Welcome to part 1 of a 4-post series by IMAGINiT's Veredith Keller on Revit Adaptive Components! Veredith is wicked awesome and I'm sure you'll enjoy. So without further ado, here is the first post leading into Adaptive Components... Adaptive Points. ___ Adaptive points are created by modifying reference points. The geometry drawn by snapping to these flexible points results in an adaptive component. Adaptive components can be used in pattern panel families, adaptive component families, conceptual massing environment, and projects. In this blog post we'll show you how to create by using Adaptive Points, starting with a Generic Model Adaptive... Continue reading

You may have seen the recent IMAGINiT Clarity 2015 and Clarity Connect 2015 new release information that has been making its way around, but do you know two of the biggest forces behind the planning and development of IMAGINiT Clarity? Meet Beau Turner, Director of Business Development, and Matt Mason, Director of Software Development. You may recognize them from other events like Autodesk University or the Revit Technology Conference, and we've used them to help put together a quick informational video about what this Clarity software is all about (below). Take a look and if this seems like it might... Continue reading

IMAGINiT Virtual Free Event: Your Problem. Solved. - April 24th Come join us for our next virtual event and learn about the technologies that are important to you and your company as well as emerging trends in collaboration. We have 5 building design, construction, and management sessions led by some of the best and brightest here at IMAGINiT. Oh and its FREE! Building Sessions and FREE Registration Poor communication and lack of collaboration on design projects are common problems for companies in the architectural, civil and manufacturing space. Attend IMAGINiT's Problem Solved online conference and hear from experts as they... Continue reading

A few months back I recorded a blog post for CAD Shack and answered a question about Autodesk Remote and how it was pretty decent (and free for customers with an active subscription), but that its usefulness would be limited for Building Design professionals until Autodesk achieved a level of integration with Revit like they have with Inventor. Well, now we have it. Over the weekend, I received notice of an update to the Autodesk Remote app for my iPad and then also a notice on my laptop for an update to the Autodesk Remote software for it as well.... Continue reading

Here's a guest post from Carl Storms out of our Calgary office: On January 14th, 2014 Autodesk released their first BIM 360 Glue update of the year. Well this in of itself is not a surprise as Autodesk tries to push out an update for this cloud based software every 2 – 3 weeks (or at least monthly). The bulk of this particular update is the standard bug fixes and usability improvements. You can see the full list of the updates here. However the part of the update that caught my eye was the “Homework” required before the next update... Continue reading

Autodesk Labs just graduated "Project Falcon" from Autodesl Labs, and it's now Autodesk Flow Design: http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/2014/01/project-falcon-graduates-from-autodesk-labs-to-autodesk-flow-design.html If you haven't looked at it before, take a look, while it's got specific interaction with Revit and Inventor, the AutoCAD plugin might come back later... the only real down side, of course, is now that it's no longer an Autodesk Labs product, it's also no longer free for use/evaluation. Anyone with the software already running as a Technology Preview will be able to continue using it until the end of the month (Jan 31, 2014). Continue reading

You’re all familiar with the bSa, right? The buildingSMART alliance is a council of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) and they put out some pretty interesting projects and information. Little things that you might have heard of like the National CAD Standard and the National BIM Standard, the Journal of Building Information Modeling… anyway, as I was getting some information from their web site, I noticed a link to the “buildingSMART alliance January 2013 Challenge”, where they challenged software vendors to prove how well their software communicates via open standards. I remembered seeing information about this a while... Continue reading

You might have seen some press releases about it already, but IMAGINiT just announced Clarity 2014 today. There are plenty of ways to get into the details of what Clarity does or what's new in this release - take a look at our product page, sign up for one of the webcasts held on Friday, May 17, watch a recorded presentation, or contact your local IMAGINiT office for some personalized attention - but I wanted to take a moment to point out one of the features that I put in my top ten of what's new. Hyperlinks in Data Sheets... Continue reading

