AU Kickoff

The gang is pretty much all here and ready for day one of Autodesk University.

At the Speaker Social Monday night, from left to right:
Dave Butts of Advanced Solutions, Yours Truly, Lynn Allen and Paul Aubin




Paul Aubin and I enjoying a couple of ceegars and brandy later in the evening.

Autodesk White Paper on Revit Performance

Download this critical white paper on Revit Platform Performance with tips on how to improve model performance and stability:

Download Revit_Platform_2009_Model_Performance_Technical_Note.pdf

Send in those error reports!!

When you crash in AutoCAD / AutoCAD Architecture / AutoCAD MEP / Revit / (insert any other Autodesk product here), do you choose to send the report to Autodesk?

You should.

First and foremost - you might actually be surprised some day to receive a notification after submitting the report that there is actually a fix or solution for what caused your problem.

At the very least, submitting the report means that someone at Autodesk has to deal with it - sort of like "payback" for being at least indirectly responsible for you possibly losing some of your work :-).

Revit MEP 2009 - Coordinating Space Tags

Revit MEP 2009 now allows you to create your own Space objects in the MEP model for use in heat and cooling load analysis, rather than having to rely on Rooms that are derived from the architectural model.

If you link an architectural model into your MEP model, you can use the Space tool to place MEP Spaces wherever the architect has placed rooms, giving you full and independent control over the upper limit offset and other analytical properties.

The problem is, the Space Tag that is added to the Space has no obvious relationship to the original architectural room name or number. The Space has it's own name and number! Rather than manually editing the Space properties to match the room name and number (and running the risk that either the room name or number could change in a subsequent reload of the architectural model), you can make a simple edit to the Space Tag family to keep the Space and Room in sync.

Select one of the space tags in your model and select the "Edit Family" button from the Options tool bar. (Don't worry if you've never edited families before and the thought of entering the Family Editor sends shivers of fright up and down your spine - this is EASY).

Once in the Family Editor, you might want to do a "Save As" to keep your new tag separate from the original. Then simply select the "Space Name" label and click on the "Edit Label" button on the Options bar. In the Edit Label dialog box, remove the "Name" label from the pane on the right and replace it with the "Room Name" value in the pane on the left. (Your dialog box should look like the figure below).


Repeat the steps above to replace the "Number" label with the "Room Number" property. Save the family and load it into your project. Select the space tags in your model and use the Type Selector to replace them with your new family.

Viola. Done. And... even better - since they're actually reflecting the room names and numbers of the linked architectural rooms, if the values change on a subsequent reload of the architectural model, the space tags in the MEP model will automatically update to reflect those changes.

Shaan Hurley Brings the Infamous Matt Murphy Clay Head!

Last night was the San Antonio AutoCAD Users' Group meeting - the guest speaker was Shaan Hurley, Autodesk Technical Evangelist and Beta Programs Manager. Of course, he brought with him the infamous Matt Murphy Clay Head and I was honored to be able to include myself (finally) in that esteemed group of fellow geeks to have been photographed with it:

My picture with the Clay Head

You can view all of the locations and former "holders of the head" (including Jay Leno) at Shaan Hurley's Flickr site, and if you want to visit his blog on all things geeky and Autodesk, it's worth the time!


Shaan at last night's user group meeting

Autodesk University - Classes Announced

Once more, I'll be teaching at Autodesk University in November. This year all of my classes are "repeats":

Schedule Anything in AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP (3.5 Hour Class)

All in the Family: Creating Parametric Parts in Revit Architecture (90 Minute Class)

Revit Architecture for AutoCAD Architecture Geeks (90 Minute Class)

I may also be helping Paul Aubin out as a lab assistant for his 3.5 hour lab on Revit Families. Or maybe I'll just be a bouncer...

At any rate - I was trying for a bit lighter load this year and I was rewarded with exactly the number of classes that I was hoping for, which means that I might actually be able to attend a few myself for a change!

Rendering Examples from Revit Architecture 2009

Just a little model I started playing with in Revit Architecture 2008 and imported into Revit Architecture 2009.

Here is the rendering output from Revit 2008:


Here is the same scene rendered in Revit 2009 (after updating some of the materials - note especially the difference in the water!).


I should have postprocessed this with the exposure controls in Revit 2009 to brighten it up a bit but I was lazy. Which was stupid, because it only takes a few seconds. Here's an example of an interior scene rendered with 2009 before adjusting the exposure contols (no radiosity solution needed, by the way - this is done with the new Mental Ray engine, which is a breeze to use).


