Google Earth & Casework

So, two things I worked on yesterday...

I spent a better part of my day getting a google earth topo surface & image into my Revit model as an underlay for rendering. The amazing thing is, that after 4 CAD programs & G-earth everything still scaled out correctly with only a minor margin of error (minor when talking about a mile long image). I imported our site plan from Microstation into sketch-up, into which I took a 2D & 3D G-earth snap shot. Using those items in sketch-up I built some of the content buildings (dumb masses), and then export the whole thing to dwg. In autocad I did some purging and a little clean-up. In Revit I created a new generic family and dropped the dwg into the family. Since the various "parts" of the context dwg file were all on separate layers, in a Revit project it is possible to assign rendering materials to each layer of the imported dwg. The real trick was mapping the high res google earth snap shot I saved as a jpeg to the imported object. There were a few things in hind sight that I could've done to make my life easier, but suffice is to say it came down to knowing how large the photo was in the real world (ie about a mile) and figuring out the angle of rotation of the image. After that the toughest part was adjusting the offset of the "texture" to align with the geometry in Revit. In the end it worked out really well, I would share images but I'm not sure the boss would appreciate that at this point (sorry).

As to casework, I'm developing generic parametric casework families for our firm, and I'm using nested families, the weird thing is that one of my nest families, I can't link to any of the parameters, I haven't investigate further yet, but its just weird. I've seen this a couple times before and solution in the past was to make some or all the parameters instance instead of type. I'm not sure why that works, and I haven't tried yet in this case, but its just odd.