Well... it's out! IMAGINiT Scan to BIM 2014 We've placed a few new tools in this release and improved on some other tools - in fact, there is an area on a sample pipe cloud that I use in client presentations that doesn't work for me anymore. huh? So now you're re-reading that last statement trying to figure out if I really meant to say that. :) Yes, I did. One of the key things in working with point clouds is an understanding of the conflict between what Revit wants to draw and what your deliverable requirements require. This particular... Continue reading

I'm a fan of Ted. Wonderful, enlightening, funny, fascinating presentations on a wide variety of subjects. I came across this one today and wanted to share - It seemed like a good lightweight thing for a Friday. Things to make all our lives a bit easier (mostly) when we are working with technology. Especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. :) Enjoy! Continue reading

There have been a few questions coming our way about Navisworks 2014 and Autodesk Quantity Takeoff (QTO) 2013. Those questions have provided a nice opportunity to get out a blog post on some general Q&A about the two. As you might have noticed, there are two different release years listed with the software above. Autodesk has not and is not releasing a 2014 version of QTO. Instead, Autodesk is building 3D quantification features into Navisworks Simulate 2014 and Navisworks Manage2014. If you think about it, when you consider that Navisworks is the software that assembles information from all sorts of... Continue reading

A while back I did a presentation at our Know It.All online event about Process Improvements - asking the question, "How do you know how well you are doing (in this case, using your preferred design software), and how do you determine what you can do to get better?" The idea I was chasing down is to step back and think - you've already gone through some sort of technology implementation and things *seem* to be going all right... but could or should things be better? Are you getting everything you can from your investment? If you've ever asked yourself... Continue reading

I have to admit, I’ve been struggling with this one. As an Autodesk partner I know we need to - at least publically :) - show a strong positive outlook to nearly everything that happens related to Autodesk and Autodesk software, but as I look at Revit LT, my initial impression was, “What?... Why in the world did Autodesk come out with that???” For more information about Revit LT after you’ve gone through this post, you can follow this link and view additional product information including a couple of product comparison matrices: http://imaginit.com/software-solutions/building-architecture/autodesk-revit-lt The major limitations as I see it... Continue reading

IMAGINiT’s Ken Flannigan has a blog and has posted a good piece on Vasari (which just hit a new release). In his words, With the new Vasari Technology Preview Version 2.5 available free from Autodesk Labs (link to Vasari 2.5 website) I wanted to take a post to point out some of the new improvements as well as to share my general affection for this software. In this post, he highlights some of the bigger reasons he really likes Vasari, key features like energy modeling, wind tunnel analysis, the radiation tool, modeling, and exporting to FBX. Take a look and... Continue reading

Do you remember Autodesk Lab's Project PhotoFly? Well, it has recently graduated into 123D Catch. And it's still free! http://www.123dapp.com/catch The idea behind it is that you can use a digital camera to take pictures of something, load it into this software, and it uses all sorts of black magic and cloud computing to convert these pictures into a real honest to goodness 3D mesh with texture. I used the Labs version to take pictures of a small statue on a co-worker's desk using just the camera on my cell phone and the results were astonishing. You can then take... Continue reading

by Joe Eichenseer How many of you have run into this and found a dead end? You are using a 64-bit workstation (Windows 7, probably) with 64-bit version of some Autodesk software (Revit or Navisworks, perhaps) and want to try out this supposedly nifty neato cool wow export/link to Microsoft Access. You might have run into a problem in that as you work through any export/link wizard, you don't see any way to export to MS Access. This is probably because: Your Autodesk software is 64-bit, so it needs a 64-bit ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) driver. Your Microsoft Office is... Continue reading

