and(DOOR WIRE GLASS, or(HALF LITE, or(FULL LITE, or(3" X 33" LITE, or(8" X 33" LITE))))), "WIRE", “CLEAR”)

As I was driving home trying to parse through this issue it dawned on me, why not just create another parameter driven by each of the glazing parameters, which would give me another yes/no value.

So the next morning I created a WIRE GLASS parameter (pardon the confusing names of some of these parameters) which reads as follows:

if(HALF LITE, "CLEAR", if(FULL LITE, "CLEAR", if(8" X 33" LITE, "CLEAR", if(3" X 33" LITE, "CLEAR", "--"))))

This is basically saying if I have any of the “LITE” parameters checked read “CLEAR” if not then give me “- -“ . Now I had to marry this with my earlier conditional statement that controlled “WIRE” or “CLEAR” which ended up changing to this:

if(and(DOOR WIRE GLASS, or(HALF LITE, or(FULL LITE, or(3" X 33" LITE, or(8" X 33" LITE))))), "WIRE", WIRE GLASS)

This states if both the “WIRE” and any one of the “LITE” parameters are satisfied give me “WIRE” if not then check with the other WIRE GLASS parameter which reads out CLEAR if we have glazing with no wire or “ - -“ which would be no glazing at all.

So in the end I have this: (both are text parameters)

DOOR GLAZING TYPE = if(and(DOOR WIRE GLASS, or(HALF LITE, or(FULL LITE, or(3" X 33" LITE, or(8" X 33" LITE))))), "WIRE", WIRE GLASS)

WIRE GLASS = if(HALF LITE, "CLEAR", if(FULL LITE, "CLEAR", if(8" X 33" LITE, "CLEAR", if(3" X 33" LITE, "CLEAR", "--"))))

Which gives me my 3 conditions WIRE, CLEAR and - -

Enjoy!