And here is the same image after adjusting the exposure just a bit:


What's most impressive about all this is that I really don't have much of a clue as to what I'm doing in this new rendering engine yet. I played around with the new materials library and editor a bit, and pushed a couple of buttons in the new Render dialog and viola! It's a breeze!

Rendering Changes in Revit 2009

The Revit 2009 products have a lot of nice enhancements in them - some of them seemingly minor, but with a huge impact, such as being able to dimension to a point or override dimension text. However one that will be noticed in a big way (and hopefully a positive one) is the new rendering engine and interface. When you move to the "Rendering" tab of the Design Bar you will now have two tools - "Modify" of course, and "Render View". Selecting this button will bring up the new Render dialog box, which has all of the settings for rendering in one place. Revit now uses the Mental Ray rendering engine, bringing it more fully into standardization with other Autodesk products, and in my opinion, providing for much more realistic and compelling images while at the same time simplifying the rendering process.



In addition to the revamped interface and rendering engine, the render properties editing and interface of material dialog has been revamped with an asset browser built in. There is a huge library of pre-configured material templates and types added.

New Features of AutoCAD Architecture 2009

David Koch has listed some of the major new features of AutoCAD Architecure 2009. Go take a read at:

David Koch's AutoCAD Architecture New Features Overview in "The Arhitect's Desktop"

Automated Keynoting in Autodesk Revit

I am frequently asked about the keynoting feature in Autodesk Revit; how to use it and how to set it up. It’s actually quite simple, and with a little bit of effort can reward you with a much-simplified annotation system, whether you actually use keynotes (reference or sheet) or simply want standardized “typical” text notes.

The following tutorial will attempt to walk through the process of using keynotes. Then we’ll take a look at how to customize them. This tutorial will use the standard keynotes file that ships with Revit Architecture (as well as Revit Structure and Revit MEP).

Associating the Keynotes File

Before you can use the keynoting feature in Revit, you must first associate your project with a keynotes file. You can do this in your template project if you want to use an office standard keynotes file, or you can use a separate file for each project.

To associate a keynotes file, go to Settings->Keynoting. The first item in the dialog is the path to your keynotes file. Note in the figure below that it is currently reflecting the default keynotes file, which should be located in your Imperial or Metric Library. This is a simple text file which can be edited or created from scratch, as we will see later.

Figure 1 – the Keynotes Settings dialog

Note the other settings in the keynotes file. Most importantly we will discuss the difference between the numbering methods “By sheet” and “By keynote” later.

Assigning Keynotes to Materials and Types
Once you’ve associated the keynotes file to your project or template you can begin to assign keynotes to material definitions and element types. Note in figure 2 and 3 that both the Material Definitions dialog (on the “Identity” tab) and the Type properties of any element have a field for a Keynote to be assigned.

Figure 2 – the Material Definitions dialog, with the “Identity” tab selected.

Figure 3 – the Type Properties dialog of a wall type.

Additionally, the Family Types dialog of a component family definition will allow the assignment of a keynote to any component or detail component family. Selecting the browse button in the Keynote field in any of these dialogs will take you to the associated keynote file, allowing you to select from any of your standard notes. Figure 4 shows the default Imperial keynote file, which is structured around the 16 division CSI format.

Figure 4 – The default Imperial keynotes file.

So, now you’ve associated a keynotes file to your project and you’ve assigned keynotes to your materials and type definitions. The hard part is done.

Using Keynotes

To use keynotes, go to the drafting panel and select the “Keynote” tool. You have three options:
Element: Pick an element and the keynote assigned to the type definition will be used.
Material: Pick an element that has materials assigned to its components and the keynote assigned to the material definition will be used.
User: Pick any element. Whether or not it already has a keynote assigned to it you will be taken to the keynotes file to select any other keynote that you prefer to use.

If you select an element or material that has no keynote assigned to it yet, you’ll also be sent to the keynotes file to select a note. Once selected, that keynote will then be assigned to the element or material that you selected for future picks. If you accidentally select the wrong keynote during this process, you need to edit the type (or material definition) properties and change the keynote assignment there.

