Some advertising and new family development

Since at least one blogger recently mentioned that he stops in from time to time, I thought I would put up a few of the blogs I read on a regular basis as a thank you.

Daniel recently gave me a shout out, so if you didn't get here from there, go visit him: Revit Job Captain

David's Blog is great! I don't have to worry about coming up with cool little tips and tricks cause I always know I can stop by his site, or send a user there to learn something. Revit Beginners

I wish Shaun and Mike would be a little more consistent (but I probably shouldn't talk :) ), but when they do post something its usually pretty good. Revit Family Man

And of course Steve Stafford (who already has two links in the side bar) if you're using Revit and don't know who Steve is, then dude or dudette, you need to read more and join AUGI!

I'm working on cooking up some good stuff right now, as is the whole BIMplementation team, hopefully I should have some good stuff to report on in a couple weeks.

Currently I'm working on some pretty sweet parametric elevator families that make use of both nesting & shared families. The biggest issue I'm having though I can't completely control the visibility of objects the way I'd like to unless I throw a bunch of visibility switches into the type parameters, which given its an elevator, would only make it ever more complex! I've shared/nested the elevator cab with a type parameter so we can have couple of basic elevator frameworks that a team/user can put in whatever type of elevator cab they need, double door/single door, some other custom cab.... My current cabs do however allow the user to choose either centered door or offset door with a flip of a switch. I debated about having one cab that you could also choose if it was a double or single door, but decided it was adding an uneccessary level of complexity as I would has to do alot of controlling of voids to move them out of "cutting range". I know that you can do this, but the old fashioned 3D modeler in me isn't quite sold on having random unused pieces of geometry hanging around in families (seems like a good way to potentially slow your model down for no good reason).

I've also included a fair number of shared parameters in the elevator family(s) so that essentially a project team will be able to create an elevator report, that shows exactly what they need for each and every elevator in their building. All the dimensions and information that architects would be concerned about. I know some of this info could be included by just creating new parameters in a schedule, however this opens the possibility of inconsistency from project to project. Whereas if we build the info in the families from the get go it is much easier for the end users who perhaps are not, and never will be super duper Revit experts, and in a 600 person firm, we are never going to have super duper experts for every project & project team as we move to 100% BIM. Therefore, we need to make these easy and simple!

Cheers,
-R