I have to admit – I’m dragging today. Last week’s time at AU, meeting clients and friends, making new contacts and linking other people together… getting back to work this week takes a bit of adjustment. And I am severely lacking in focus. So what do I do? Head out to the internet, of course! :) I’ve linked to videos from Ted.com before, and I’m going to do that again today. There are an incredible number of really interesting and inspiring presentations there and the two below caught my attention. The spider silk presentation might include some things that you... Continue reading

by Joe Eichenseer Crazy fun times continue through day 1 and 2 after Cyrus and I made the video for yesterday's post. The only session that I was able to make it to (that I was not co-presenting) was the innovation session talking about the future of cloud services within the building design and construction industry. One of the interesting things that I took away from it were the results of the polls that the audience responded to about the role and purpose of the cloud in our industry. In general (as might be expected) the idea and promise of... Continue reading

By Joe Eichenseer We had a question come through Twitter recently, asking for information on keyboard shortcuts. I’m taking the answer that Rob Goetze in our Edmonton office provided and am adding some excel spreadsheets that list the default keyboard shortcuts for Revit Structure, Revit Architecture, and Revit MEP. These were generated by going into the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog box in Revit and clicking on the “Export” button. The resulting XML file can be opened in Microsoft Excel to get similar results to what you’ll see in the files below. (Note: many times, .xlsx files will not download correctly and... Continue reading

With all due respect and admiration for those who are truly recovering addicts, here's a light-hearted bit that I put together (actually, part of an AU class proposal that was not accepted) for AutoCAD Addiction... the cure for which, of course, is Revit. :) -- Step 1 - We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable Step 2 - Came to believe that a power greater than AutoCAD could restore us to sanity Step 3 - Made a decision to turn our design and drafting over to the care of Revit as we... Continue reading

hmmmmm.... Fresh from Autodesk Labs, an update to Project Neon (http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/neon/): Project Neon is a rendering service that offers greater productivity and a faster turnaround of photorealistic renderings by leveraging the power and compute capabilities of the cloud. Project Neon now lets you render Revit 2012 projects using the Neon for Autodesk Revit 2012 Add-in that you can download from the Project Neon web site. In short, you install an add-in for Revit and go to "Web Services" tab in your Revit Architecture/Structure/MEP 2012 ribbon. Adjust settings and go! When the rendering is done, you'll be emailed details on how... Continue reading

I thought I'd take a moment and echo a post from the Autodesk Inside the Factory blog: ---- Autodesk is working to improve the organization of Revit family content and looking for Revit customers to participate in a short online survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/revitcontent The survey has two parts: In Part I, you will be asked to review three proposed options for organizing Revit family content, select the option you like the most, and tell us why you chose that option. In Part II, you will be asked to try a few tasks using the best option you chose. The two-part... Continue reading

If you've followed this blog for a while :) and you should :) then you know that I like to link to Ted Talks from time to time... and here's another one. I have not been able to get through all of it yet (airport wi-fi is not always all that cooperative to streaming media), but it looks pretty interesting. It's a fair bet to say that pretty much everything on Ted is pretty interesting. (www.ted.com) Here's the description from their site and then the video itself: A future more beautiful? Architect Thomas Heatherwick shows five recent projects featuring ingenious... Continue reading

If you hadn't heard, our new version of IMAGINiT Utilities for Revit 2012 is out now. If you do your Autodesk subscription through IMAGINiT, you have access to these tools for free... others have access to a lightweight free version or can pay for the full set of tools: http://imaginit.com/software-solutions/building-architecture/imaginit-utilities-for-revit Matt Mason, who is in charge of our product development group, had a post recently on his CAD Application Development blog about one of the new utilities in this release, DWFPlus. (other new utilities include a language translation feature and an automatic view creation utility - cool stuff!) Here's his... Continue reading

Have you ever wondered why a detail view (especially an enlarged plan detail) works in a different way than most other callouts? Well, I don't really have an answer for that, but what I do have for you is a way to understand what it is doing and how to control the results you get. But before you get to that fun bit - here's a question for you: Do you prefer video tips like this one and the previous post about splitting schedules, or do you prefer printed words and screen captures? Comment on this post and let me... Continue reading