Referring back to the keynotes settings dialog box shown in Figure 1 again, note that you can choose to use “By sheet ” or “By keynote” when you place keynotes. The difference between these is simple but significant. “By sheet” refers to a system where each keynote is assigned a number that is unique on a particular sheet, however the same keynote could be a different number on a different sheet. Typically the numbers will simply be “1”, “2”, etc. “By keynote” is a system where the actual keynote number specified in the keynotes file will be used, and will be consistent for a given keynote across all sheets. The terms “By sheet” and “By keynote” refer to the US National CAD Standard “Sheet Keynotes” and “Reference Keynotes”, respectively. Figure 5 shows a detail annotated with the “By keynote” (reference keynotes) option. Figure 6 shows the same detail annotated with the “By sheet” (sheet keynotes) option.

Figure 5 – A detail annotated with the “By keynote” option.

Figure 6 – A detail annotated with the “By sheet” option.

Note that with the sheet keynotes, the actual keynote number is not assigned; instead there is a simple “?” placeholder. The number will be assigned when the detail is actually placed on a sheet. You can actually switch an entire project’s details from the reference keynotes option to the sheet keynotes option by simply switching the choice in the Keynotes Settings dialog. All existing keynotes in your project will update immediately to the new system.

Keynotes are essentially nothing more than tags. You can choose to use a tag definition that displays the keynote number, or you can choose to use one that displays the keynote text itself. Therefore, even if you don’t use keynoting as an annotation method, you can still use this feature in Revit to standardize and automate your text annotation.

Creating Keynote Legends

Keynote legends are nothing more than a schedule view. To create them, however, you need to go to the View pull down menu and select New->Keynote Legend; you won’t find the option on the View design bar. Once the legend is created, you’ll see it listed in the Project Browser with the rest of your schedules.
Viewing the properties of the legend, you’ll see, in fact, that it has the same structure as any other Revit schedule with one critical exception. On the “Filter” tab there will be an option at the bottom to allow you to filter keynotes by sheet, as in figure 7.

Figure 7 – filtering keynotes by sheet.

Turning this option on will allow you to have all of your keynotes in one keynote legend. However you can use the legend on multiple sheets. For each sheet that you place it on, only those keynotes that appear on the sheet will be shown in the legend. If you are using sheet keynotes, the keynote number will be blank in the legend view, since each one can vary from sheet to sheet, but when the legend is placed on the various sheets the numbers for those sheets will be assigned.

That’s it. That’s all there is to working with keynotes. The critical thing to make it move fluidly and quickly is to take the time to assign keynotes to all of your component family types and system family types, as well as your material definitions. This means that you will probably also need to either edit the default keynotes text file or create a new one. Read on…

Customizing a Keynote File

Although keynote files are nothing more than simple text (.txt) files, the best tool to use to create or edit them is actually a spreadsheet editor such as Microsoft Excel. The formatting is a little ugly in the raw text form, but much more readable in spreadsheet form. When you open the file in Excel (we’ll use the default Imperial keynotes file as an example), make sure to set the file type in the File Open dialog to “all” so that you can see .txt files. After selecting the file, choose the “Delimited” option in the Text Import Wizard, and select “Next”. In the next screen, select “Tab” as the delimiter; you should see a preview of the file in the same dialog box.

Once the file is opened in Excel, you should notice that there are three columns. The first column is the actual keynote number for each note (or the section header for a group of keynotes). The second column is the keynote itself or the header text. The third column is a reference section – it is the section number that the keynote in that row falls under. This is how the keynote file can appear to “cascade” in the keynote dialog box. Looking at figure 8, let’s examine this a bit closer.

Figure 8 – a partial view of the default Imperial keynote text file

Notice the entry for “01530.A1”. The keynote text for that entry will be “Temporary Dustproof Partition”. It will fall under the section 1500 – “Temporary Facilities and Controls” – note the reference to section 1500 in the far right column for the keynote. Section 1500 will, in turn, fall underneath Section 1000, “Division 01 – General Requirements”, because it’s far right column includes a reference to that section. Rows that do not include a reference in the far right column will be considered top-level headers.

It’s that simple. After editing the file, make sure you save it back to .txt format, not .xls, and you’re ready to go!

That’s all there is to Revit keynoting – create/modify your keynote file, associate it to your project or template, assign keynotes to your type and material definitions, and start annotating!

Achtung! Presenters and Instructors

Do you use your computer to do on-screen presentations? If so, you might want to check out a handy little free utility that a co-worker turned me on to earlier this week, called "ZoomIt". It runs resident in your system tray and allows you to ZOOM to a specific area of your Windows screen, and also to mark up and draw, using CTRL keys. Hitting ESCAPE when done restores your original screen and removes any markups. WAY more effective than a laser pointer, and if you're like me, safer for your students as well!

Check it out: ZoomIt Donwload Page